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

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of public space carried forward the groundbreaking realization that the no-

tion of proper place could be broken down, that lived experience could be

transformed. Public space could be reclaimed and altered.

While Becker’s depiction of the new generation of the Left Bank re-

produced the optimistic hopes of the early reconstruction years, Léo Ma-

let’s Les Nouveaux mystères de Paris captured the more deviant and cynical

violation of accepted norms and the more multifaceted spatial meaning

of Saint-Germain-des-Prés as it evolved over the decade. A return once

again to his detective series provides perhaps the ﬁnest entrée into the di-

vergent territories of the Left Bank. Malet knew it better than any other

area of Paris. He lived and worked in the 5th and 6th arrondissements as

well as farther out in the 13th and 14th arrondissements. Among his many

métiers, Malet was a poet, singer, and songwriter in the Saint-Germain-

des-Prés night spots and in 1929 opened and entertained in his own base-

ment cabaret on the rue des Grands-Dégres. By 1935 he had joined the

avant-garde Groupe de la rue du Château, which held court at the Café de

Flore. Around their table could be found Yves Tanguy, Henri Filipacchi,

Jacques and Pierre Prévert, and Marcel Duhamel. June 1940 and the Ger-

man occupation forced a momentary hiatus in the avant-garde scene. But

after his release from a German prison in 1941, Malet returned once again

to his intellectual home in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. His ﬂânerie through

the district took him to the cafés and clubs, the bookstores, the back-alley

“improv” stages, the radical newspapers and small publishers, the chic

art galleries. It was there that he discovered Dashiell Hammett, Raymond

Chandler, and American detective novels and attended events such as the

June 1946 Grande Nuit de la Série Noir.

Malet’s 1955 La Nuit de Saint-Germain-des-Prés featured all the places

of which he had intimate knowledge, and many of his friends and acquain-

tances appeared in its pages. His ace detective Nestor Burma identiﬁes the

troglodyte phenomenon in the basement clubs

by the nostalgic signs or something like that. The descents into the base-

ment in the middle of the night, the dismal sound of sirens, the attempts

to neck with the neighbor across the landing or discover certain of her

secret charms. They try to relive the good times. Then the journalists

turn up and start spreading stories, and so it goes. That’s how the hip

quartier was launched.

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Burma follows a hot trail to the ﬁctional Cave-Bleue on the passage Dau-

phine, where he takes in the scene:

The path leading to the famous Cave-Bleue was littered with obstacles.

First you stumbled against the trash bins awaiting the garbage men un-

der the entry to the passage Dauphine. Then you twisted your ankles on

the infernal jagged pavement that makes this type of place so charming.

That’s not all. The worst is still ahead: getting into the basement. In front

of the squat door, above which the Cave-Bleue was scrawled in chaotic

writing on a wood plank ﬂanked by two bizarre lanterns, a packed crowd

was massed, shouting and pushing like a pack of animals. It was raining

on everybody, but as if that wasn’t enough, from time to time, from a

window on one of the ﬂoors above, the contents of a pail of water, in the

best-case scenario, added its own drama, accompanied by the curses of

the dispatcher, who just wanted to get a little sleep. Two leathery women,

originating from the New World, more or less contemporaries of Abra-

ham Lincoln, already victims of one of these extra waterfalls, ﬁnd all this

very funny and exciting, and scream at the top of their lungs for another

sprinkling. Usually you don’t have to wait.

Burma descends into the smoke-ﬁlled basement-inferno, which is jammed

with regulars of “both sexes in different conditions, from the latest bohemian

to the wealthy ﬁlmmaker, the waiting-to-be-discovered starlet and the aging

tourist in search of novel sensations.” The racket and jazz music are ear-

splitting. He arrives just in time to see the ﬁrst round of the Miss Poubelle

contest: “Three girls suddenly appear from who knows where and jump

onto the tables, where they strike a pose. Camera ﬂashes explode. The three

graces are in bizarre getups. Leeks, turnips, carrots and other vegetables of

doubtful freshness have replaced Josephine Baker’s bananas. The bracelets

and crowns of the candidates are made of food tins.” The audience votes

with their raucous applause, and a pretty blonde makes it to the elimination

round, to be held in a few days. In Micmac moche au Boul’Mich’ (1957), Malet

features a cabaret scene at the site on the rue des Grands-Dégres between

the boulevard Saint-Germain and the quai de Tournelles where he and his

wife Paulette had launched their Cabaret du Poète Pendu. Nestor Burma

ﬁnds himself in the now-ﬁctional Chez Colin des Cayeux nightclub in the

broken-down building. The basement is a showcase for the club’s Middle

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Ages theme, carried out with “troubadours . . . apparently of masculine sex”

and a medieval striptease act by a young student.

For the communists, Saint-Germain-des-Prés as the new territory of

aspiration was an entirely corrupted one. The boozing and reverie, the open

sexuality, the drugs, and the outrageous behavior all signiﬁed the seduction

waiting to hypnotize impressionable young people in the spaces of the city.

Even Jacques Becker’s optimistic Rendez-vous de juillet came under withering

censure in the communist press. The Young Communist newspaper L’Avant-

garde asked incredulously why Becker “portrayed this handful of corrupted

youth, without making clear they have nothing to do with the millions and

millions of young people who struggle in the factories, the ﬁelds, or the uni-

versities?”

The category of youth itself was viable for the communists only

within the traditional nexus of class struggle and the myth of resistance. The

sublimes ouvriers were always young; they never aged. Their heroic image of

young French proletariat leading the country forward in revolution had little

to do with the wild nights staged by spoiled bourgeois kids in Saint-Germain-

des-Prés. The image of youth fell into one of two categories: it was an abstract

representation of the good and courageous or the bad and degraded, and

the spatial dichotomies were clear. Becker’s cinematic invention Antoine et

Antoinette provided the communist ideal of splendid young French living in

traditional working-class districts. It was for these brave young proletariats

that the PCF continued its struggle for schools, sports facilities, and prop-

er cultural activities. L’Humanité, for example, described a performance of

“authentic popular theater” on New Year’s Day, 1953. The Worker’s Revue

took place in the Metallurgist’s Hall on the newly renamed rue Pierre-Jean-

Timbaud in the 11th arrondissement. The evening’s combination of profes-

sional and amateur entertainment included a play by Jean Cazalbou on the

1936 factory occupations and the Popular Front. “These kinds of one-act

plays,” reported L’Humanité, “are easy for small amateur groups and the

young and are absolutely necessary to our people’s ﬁght.”

The communist

student newspaper Clarté sponsored traditional bals populaires in the Latin

Quarter. Mixtures of fêtes populaires and “Youth Nights” were held regularly

throughout the late 1940s and 1950s in the hope of attracting students and

young workers. The ﬁrst “Youth Night,” held in December 1944 at Vél d’Hiv,

featured the music-hall stars Josephine Baker and Charles Trénet, accordion

music, and the traditional choir singing militant anthems.

But by the mid-

1950s these events were already fading into wistful nostalgia.

the left bank | 259

The communist condemnation of nonconformist adolescent behavior

focused on a single source: Americanization. The anti-American polemics

of the communists were well-known throughout the late 1940s and 1950s

and became particularly virulent as the cold war intensiﬁed. While sultry

young rebels modeled themselves after the American stars Elvis Presley and

James Dean, young communists adored their French idols, Yves Montand

and Gérard Philippe. Existentialism itself was associated with the depravity

infecting France from across the Atlantic. Sartre’s ambivalence toward the

United States only fueled communist skepticism about his philosophy. No-

where did the Yankee distortion of the future have more dire consequences,

according to communist dogma, than in the seduction of France’s youth in

the Latin Quarter and Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The Left Bank was, accord-

ing to the communist student newspaper Clarté, the “hunting ground for

those who would make our country a colony.”

In Paris rouge, Jean-Pierre

Bernard argues that “this ideological and cultural battle between the Good

and the Bad took place right in the middle of Paris, often along the frontier

of the boulevard Saint-Germain.”

On one side, the Latin Quarter was as-

sociated with struggling students aiming to better themselves and their social

condition through French higher education. On the other side, the sleazy

world waiting in the cafés and smoky basement boîtes of Saint-Germain-des-

Prés was identiﬁed with a decadent French bourgeoisie under the inﬂuence

of the American opiate. In his erstwhile memoirs, the lettrist Jean-Michel

Mension recounted the psychological border between the Latin Quarter and

Saint-Germain-des-Prés that was marked so indelibly in the city’s spaces.

The Café Dupont-Latin in the Latin Quarter “was the port, or the beach,

before the great departure; and you had to cross the Boul’ Mich’—leave

the Latin Quarter, was the way we put it—and make the voyage from the

Dupont-Latin to the Mabillon: that was the initiation. Most people got lost,

got drowned, on the way over.”

Thus the public sites of this cultural struggle

were quite speciﬁc, and they were largely cafés and jazz clubs: the Mabillon,

the Bonaparte, the Huchette (Cave de la Huchette), the Kentucky, and the

Vieux-Co (Club du Vieux-Colombier).

The golden days of Saint-Germain-des-Prés were actually short-lived.

The district’s exotic denizens were quickly turned into the city’s foremost

tourist attraction. By 1953 the scene had dissolved into a bogus carnival

overdiscovered by journalists and invaded by busloads of rubbernecking

tourists in search of the cool. Les intéllos were ambushed for interviews and

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ﬂed their bistros in search of the comforts of solitude and ennui. Sartre, de

Beauvoir, Gréco, and Prévert all departed. Claude Luter and his jazz combo

left for a road tour of France with a series of “Nights in Saint-Germain-des-

Prés” concerts. In the words of the journalist Stanley Karnow, the district’s

avant-gardism rapidly congealed into feigned sophistication by dilettantes

and poseurs.

The overmediatized landscape became a parody of itself. No

end of pseudoexistentialists turned up for the rapidly disappearing and deﬁ-

nitely passé jam sessions, beat poetry readings, and wild dancing. Posh art

galleries, antique dealers, and chic restaurants followed the smart set into the

district of hip. By 1958 a television special on “nostalgic music” was already

bringing viewers to the Caveau de la Huchette, “the last of the fabled caves

of the Latin Quarter.”

Les Tricheurs

Two ﬁlms of the late 1950s that depicted the degeneracy of Saint-Germain-

des-Prés and its rapid decline elicited an outpouring of public debate about

the consequences of placing the future in the hands of this new generation

and the threat it posed to the public spaces of the city. These were Marcel

Carné’s Les Tricheurs (1958) and Eric Rohmer’s Le Signe du lion (1959).

Les

Tricheurs (translated for export as Youthful Sinners) won the Grand prix du ci-

néma français in the year of its release, despite the fact that for many it hardly

represented the “expression of French thought” that was the requirement for

the coveted prize. But such was the anxiety over disaffected youth spending

their nights in caves and their days in existential despair that the ﬁlm’s subject

was deemed vital for public discussion. Its release in October took place just

after the extraordinary political crisis that ended the Fourth Republic and the

September referendum that set up the Fifth Republic, with de Gaulle at its

head. Wayward teenagers and gangs of violent juvenile delinquents wander-

ing the streets were urban similes for a badly shaken and politically volatile

nation. The customary spaces of Paris seemed to be disintegrating under the

weight of France’s changing fortunes, its bloody process of decolonization,

and the mutations of the trente glorieuses. There was no doubt as to the con-

troversy the movie stirred. Filmgoers lined up outside theaters to see Carné’s

version of le mal de la jeunesse. He found himself defending the ﬁlm’s portrayal

of youth against public outrage. In an interview with Le Monde, the director

explained that his purpose was to make a realistic ﬁlm about young people

the left bank | 261

in Saint-Germain-des-Prés: “I have personally known Saint-Germain-des-

Prés for the past twenty years, and I can tell you that these young people

exist and they were there on the spot. We asked for their advice, they taught

us their slang, and they created part of the dialog.” These disaffected young

men and women, he maintained, were “for the most part students who had

abandoned their studies. They were habitués of [the café] Bonaparte, very

different from the cafés of the Latin Quarter. . . . Their greatest fault is an

absence of courage. They lack guts and live from day to day. They refuse

to feel until something ﬁnally gets through to them.”

Carné believed that

although they were completely apolitical, underneath their haughty attitude

lay the cold-war reality that the atomic bomb could “liquidate” existence at

any moment. They were victims of their time.

The term tricheurs quickly came into common usage to depict a 1950s

generation lost in immorality and ennui. In Carné’s ﬁlm they slide precipi-

tously down a slope from freewheeling adolescent independence to tragedy.

Although nostalgia for the poetic populist imagery of the Liberation and

reconstruction years still gripped the public, by the late 1950s Paris was

ﬂooded with the spatial textures of a new, volatile style of modernity. There

was a breakdown of urban coherence, a raw degradation and obsession with

the sexual and riotous turmoil taking place in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

The public domain became polymorphic, riddled with new tensions and

complexity. The ﬁlm’s unknown actors featured Jacques Charrier (who later

married Brigitte Bardot) as Bob, a middle-class banlieusard from the 15th

arrondissement. Bob is studying for the École normale but is seduced by

Saint-Germain-des-Prés and abandons his education. He ﬁnds himself em-

broiled with two young women: a wild working-class girl living on her own

(Pascale Petit, who was “discovered” working in a hairdresser’s shop) and a

young lady (Andréa Parisy) of aristocratic lineage who throws riotous par-

ties in her family’s luxurious home. Every social class is implicated in this

“quasi-documentary” crisis of youth and spatial dynamics that dealt

with the description of a milieu. . . . This is no longer the era of the

literary cafés of 1934 (that Carné-Prévert operated in), nor that of the

old postwar philosophy called “existentialism.” The action begins at Le

Bonaparte, which had been a quasi-provincial little bistro, but today is

the hangout of young “bands” with their records, jazz, whisky, dance,

the “parties,” revolt, and despair.

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The city surfaces are emotional, psychological, ﬁlled with sensuality, provoca-

tion, anxiety, and fear. The ﬁlm takes viewers on an invented tour of Saint-

Germain-des-Prés as a debasing urban inﬂuence; to the place Saint-Germain-

des-Prés, the swinging record shops, and the “existential” cafés, to the wild

music and dancing at the Caveau de la Huchette, to the cheap ﬂats and dance

parties. Its emblematic spaces were made even more notorious by the intense

coverage surrounding the ﬁlm. One caustic movie reviewer quipped that the

ﬁlming on location at Saint-Germain-des-Prés had at least helped everyone

in the neighborhood eat well in the weeks that followed.

Music, alcohol, and fast living are the mantras of Carné’s band of youth,

which, as one of the girls puts it, is “for freedom in all its forms.” “Especially

sexual,” another chimes in. They share “the same cafés, the same records,

the same guys.” When Bob reveals he is looking for a proper girl, his friends

ridicule him for being bourgeois. The party scene features a parade of threats,

from homosexuals and pretty boys, free sexuality, and drunkenness to the

careless destruction of property. In her rebellion against her working-class

family “from another time,” that “understands nothing—and I can’t explain,”

the heroine, Mic, abandons any idea of becoming a teacher for the seduction

of a Jag (that is, the sports car) in her brother’s garage. Any sense of working-

class nobility has been squandered on slavish desires. For her, existentialism

means immediate gratiﬁcation. She has “gone bad” and hooks up with the

ﬁlm’s juvenile delinquent, Alain (Laurent Terzieff). A classic hooligan in jeans,

leather jacket, and pompadour, he lacks either morals or feeling. Money and

material things are Mic and Alain’s only ambitions. Malaise and a bored

cynicism darken the urban atmosphere. The ﬁlm’s two heroines pay dearly

for their hedonism; Chlo becomes pregnant, and Mic dies racing her beloved

sports car. In the ﬁnal scene of this morality tale about youthful excess, Bob

walks along the boulevard Saint-Germain-des-Prés, stunned by the turn of

events, only to see a new group of youngsters on motor scooters planning

their surboum with cigarettes and alcohol. He leaves Saint-Germain-des-Prés

for a “life of more courage.”

Carné produced a frightening image of youthful corruption and urban

disintegration. In it the optimism of Paris populaire has been exchanged for

the image of an unforgiving place where youth and the future are out of

control. The ﬁlm elicited an outpouring of public discussion for and against

these antisocial tricheurs, who they were, and where they could be found in

the city. In December 1958 the Centre catholique des intellectuels français

the left bank | 263

led a public debate about Carné’s ﬁlm at the Palais de la Mutualité, one of

the traditional Left Bank assembly places for meetings and protest rallies.

In a reiteration of the Left Bank’s mental divide, students from the Latin

Quarter testiﬁed that their own lives had little to do with the screen images

or with Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

Taking advantage of the ﬁlm’s notoriety,

the magazines L’Express and Réalités both launched investigations of “teenag-

ers” and juvenile delinquency. In imitation of live television coverage, their

investigative reporters went on location, descending into the streets, stalking

the city’s cafés and dance halls in search of the characters depicted in Carné’s

ﬁlm. Their interviews were clearly skewed toward the magazine’s readership,

but they took the form of a quasi-ﬁeld study of a generation and their unruly

urban territory, heretofore hidden from view. At the Bal de la Marine on the

quai de Grenelle, the thirty-two-year-old reporter Jean Cau described for the

readers of L’Express sultry young men outﬁtted in white shirts with collars up

and black leather jackets, with ducktails “greased and coiffured with love.”

The girls, all of them in identical cotton blouses and full skirts, giggle, chitchat

together, and chew gum. Gau’s subjects are from Montrouge, in the suburbs,

where they work or are apprenticed in factories and small workshops. Their

figure 28. Scene from the ﬁlm Les Tricheurs by Marcel Carné, with Jean Paul Belmondo, Pascale

264 | chapter six

response to his questions about politics and the war and to the query “Have

you done your military service?” is utter lack of interest. He has more success

when asking about relationships and sexuality at the bar on the rue des Ca-

nettes. But even here a feigned tedium reigns as he peppers his interviewees

with “How many people are you sleeping with?” and “Do you believe in love?”

“From the ‘Trois Maillets’ to ‘La Huchette,’ to ‘Kentucky,’” Cau searches

out these would-be tricheurs and ﬁnds instead young French people “waiting

for Godot” to solve their problems. But as in Samuel Beckett’s play, he has

doubts whether either Godot or France will come to their aid.

In a special

1959 report in Réalités, the customs of les jeunes in the public spaces of the

city were investigated with an almost voyeuristic curiosity—especially their

unguarded sexuality. A hidden cartography of youth is exposed and mapped

out. On Saturday evenings they invaded Saint-Germain-des-Prés, especially

the bars on the rue Mabillon and the rue du Four. They are caught together

in groups or as couples wrapped around each other in the Jardin des Plantes,

on the Left Bank streets and along the river quay. There was little difference,

according to the report, “between the behavior of a young bourgeois in his

jacket and a young worker in his shirt.”

Reporters “go live” to porte d’Ivry

in search of gangs of disaffected youth. Once a group of young men is located

who admit to gang membership and to taking part in “rumbles,” the inter-

rogation begins. They have all seen Carné’s ﬁlm but refuse to identity with

it. The silver-screen tricheurs have money and cars—they are from a ﬁctional

16th arrondissement and don’t work. The young men get “pissed off” every

time someone labels them. Everyone imagines that all you need is a black

jacket, but in fact the situation at porte d’Ivry is far more difﬁcult. To the

reporter’s question about how many gangs they are in, the men answer that

most guys are communists. “The class struggle isn’t wrong,” they argue, but

their gang is more like a family.

The ﬁlms and press coverage about teenagers and juvenile delinquency

toward the end of the 1950s and into the 1960s reﬂected the French appre-

hension over public space in Paris and its disruptive, dangerous qualities.

Public places were claimed as the domain of a new generation that acted out

their entitlement through novel practices. Saturday night for young people

had traditionally meant dancing at neighborhood bals populaires on the rue

de Lapp, the Bal Wagram, or at a dance party in someone’s ﬂat. Evenings

at a local bistro were opportunities to watch sporting events on television,

especially le catch, or wrestling. But more and more young people were

the left bank | 265

simply hanging out in the street. Saint-Germain-des-Prés was certainly not

the only site of youthful rebellion, although it speciﬁcally symbolized the

arrival of the postwar hip generation. In this new social geography, groups

of teenagers on the streets or screaming by on Vespa scooters and in old

jalopies could be found in the beaux quartiers as well as the quartiers popu-

laires. The Saturday ﬂea market at Saint-Ouen was alive with young people

searching for Levi’s 501 jeans, cowboy shirts, and belts. They jammed into

record stores and bistros listening to the irrepressible gyrating rhythms of

early French rock and the latest American hits. The ﬁrst French rock ’n’ roll

records were cut in June 1956 by Henri Salvador and Baptiste “Mac-Kac”

Reilles. The former used lyrics by Boris Vian, while the latter was a pillar

of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés scene. Henri Salvador publicized his ﬁrst

recording in a public concert in front of Notre Dame Cathedral just after

its release. Salvador also appeared on 36 Chandelles, France’s most popular

television show, in October 1956 in a live broadcast from the porte Saint-

Martin.

The city’s music halls, especially the Olympia and the ABC, were

scenes of screaming, unrestrained young women and wild disturbances dur-

ing rock concerts. Music was a customary populist practice in the streets of

Paris, and “teenagers” claimed its disruptive, subversive qualities as their

own. Police were called in to control the crowds when Lionel Hampton

played at the Palais de Chaillot in 1953. A concert by Louis Armstrong in

July 1955 was followed by a melee. Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock was

the number 1 hit in 1956. His arrival at the Olympia in October 1958 pro-

voked an hour of mayhem and substantial property damage.

By the end of the decade, the public psychosis over youth gangs—the

tricheurs and blousons noirs, as they were alternatively called—terrorizing a va-

riety of urban places had reached unprecedented levels. Any sense of the city’s

ﬁxed authenticity, of its customary spatial imaginary, seemed to be evaporat-

ing into a geography of fear. The zazous and J3s of the immediate postwar

years had transmuted into something far more threatening.

Although the

label tricheurs had been popularized by Carné’s ﬁlm, the production of a

wider vocabulary of meaning with such terms as blousons noirs, blousonnets,

voyous, teddy boys, and jeunes voyous pointed to more serious social deviance

and urban violence. All of these expressions conjured up images of hooli-

ganism and juvenile delinquency. In the novelist Michel Déon’s portrait of

youthful ennui, Les Gens de la nuit (1958), the main protagonist walks onto

Saint-Germain-des-Prés’s rue Saint-Benoît to ﬁnd a crowd watching “two