8 | introduction
and intensity that energized public debate and the spaces of the city and that
determined the forms that late twentieth-century Paris would take. We might
say that this period was a high-voltage conduit between the past and the fu-
ture. My general contention is that, contrary to the traditional narrative of
decay, the public spaces of Paris flourished. The city’s public landscape was
intensified. The streets overflowed with ritual, drama, and spectacle. Pub-
lic space in Paris—from the petit quartier to the city’s grandest ceremonial
sites—was fluid, polyvalent, pierced with political and social tensions. This
perspective makes use of the rich debate about the public sphere that has
taken place since the publication of Habermas’s Structural Transformation of
the Public Sphere, and particularly of the cultural and postmodern critique
his work has provoked. Rather than focusing on the monolithic, universal-
istic spectacle of modernism, scholars now point to the complex practices
of local and popular culture. Theorists argue that this multifaceted public
sphere, rather than being closed by the forces of late-capitalist moderniza-
tion, has open boundaries. There are subaltern counterpublics that circulate
counterdiscourses, actively vie for public power and space, and formulate
oppositional interpretations of identities, interests, and needs.
15
The dialectic
between normalization and differentiation in space and practice is particu-
larly relevant here. As private space was being increasingly solidified and
controlled, public space continued to be liquid and unruly. As technocratic
urban planning reached out to impose rationality and uniform composition
on the city, the public domain remained ambiguous and unpredictable. It
was highly structured by official policy, but it was also a space of serendipity,
of freedom of spirit and action. Hugo Lacroix remarks, in his meditation on
the meaning of Les Enfants du paradis, that for the viewer the film is “paved
with interior tensions, with moral crises, of sliding and bending 180 degrees
for or against the characters.
16
These social and civic tensions were played
out in the spaces of Paris by a multiplicity of publics throughout the period
covered in this book. Who could occupy the public domain and how these
polyvalent spaces could be appropriated became questions that tested the
meaning of urban relations at their deepest level.
These multiform, heterogeneous spatialities mark the late 1940s and 1950s
as a crucial transitional period in the twentieth century. It was the bridge
between the first half of the century, with all its political violence and class
struggle, and the second half, with its modernizing zeal and mass consumer
culture. As a result, the chapters that follow deemphasize 1945 as a turning