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

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266 | chapter six

big guys in leather jackets,” one “a mulatto with shaved head,” livid with rage

and savagely beating up their victim.

The summer of 1959 was dubbed the

“summer of the blousons noirs.” The media hype over this new social type was

one of the principal reasons for the discourse of apocalyptic doom in the

hands of a young generation. Lurid front-page headlines depicted rumbles

between rival gangs on the streets of Paris with an arsenal of gruesome weap-

onry: metal tubes, whips and chains, brass knuckles, bludgeons, and bleach

guns. Over the summer the police took some ﬁve hundred adolescents into

custody. The only actual violence occurred on July 22 in the 15th arrondisse-

ment on the Square Saint-Lambert between the local gang and their rivals

from the porte de Vanves. It resulted in twenty-seven arrests and became the

most often used example of the frightening gang violence normally associated

with the asphalt jungle of New York. Although a July 28 ﬁght in the same

area was not much more than a noisy shoving match, the press treated it as

dangerous unrest. For one judge in the Paris juvenile court system, it was the

city’s terrain vague that created the opportunity for this kind of misbehavior:

“It is the fête foraine, the movie theater, the bal, the pinball machines in cafés,

especially foosball.”

The time-honored public places that had represented

urban sociability and Parisian populism were now a menacing urban abyss

that required continual surveillance.

This apprehension about the invasion of customary spaces was shared

by the city’s municipal councilors and corroborated by an ofﬁcial 1959 po-

lice report on the blousons noirs.

It was meant to counteract the media

exploitation of juvenile delinquency and calm public fears by providing a

law-and-order panoply of statistics on arrests and violent behavior. But it

veriﬁed that between 1956 and 1959 the number of juveniles taken into cus-

tody grew to an unprecedented 9.4 percent of all arrests. The report gave

an account of the new urban phenomenon of “black jackets” whose dress

and behavior, the police report declared, were downright obnoxious as well

as threatening. But it rarely ended in signiﬁcant violence or confrontations

with the police. Wearing Levi’s jeans, riveted belts, and black leather jackets,

crowds of mostly male adolescents hung out at certain places in the city: fêtes

foraines, kermesses, public dances and cafés, squares and intersections, and

Métro station entrances. They arrogantly took over public spaces, hassled

passersby, caused no end of uproar with their rude conduct, and pestered

and followed young women. The police report insisted that these were not

local kids but misﬁts from elsewhere in the capital—ciphers for the classic

the left bank | 267

“other” or “outsider,” who staged their theater in quartiers where they were

not known. The depraved misﬁt or outsider as public menace was reiterated

in 1959 municipal council debates on the “summer of the blousons noirs.”

Members told of their own encounters with “vagabonds between Clichy

and Pigalle, in the fêtes foraines, in front of sleazy billboards, in front of gar-

ishly lit bars, and where prostitutes and homosexuals hang out and, sorry to

say!, prey on the young.” They admonished police to “step up surveillance of

movie theaters, fêtes foraines, and all the other places of pleasure.”

A 1959 newspaper article succeeded in identifying between sixty and

seventy gangs occupying a realm of illicit spaces and terrorizing various

neighborhoods. Émile Copfermann’s research located about eighty youth

bands made up of some ten thousand teenagers throughout the Seine depart-

ment.

The police accused reporters of paying local teenagers at the square

Saint-Lambert to stage a rumble they could ﬁlm for sale to the French and

foreign press. In a “Geography of Youth Gangs in Paris,” the magazine Aux

Écoutes du monde singled out the Trocadéro gang, composed of young men

from good families in the 16th arrondissement, as particularly “brilliant.”

Their hangouts were the clubs along the avenue Henri-Martin. Their nightly

surboums were crashed by rival bands and ended in violence and vandalism.

The Neuilly gang hung out at Mamy’s Bar on the rue de Washington.

typically, the reaction to these young rebels revealed persistent fears about

working-class culture. The 1959 police report, for example, identiﬁed most of

them as working class or lower middle class, from modest but not miserable

social circumstances.

The well-organized Bastille gang allied with those

at Montreuil, Clignancourt, Bagnolet, and Nation in forays against their

archrivals, the Ritals. Their brawl on the place de la Réunion in the 20th

arrondissement brought out the police. The Saint-Denis gang was led by a

particularly precocious eighteen-year-old who laid out a strategy of public

attacks against taxi drivers, ﬁreﬁghters, and people collecting family-beneﬁt

payments. The Maisons-Lafﬁte gang specialized in attacks against women,

while others went after North African immigrants and homosexuals.

Com-

mentators pointed to the terrain vague of the city’s periphery and the zone

as an infernal nest of dangerous blousons noirs. In the December 1959 Paris

municipal council debate on the problem of the blousons noirs, the 20th ar-

rondissement around the porte de Montreuil and, even more speciﬁcally,

the low-income public housing projects on the rue Félix-Terrier were iden-

tiﬁed as trouble spots. When a local journalist who had published a typically

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exaggerated description of delinquency on the street was invited to see for

himself, he refused to go for fear of retribution.

This imaginary landscape of violence perpetrated by teenage trouble-

makers was a sign of heightened anxieties about urban life and a society that

had gone off course. The explosion of adolescent misbehavior was blamed

on a variety of inﬂuences: immorality, the breakdown of family and schools,

American “young rebel” ﬁlms, the new consumerism, adolescent physiol-

ogy, and so on. For Copfermann, the blousons noirs were the sign of a moral

crisis, especially the crisis of conscience brought on by the Algerian War

and the abandonment of moral values for the immediate gratiﬁcation of

consumerism.

As evidence, Copfermann cited the growing number of re-

ports in Le Monde and other newspapers of urban violence and street gangs.

The communists on the municipal council whipped up the reproach, argu-

ing that juveniles were only emulating the state-sanctioned police violence

against Algerians and war protesters in the streets of Paris. Gangs were also

associated with postwar public-housing projects in Paris and with the ﬁrst

migrations to the grands ensembles in the Paris suburbs. Modern architecture

and urban planning were deemed the culprits for social problems. “Modern

housing projects without any kind of supervision or recreation for children,”

claimed the communist city councilor Raymond Bossus, “are worse than

slums because they favor the sprouting of these bands.”

It was an opportune

moment for communists to point to their long-standing commitment to a

socially conscious urbanism and to their support for public projects in the

neighborhoods, schools, youth centers, and sports facilities that were viewed

as the antidote to delinquency.

This anxiety-ridden vision of Paris as the epitome of the cruel big city

with all its problems of juvenile delinquency, poverty, and social malaise was

presented in Eric Rohmer’s ﬁlm Le Signe du lion (1959). Rohmer was among

the young turks of the New Wave, and this ﬁrst ﬁlm under his direction has a

decidedly different tone from the poetic realism of Carné or the optimism of

Becker. Instead, it captures the darker, more cynical mood spreading through

the spaces of Paris by the late 1950s. The ﬁlm opens with the classic shots

of monumental Paris: a peniche (barge) meanders down the Seine, car traf-

ﬁc streams along the quays and bridges, the dome of the Invalides appears.

Finally the place Saint-Germain-des-Prés comes into view, where a group of

young friends is spending the evening in a café. “You have the most beautiful

view of Paris,” one of them remarks as the camera pans across the panoramic

the left bank | 269

nighttime skyline. The ﬁlm recounts their daily lives, their drunken parties,

their music, and ultimately their independence from societal and familial

constraints. Like many of Rohm’s ﬁlms, Le Signe du lion was semi-improvised

and shot on location on a shoestring budget. One scene captures the July

14 celebrations on the place Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Strung with colored

lights, the space has been converted into a giant bal public. Throngs of young

people and tourists jam the cafés and join revelers dancing in the street to

a live orchestra. The waiters snake through the mobs, their trays held high.

Smoking, drinking, anticipating amorous encounters, the street party is an

arousing carnival of youth. Anything goes. The ﬁlm’s hero, Pierre (Jess Hahn),

a music student, describes himself as an American “from everywhere” in his

effort to charm a new acquaintance.

But the ﬁlm paints a dismal portrait of a Saint-Germain-des-Prés that

had crumbled under the weight of its own duplicity. The tale turns dark and

foreboding. Despite the festive atmosphere, life is not easy. Pierre loses his

inheritance and is left pennilessness and alone. Unable to pay his bills, the ﬁlm

recounts his rapid descent into penury and homelessness. It is the topographic

tactics Rohmer uses to depict Pierre’s fall from hopeful violinist to clochard

that is most enlightening. Once again Paris is on view. With an acute sense

of irony, the tragic ﬁgure of Pierre lumbers through the stunning spaces of

the capital. From the central districts to the periphery of Nanterre and back

again, the ﬁlm excoriates the city, exposing it as a bleak, cruel-hearted place.

Rohmer transmutes the ﬁgure of the ﬂâneur into a hopeless and estranged

drifter, tramping the streets until his shoes have worn out. Pierre searches in

vain for anyone to help him. The city’s famed sociability and street life have

turned sour. People have no compassion. He rummages through garbage

at Les Halles. Despondent, he watches young people in the cafés of Saint-

Germain, in the Luxembourg gardens, along the rue Mouffetard. Shot after

location shot displays the youthful, idyllic atmosphere of the Left Bank in

summer. But the cool sophisticates are oblivious to his desperation, and

Pierre bursts out that he “hates Paris.” The incident marks his rage toward

the city around him and his mental breakdown. In a ﬁnal scene, shot in the

streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, a drunken, crazed Pierre becomes street

entertainment for the tourists. They surround him, their cameras clicking

to capture the spectacle for family back home. Both Pierre and his tourist

audience become theater for the neighborhood’s young people, who walk by

shaking their heads in amusement.

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Although Pierre is saved in the end, Rohmer’s ﬁlm is a relentless portrait

of descent, not only of Pierre, but of Paris itself. The ﬁlm’s two failed drifters

(Pierre and his hobo pal) probe along the boundaries of the vagabond-seer.

Their decline into aesthetic negativity and deviant antics provokes the seer’s

transgression and inversion of order. But the creative impulse, the sensuality

and psychogeographic intuitiveness that permeated the poetic rendition of the

vagabond ﬁgure has crumbled. For the most part the ﬁlm depicts Pierre and

his hobo friend as drunken fools in a spatial theater gone wrong. Rohmer’s ﬁlm

is a corrosive observation of an unfeeling metropolis at the decade’s end. This

descent into hell is mirrored in Michel Déon’s Les Gens de la nuit. A member

of the young right-wing literary Hussards, Déon’s political trajectory differed

radically from Rohmer’s or, for that matter, from Carné’s in Les Tricheurs,

but they shared a merciless vision of hedonism in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

Pessimism and cynicism invaded the spaces of the city. In Déon’s morality

tale of wayward youth, two friends are claimed by the district’s pernicious

inﬂuence: the drug addict Gisèle sets in motion Maggy’s suicide on the rue

Saint-Benoît. Maggy’s broken body lying dead on the pavement draws a crowd

of shaken onlookers. The novel’s protagonist watches with a glass of liquor in

hand as a pool of blood engulfs her face and hair; the narrator intones, “The

girls were pale, the men silent. Everyone knew Maggy.” But the end of this

lethal public theater is quickly reached. Once Maggy’s remains are removed

by the police, the hotel manager cleans the sidewalk. Sports cars whiz by on

the street; couples once again walk by arm in arm. By evening Maggy’s suicide

is no longer a topic of conversation.

The self-absorbed whirl of drinking and

drugs, parties and sex, carries on. A stroll through Saint-Germain-des-Prés

described by the American journalist Janet Flanner in 1958 was an equally

chilling exposé of a cruel city: “a stabbed Algerian lay dying in a pool of blood

on the sidewalk before Lipp’s brasserie in St.-Germain-des-Prés, with a crazy

old ﬂower vender shufﬂing in the gore and offering his faded bouquets for

sale, as if it were all a scene from a Surrealist picture.”

The image of avant-

gardism had indeed changed.

The Latin Quarter

Against the fast living and degeneracy of Saint-Germain-des-Prés stood the

image of the Sorbonne and the long history of struggle in the Latin Quarter.

The two districts were distinct, if not diametrically opposed in character.

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The Latin Quarter proper in the 5th arrondissement was the city’s traditional

student district and center of bohemianism. Its character had long been de-

termined by the life of the university. In the years before the state’s decentral-

ization programs scattered French higher education to the Paris suburbs and

various provincial capitals, the Latin Quarter enjoyed an unrivaled monopoly

on intellectual life. Its bookstores, avant-garde cinema and theaters, and its

cafés were the ultimate image of urbane scholarly cool. To be a student, to

yearn for the life of the mind, was to live and study in the Latin Quarter. In

the 1950s the imposing Sorbonne stood on the rue des Écoles as the country’s

most illustrious educational institution. Around it was gathered a wide fan

of faculties and universities, from the elite École normale superièure on the

rue d’Ulm to the Faculty of Medicine on the boulevard Saint-Germain-des-

Prés, the Faculty of Law on the rue Saint-Jacques, and the École des mines

on the boulevard Saint-Michel, as well as a host of colleges and institutes.

Further east in Saint-Germain-des-Prés were the École des beaux-arts on

the rue Bonaparte and the Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, or

Sciences Po, on the rue Jacob.

None of this was new territory. It was the traditional educational land-

scape of the Left Bank, a discrete zone with its own distinctive mores and

temperament that was separate from the rest of the capital. What had

changed was the growing number of young people who identiﬁed with its

life. The French university system was already following a more open policy

in the years after the First World War. Secondary education was made free

in 1930. Between 1920 and 1935 the number of university students grew

from around 21,000 to more than 32,000. The Second World War and the

occupation crimped the ﬂow of students into the Left Bank. But after the

Liberation, young men and women anxious to restart their lives enrolled in

Paris’s institutions of higher education in record numbers. Well over 53,000

students were already waiting to begin the 1945–46 academic year. They

continued to ﬂow into the Left Bank districts throughout the 1950s and

mainly into the Faculty of Letters lodged at the Sorbonne. By 1960 the total

number of students had swelled to 77,800.

Many were members of petit-

bourgeois families who were sending their children to university for the ﬁrst

time. They represented the dream of social mobility in the new France of

the postwar years. But the universities were ill prepared to welcome them.

The Sorbonne was built in 1890 to welcome about 1,000 students. In 1956

20,000 were enrolled. The amphitheater for the ﬁrst-year philosophy class

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held seven hundred seats for the 2,480 registered students. The Sorbonne

library had seating for a total of 422 students. The Faculty of Science was

the worst off, with antiquated equipment and a paucity of classrooms and

laboratories for overwhelming numbers. The physics, chemistry, and biology

wing could accommodate 400 students but was faced with 5,000.

The only

respite in this litany of woes was the new Faculty of Medicine on the rue

Saints-Pères, which opened in early 1954 after long delays. There were plans

for a magniﬁcent new university building at the Halles aux Vins at Jussieu.

The wine warehouses there had been partially destroyed during the 1944

bombardments. The location next to the Jardin des Plantes seemed a per-

fect setting for a state-of-the-art Latin Quarter university. But negotiations

dragged on, with large-scale wine merchants such as Dubonnet refusing to

move across the Seine to Bercy.

The jazz clubs may well have been groundbreaking territory; but they were

also a needed diversion from these conditions and from the general penury of

student life during the reconstruction years. Masses of young people, many

of them without regular incomes, descended into the Latin Quarter, hopes in

hand. At ﬁrst their living conditions were dreadful. Even regular meals were a

luxury, and there were student protests against the government’s food restric-

tions as early as 1944. Students swamped the city’s few social-welfare ofﬁces

looking for a place to live, medical services, and restaurant passes. They hunted

the broken-down buildings on the rue Lhomond and the rue Tournefort and

around “la Mouff” for chambres de bonnes. The Contrescarpe behind the Pan-

théon was a worker-student ghetto of dilapidated garrets straight out of La

Bohème. Given the general housing crisis, even rooms in the cheap hotels or

pensions on the Left Bank were scarce. The newspaper Combat investigated

student conditions in the Latin Quarter for the opening of the 1950 academic

year. It found overwhelming need at the ofﬁces of the Comité parisien des

œuvres en faveur de la jeunesse scolaire et universitaire (Paris aid committee

for students) on the rue Soufﬂot. Mobs of students crammed the stairway

seeking help ﬁnding housing, medical services, and meals. Combat calculated

living and education costs at well above what most students could hope to

afford. Buying books was out of the question.

Well aware of the appalling

conditions, the authorities increased food rations and meal tickets and opened

the ﬁrst student restaurant in the Mortier barracks at the porte des Lilas in

December 1947. By the end of the 1940s there were ﬁfteen university restau-

rants in Paris. But the numbers of students far exceeded what their kitchens

the left bank | 273

could serve: “At the door of all the restaurants, whether on the boulevard du

Port-Royal, or at Saint-Geneviève, or at the École des mines, lines of students

queued up at meal hours and sometimes . . . for nothing.”

The early 1950s

saw the opening of a series of state-of-the-art cafeterias. The Prince served

a thousand meals a day, the Beaux-Arts turned out eight hundred, and the

Mabillon was a modern showcase of dining services offering students some

six thousand meals a day. Its opening in 1953 was hailed as a major event.

Nevertheless, the ﬂood of students outpaced the meals. Five years later, during

the fall rentrée of 1958, the Union des jeunesses communistes (union of young

communists, or UJC) newspaper Clarté declared food to be the number 1

problem for students, especially after the price of a meal was raised from 85

to 100 francs at the university restaurants.

As far as emergencies went, the only thing that topped nourishment was

housing. The authorities estimated that some twenty thousand students at

any one time were looking for accommodations. Unscrupulous landlords

regularly took advantage of their distraught pleas for lodging. The rental price

doubled and tripled for the classic chambre de bonne with two to three students

crammed into rooms meant for one. In Henri Calet’s urban reportage in

Les Deux bouts, a student named Louis Gilbert lives “in a narrow room that

was more like a hallway at the Hotel Montaigne on the rue de la Sorbonne,

where all the renters were students, where all the doors were open all the

time.” The cheap rooms were “without air, without water, without gas, with-

out electricity, without heat,” reported Clarté.

In 1956 the Comité parisien

des œuvres en faveur de la jeunesse scolaire et universitaire recommended

that the prefecture reestablish its policy of requisitioning chambres de bonnes

throughout the Left Bank for student use. Worst off were students coming

from the crumbling French empire, especially Morocco and Tunisia. Most

of the four thousand colonial students enrolled in the French university sys-

tem were in Paris. They met a cold reception in the Latin Quarter. The aid

committee had little choice but to acknowledge the reality of segregation and

buy cheap rooming houses where they could be lodged. In her memoirs the

historian Annie Kriegel noted 130 Moroccan students boarding on the rue

des Écoles and the rue Bonaparte, Vietnamese students in hotels on the rue

de l’Observatoire, and Réunion students on the rue Saint-Sulpice.

If home was a garret, all the more reason to ﬁnd life and friends in the

cafés. The Left Bank bistros served as living space for everyone from Simone

de Beauvoir to the poorest student. Since heat was a ﬁction in many a ﬂat,

274 | chapter six

the drinks and potbellied stoves in neighborhood bistros were an immediate

draw in winter. Students shufﬂed between classes and the tables at a favorite

haunt where they pored over textbooks. When the weather turned warm, the

outdoor café scene was a baroque theater of student collectivism. “Depend-

ing on the hour,” according to a reporter for Réalités magazine describing a

bistro behind the Panthéon in 1959, “you can ﬁnd everything: couples after a

movie, the neighborhood communist cell, the corner grocer, students, make-

believe students, future starlets, future licenciés (graduates). And music ‘of any

kind.’”

The public scenography was shared with Armenian bistros around

Saint-Severin church and the North African cafés on the rue Galande. In

Génération, Hervé Harmon and Patrick Rotman recount the geography of

lively watering holes in the Latin Quarter. Le Champo on the place Paul-

Painlevé across from the Sorbonne was claimed by the Union des étudiants

communistes (communist student union, or UEC), as a sort of annex to the

nearby UEC Clarté bookstore. The southernmost cafés were the Mahieu and

the Capoulade at the end of the rue Soufﬂot. Across the place du Luxembourg

was the Luco.

The celebrated canteens of Saint-Germain-des-Prés such as

the Café de Flore and the Deux Magots were beyond the budgets of most

students, reserved for special pilgrimages to see the intellectual mandarins

who mesmerized their followers in the 1950s.

The public sphere in Paris during the 1950s was a multilayered medium

of expression that absorbed both spatiality and temporality. Traditional

practices resurfaced in dramatic, hypersensory form. In the case of student

activism, a mélange of folkloric rituals initially provided the foundation for

a maturing political consciousness. Political protest often took place within

the context of the monôme de bac, the time-honored student rag proces-

sion at the end of the infamous baccalauréat examinations required as the

ﬁrst diploma of higher education. The modern version of the ritual dated

from 1893 and the appearance of the ﬁrst post-exam bal des Quat’z-Arts at

the École des beaux-arts. When police intervened in the affair to bring the

drunken carousing to a halt, two thousand students staged a giant monôme

at the place de Sorbonne. By the 1920s it generally consisted of a traditional

parade led by the students and brass band of the École des beaux-arts,

which had the quality of a ludic rite that had already seen its best days. But

the war and its aftermath reinvigorated the monôme with an edgy, politically

disputatious quality. During the occupation, students gathered after exams

near the Panthéon and serendipitously paraded in small groups along the

the left bank | 275

rue Soufﬂot and the boulevard Saint-Michel or up the rue Lhomond, sing-

ing and chanting, improvising the lyrics with political slogans and slurs, and

handing out clandestine communist and Gaullist tracts.

The custom of

the monôme du bac was then renewed as a public protest against the dread-

ful student conditions in the early postwar years. For the most part it was

viewed sympathetically by the broader public, or even as a charming revival

of Left Bank mores and amusement. But the monôme was a carnivalesque

zone of hidden volatility and discontent. Dressed in traditional costume,

students were transformed into merry pranksters parading in a farcical, pro-

figure 29. A traditional student rag procession or monôme de bac celebrating the end of

the baccalauréat turns into a demonstration along the boulevard Saint-Michel, June 30, 1954.