Wakeman Rosemary. The Heroic City: Paris, 1945-1958
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Mothers have suffered too much
While others prosper
And live at ease
In spite of the mud and blood
There are prisoners
Whose souls have been stolen
Whose wives have been stolen
And all their loved ones gone
Tomorrow, first thing in the morning
I will close the door
On the smell of these dead years
I will take to the road
Yves Montand, a longtime communist, entered the political fray with an
adaptation of the old pacifist song Giroflé, Girofla: “How beautiful are your
barley fields / Girofle, girofla / In your orchards, fruits abound / Good times
are here / Do you hear the forge whirring? / Girofle, girofla / The cannons
will mow them down.”
In heated municipal council debates after the strikes and protests in
support of Algerian independence in March 1956, Jean Legaret, a moderate,
railed against the “ten thousand North Africans who—to the indignant as-
tonishment of Parisians—swarmed into the streets” and warned the council
that it was “the young who were protesting: young people were at the quai
de la Rapée and in the Latin Quarter.” Outraged municipal councilors ad-
monished the prefect of police for not protecting public colleges and lycées
from infiltration by pro-Algerian elements. Le Figaro had reported that the
lycée Voltaire and other schools were the scenes of gatherings by students
and teachers to organize a “popular front” in support of victims of police
repression. “We do not want to see,” declared the Gaullist Pierre Devraigne,
“the drapeau des fellagha [guerilla flag] in our schools and lycées, or in the au-
ditorium of the Mutualité, along with demands for money for these so-called
victims of police repression.” In a pointed retort, the left-wing opposition
invited student groups to the symbolic site of the Mutualité for a meeting
to demand an immediate cease-fire in Algeria.
85
Communists led student
demonstrations in the Latin Quarter against the Algerian War on the PCF’s
day of national protest on October 17, 1957. The historian Philippe Robrieux,
a participant in the antiwar demonstrations, recalled that marching down
the left bank | 287
the Boul’ Mich’ in protest against the disbanding of the Algerian students’
UGEMA “signified ‘taking the Latin Quarter.’ The Boul’ Mich’ symbolized
possession of the historic heart of the ‘Quartier.’”
86
In a symbol of Left Bank
solidarity, the march crossed the boundary between the Latin Quarter and
Saint-Germain-des-Prés, winding from the boulevard Saint-Michel along
the boulevard Saint-Germain-des-Prés to the rue de Seine and the rue de
Buci market. The political crises of the late 1950s was breaking down older
spatial formulations and formulating new ones.
The political crisis of May 1958 that sealed the fate of the Fourth Repub-
lic brought hundreds of thousands of young people and students out into
the street to take possession of the Boul’ Mich’ and the Latin Quarter and
to participate in demonstrations throughout the capital (see chapter 3). It is
the very dissimilar, often oppositional practices by this “1950s generation”
during the explosive month of May that warrants passing attention here.
They substantiate the fluid, polyvalent, unpredictable quality of public life
in this transitional decade and the dispersion of political power across the
spaces of the capital. The new generational category of “youth” and its range
figure 31. A demonstration for peace in Algeria by the Union des jeunesses communistes de
France in Belleville, October 1957. © gerald bloncourt/rue des archives.
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of public practices fractured older discourses about class, populism, and the
meaning of the people of Paris. A space of resistance and contestation, the
Left Bank was itself contested terrain. On May Day students marched down
the rue Mouffetard to Gobelins to protest the execution of the student and
freedom fighter Abderhamane Taleb, who was branded a “terrorist” in Al-
giers. Fervent about the cause of an independent Algeria, the cortege stood
in stark contrast to the folkloric celebration on May 11, when the Paris Uni-
versité Club (PUC) celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with a 1900s-themed
masquerade ball in the streets of the Latin Quarter, with the Frères Jacques
and Monsieur Hulot himself as celebrity hosts. The redoubtable Beaux-Arts
brass band provided music. By month’s end, on May 28, the massive unity
march in defense of the republic from the place de la Nation to the place de
la République brought out some 150,000 demonstrators, many of them young
people. Students by the thousands assembled at the gare de Lyon and then
separated into their various associations to take part in the demonstration. At
first watching apathetically along the sidelines on the rue du Temple, a group
of blousons noirs in blue jeans and black jackets finally joined in, screaming
“Peace in Algeria!” and “De Gaulle to the gallows!” at the top of their lungs
and racing through the crowds. The trajectory of supporters of de Gaulle
and the Algerian War the next night was far different. On May 29 thousands
of young men took to the street in support of de Gaulle’s investiture as head
of government. Oriented toward the capital’s official spaces, they marched
down the Champs-Élysées past the Arc de Triomphe to the Tomb of the Un-
known Soldier. That same night there was a massive street party and concert
on the place Saint-Germain-des-Prés. CRS mobile guard units were called
out to deal with the thousands of young people and the infernal din of their
music.
87
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Planning Paris
7 In an editorial in the Revue urbanisme, the chief of the MRU,
Raoul Dautry, declared 1945 to be “the year of urbanism.” The gusto of his
declaration reveals the passion with which urban planning was debated at
the war’s end. Paris was treated to a series of exhibitions meant to showcase
the modern urbanism that would wash clean the lugubrious and unhealthy
conditions that had plagued the capital since the nineteenth century. They
were an immense success. After years of deprivation, thousands of Parisians
came to see the displays, eager to see the future. The Première Exposition de
la Reconstruction was organized by the MRU from October 31 to December
31, 1945, at the gare des Invalides. In the cold, depressing winter, just a few
months after the war’s end, Parisians passed through the entrance gawking
at a gigantic photomontage depicting the vision of a reconstructed city su-
perimposed over smoldering ruins. The exhibit was just an early glimpse of
the MRU’s dazzling picture of modern housing and urban life. The crowds
were tantalized by miniature model communities under glass featuring pre-
fabricated single-family homes equipped with every convenience. The first
prototypes were already being constructed in the suburbs at Noisy-le-Sec. A
huge, multicolored, electrically wired map of Paris laid out the site of each
projet d’aménagement. At the press of a button, each zone lit up, to the delight
of exposition-goers. A year later, on June 14–July 21, 1946, the Exposition
des Techniques Américaines de l’Habitation et de l’Urbanisme at the Grand
Palais was even more impressive. The exhibits featured American mass-
production techniques, building tools, and equipment from bulldozers and
scrapers to finishers for roadwork. Photographic murals and documentary
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films introduced the French to the American way of living. Fully equipped
American homes with names like the Arcadia, the Woolaway House, and the
Jeep were built by the MRU at model villages at Noisy-le-Grand and other
Paris suburbs. The exposition was a sign of the American material culture
and Marshall Plan aid that would arrive in thundering waves throughout the
reconstruction years. From July 10 to August 17, 1947, Paris hosted another
exhibit, the Exposition Internationale de l’Urbanisme et de l’Habitation. Nine
European countries displayed the revolutionary urban-planning techniques
that would rebuild a shattered world.
1
The entrance to the Grand Palais was
decked out in monumental metal tubular scaffolding, displaying the new
urban aesthetic, while the interior exhibits were arranged in ultramodern
modular format. The exposition catalog laid out the conviction that “Lodg-
ing is . . . the most essential human necessity. It responds to the needs of
the body as well as to the spirit, to the needs of the individual as well as the
family, to the needs of the nation and society as a whole: It is the clearest
sign of the level and quality of civilization.”
2
The prefect of the Seine, Guy Périer de Féral, ceremoniously presented
the official urban plan for Paris at this 1947 international exposition. An enor-
mous relief map was displayed that outlined all the work to be accomplished
to improve the capital’s quality of life. Since 1943 the Inspection générale des
services techniques de topographie et d’urbanisme (public works service) had
been carrying out intensive studies of conditions in Paris as preparation for
urban renewal projects. Each neighborhood had been the subject of detailed
research. Huge three-dimensional scale models of refurbished neighborhoods
were set up for display, with special “before” and “after” slum clearance mod-
els of îlot 16 in the Marais, îlot 11 in Ménilmontant, and îlot 2 along the rue
Mouffetard. Urbanistic magic would transform these pedestrian, dilapidated
neighborhoods into modern fantasylands. Architecture and urbanism was
heralded as transformative of habitat, of urban life, and of France itself. The
ambience was inspired. It was precisely the apocalyptic visions, the struggle
to design utopia as a remedy for healing the social and cultural fracturing of
France and the wounds of war, that marked these public displays as signifi-
cant and placed them within the context of what Manfred Tufari has called a
theatrical imagination. Images of dystopia and utopia, of decline and renewal,
were constructed around the capital as the laboratory and showcase for this
heroic experiment in reinventing the modern city.
There was an air of pure fantasy about all these plans and designs, all
planning paris | 291
this prophetic conjuring up of a magnificent future. Nothing could have
been further from the reality outside the ceremonial tubular entrance of the
Grand Palais. Resources were scarce, and urban renovation schemes—even
housing—were far down the list of national priorities. Yet the circumstances
engendered a far-reaching public discussion about Paris as the landscape of
utopia that expanded into a debate about the nature of modern urban life.
Paris was a city designed to impress. Restoring it as the capital was tanta-
mount to restoring the nation. It was to be a showcase for reconstruction
and the new France. This planning discourse about Paris, the meaningful
metaphors and emotionally laden visual imagery, was complicated, riddled
with ironies, anxieties, and confusion. On one hand, it pointed to a deep
yearning to recapture French virtues in the capital’s traditional landscape
and architectural forms. It sought the path trodden as much as the future
that beckoned. The style has often been referred to as a moderated Hauss-
mannization, or haussmannisme amélioré. To call it that is to immediately
suggest the enduring legacy of Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris under
Napoleon III and his master-planning techniques.
3
The fateful formula of
French state authority and large-scale public works for fashioning a modern
“City of all the French,” as Haussmann put it, remained the dream of many
a French urbanist. Looking out over the dilapidated, dreary landscape of the
once glittering City of Light, a growing corps of frustrated urban planners
were still guided by Haussmann’s grande croisée, his network of boulevards,
his open vistas and broad public spaces, his monumentality and rationalist
vision. In his review of the 1947 Paris exhibit at the Grand Palais, C. Eyraud,
the director of the Services d’architecture et d’urbanisme à la préfecture de
la Seine (architecture and urban planning services for the prefecture of the
Seine), wrote that “many have criticized Baron Haussmann and often with
reason. . . . But it is worthwhile remembering that he had the prescience to
understand what Paris would be like in the years to come. It would be dif-
ficult to imagine what the situation would now be if the medieval city had
been conserved intact, without the wide avenues that were realized.”
4
The French then glanced back to their nineteenth-century modernist
roots. On the other hand, they also looked forward to a twentieth-century
modernist movement that had arrived triumphant as the alternative, the
potential reality of the postwar age, ready to shape a better world. A new
generation of international architects working under the auspices of CIAM
claimed the legacy of modernism. The 1943 publication of the Athens Charter
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contained the resolutions of the Fourth Congress of CIAM and was both
a manifesto and a utopian vision of the modern city. Even more, it was an
“injunction to think right,” according to Le Corbusier’s expression. CIAM’s
militants tended to mark public space as homogeneous and universal in qual-
ity. For these professionals, the city and its spaces were abstract, objective,
and measurable. Modernists recomposed urban topography as a structured
and utopian scene—a fantasy stage set for the theater of contemporary life.
Everywhere, “disorder was replaced by functional order; diversity by serial
repetition; and surprise by uniform expectancy.”
5
The radical authority of
high modernism during the reconstruction years was astonishing. It treated
both wartime destruction and the historic decay of the city as obsolescent. Its
radical rejection of both, its practical functionality as a reconstructive form,
offered an entirely new cultural vision, a new mechanism for reuniting the
nation and creating a new kind of society. The convergence of this postwar
modernist creed with the reemergence of France from the long night of war
gave urban planning a militant, revolutionary quality.
Whether modernism was envisioned in the nineteenth- or twentieth-
century version, it was seen as a way to domesticate change and reconstitute
the civic life of the capital. It was a mechanism for healing the social fractur-
ing that had torn apart the nation and led to its defeat. Only the power of
the French state seemed capable of intervening in the chaos on behalf of the
nation and offering a utopian capital as a symbol of a reemergent France.
State elites produced an uncompromising official urbanist discourse, socially
brutal in tone and often violent in practice. Especially with the institution of
Vichy’s dirigiste (state interventionist) policies, local authority was steadily
undermined and responsibility for the capital aggressively co-opted by state
technocrats. For this reason, the chapter begins with a discussion of Vichy’s
plans for Paris. This official structure was then appropriated by the MRU
at the war’s end. With remarkable moral righteousness, professional urban
planners and techniciens in the service of the French state wrested control
of Paris and its region away from the narrow-minded local politicians who
were blamed for all that had gone wrong.
But the state technocrats who all stood hungrily over the “problem of
Paris” were just one set of actors in this battle over the terms of modern urban
life. Despite their every effort, they did not entirely monopolize public debate.
A myriad of counterdiscourses contributed much to the form Paris would
take in the future. The vision of the capital’s spatial pattern represented dif-
planning paris | 293
ferent social and cultural ideals, as well as ideals of political power. Both the
political Right and the Left proclaimed the city as the terrain of the future.
Municipal authority swung from Vichy to the communist-led Resistance to
the Gaullists. A tradition of social-democratic and reformist municipalism
fed into the experience of Resistance and working-class solidarity. A robust
localism fractured the city’s landscape into a multitude of cohesive, intensely
politicized neighborhood-villages. City officialdom clashed with state tech-
nocrats and a handful of Seine prefects over futuristic visions of the capital.
The fiery enthusiasts of Paris planning from all sides were writing, campaign-
ing, and lobbying political elites. Reports and recommendations rolled off
the presses at lightening speed, only to be met by a barrage of criticism and
censure. The plans for Paris passed through a gauntlet of political negotia-
tions and endured numerous revisions and iterations. The entire city, from
its most prestigious monuments down to its most rickety shacks, was stud-
ied, measured, and analyzed. Each of these actors and each peak moment
in this aesthetic drama espoused a different vision of the city’s future. Paris
was imagined as a panorama of traditional French grandeur or of modern
postwar French society. It was an insatiable urban omnivore. The housing
crisis, the eradication of old neighborhoods, the preservation of the city’s
picturesque beauty, and the loss of traditional public space were all argued
over and deliberated. For some, the annihilation of historic Paris was the
objective; for others, the past was the gateway to the future.
Taken together, the debates about Paris created an influential planning
corpus that largely eschewed the tabula rasa of modernist universalism and
instead attempted to invent a particularist vision of a progressive, twentieth-
century capital. It acted as the theoretical anchor, the taproot, for the renewal
projects carried out in the 1960s and after. More than simply haussmannisme
amélioré, it was part of a broad-based humanist, poetic imaginary that defined
the mid-twentieth century. French urban analysts shared a deep convic-
tion in an urbanism that was more humane, in a collective experience that
was prosaic and poetic, and in an urban aesthetic that was expressive and
vernacular. It was a powerful counterpoint to high-modernist doctrine and
essentially prevented any twentieth-century repetition of grand-scale urban
renovation in the capital’s central districts. Instead, modern urban planning
would be assimilated into the city’s historic cultural geography. In his review
of the 1947 exhibit, Eyraud clarified that despite the efficacy of Haussmann’s
vision, the 1947 Paris exhibit’s prodigious maps were not meant to represent
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reality for the entire city, but for each îlot, “in order to exactly draw out the
character of each block of houses, the available sites, and the exact nature
of the population that lives and resides there.”
6
The fractured landscape of
petites villages lived on.
But it did not necessarily mean that le peuple, as heroicized in poetic hu-
manist discourse, lived on with them. By the end of the 1950s Paris was imag-
ined as a historicized web of vernacular streetscapes, heritage buildings, and
monumental stage sets, all cleared of their meddlesome working classes. The
city’s center was transformed into a zone cristalisée that succeeded admirably
in promoting tourism. The poetic vision of the capital was largely stripped
of its social and political militancy and became something of an antecedent
to postmodernism. An unchanging, nostalgic Paris was the ultimate tourist
destination, its particularist spaces guarded with a vengeance. This posture
grossly exaggerated the division between the adored inner arrondissements
and the forgotten edges and suburbs that surrounded them. If grand-scale
modernist planning schemes were abandoned in the heart of Paris, they
were applied with a shocking vengeance in the outer arrondissements and
throughout the region.
Vichy and the Plans for Paris
One of the most remarkable meditations on planning and design in twen-
tieth-century Paris appeared in 1943 under the title Destinée de Paris, writ-
ten for the city’s two thousandth anniversary, edited by the historian and
preservationist Bernard Champigneule, and published by Chêne. Some of
the city’s most preeminent apologists contributed articles. Marcel Raval, ar-
chitect and luminary of the Ligue urbaine et rurale, attacked the inept and
self-serving political elites of the Third Republic, “imbued with the imbecilic
myth of French superiority and interested above all in courting electoral
favors.” While foreign capital cities experimented with new urban planning
techniques, Paris became open terrain for the greed and vagaries of private
financial interests. Munich, Nuremberg, Lübeck, Bern, Bruges, and Anvers
had all seen their historic districts restored while model worker cities took
root in their suburbs. In the meantime, “France has done little but nourish
old superstitions and enlist a pitiful egoism in urban matters.”
7
Above all,
Destinée de Paris was a ringing protest against the modernist vision of the
future articulated by Le Corbusier at the 1937 Exposition Internationale des
planning paris | 295
Arts et Techniques and in his Destin de Paris, published in 1941 by Fernand
Sorlot, which was closely allied with the Vichy regime. These two publications
acted as counterpoints in the loud public battle over the capital’s landscape.
For Le Corbusier, Paris was more than a city; it was a world, a metropolis
for modern times where individual freedom and spirit were the essence of
cosmopolitanism. Paris was at the core of French destiny.
8
Le Corbusier’s
notorious Plan Voisin (reworked continuously from 1925 on) demolished a
vast swath of territory on the Right Bank from the gare de l’Est to the rue
de Rivoli and replaced it with eighteen uniform 700-foot-high freestanding
towers “to have air, light and greenery all around us again.”
9
By the 1930s his
design included a network of superhighways and a vast elevated expressway
running along the rue de Rivoli–Champs-Élysées backbone. In the hopes
of currying favor with Vichy, Destin de Paris exchanged slum districts for a
mesmerizing vision of high-rise apartment buildings to welcome a thousand
inhabitants per hectare and the principles of zoning that would efficiently lay
out the city’s functions: 245 hectares for an historic zone, 452 hectares for
a new administrative zone, 500 hectares for urban artisans, 120 hectares for
commerce, and so on. Le Corbusier’s plans evolved into a radicalized version
of Haussmann’s modernization, and he indeed saw them as the contemporary
embodiment of the grand scale of French tradition.
The contributors to Destinée de Paris threw down the gauntlet against the
frightening supremacy of this modernist vision of the future. Champigneulle
defended Paris because “cities are the mirrors of their epoch. They are the
image of a civilization. If France wants to initiate the great intellectual and
moral reforms on which our future depends, then it should portray a clear
and noble face and treat the French landscape with deference.”
10
Historic
Paris was the noblest face of France. In this conceptualization, urban space
and architecture were the essential structures in which social identity, culture,
and memory in Paris were inscribed. In another essay, Pierre d’Espezel took
readers on a loving tour of Parisian geographic, historic, and sociological id-
iosyncrasies. Each of them, each neighborhood, all the riches of the natural
topography, was essential to understanding and shielding the city’s character
and beauty from hegemonic modernist designs. In his 1945 “Incarnation de
l’urbanisme,” Gaston Bardet added his voice to the rising clamor against the
“megalopolis” and the brutality of internationalism.
11
Well-known Paris devotees such as Champigneule, Raval, René Héron de
Villefosse, and George Pillement, all of whom had led the fight to safeguard