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

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the city’s historic districts for years before the war, continued through the

1940s to promote preservationist formulas. They found good cause with the

new Vichy regime. For Vichy, the city as a cultural and sociopolitical artifact

represented all that had led France to catastrophe. According to the new

government’s Commission d’étude de la région parisienne (study commis-

sion for the Paris region), the physiognomy of Paris was “banal, chaotic, even

inhumane.” In February 1942 Marshal Pétain addressed the commission’s

inaugural session: “Over the past sixty years, due to the failure of authorities

who neither planned, nor demanded, nor acted in time, the Paris agglom-

eration has continued to spread out in disarray over the surrounding coun-

tryside, widening the circle of misery and ugliness that surrounds the city,

saddening the heart and the mind.”

As Robert Paxton has argued, “Vichy

moved France signiﬁcantly toward the technicians’ vision: urban, efﬁcient,

productive, planned, and impersonal.”

Technocratic planning was one of

the great victors of the age.

For the ﬁrst time in France, the regime imposed a national agenda on

urban planning. All large cities in France were ﬁnally to produce comprehen-

sive land-use plans under Vichy’s Law on Urbanism of June 1943. It was an

attempt to control the frenzied growth spreading across the Seine basin as

well as around all of the country’s major cities, a goal that had initially been

articulated in legislation instituted at the end of the First World War in 1919

but toward which little progress had been made. It was ﬁnally accomplished

within the context of the wartime occupation as a canvas upon which to

devise a new vision for France. The Vichy years succeeded in substantially

expanding the role of the Seine prefecture and ultimately state authority

over the capital’s future. Responsibility for Paris was taken over by the Vi-

chy Ministère de l’intérieur, the new Délégation générale de l’équipement

national (state delegation on national infrastructure, or DGEN), which was

established to handle a broad sweep of urban responsibilities from slum clear-

ance, urban planning, and redevelopment to housing construction, as well

as by a Conseil national de l’urbanisme (national council on urbanism).

The interwar professional cadre of the “Paris school” of urban and regional

planning was directly incorporated into this expanding administrative ma-

chinery. France’s ﬁrst generation of professional urban planners—individuals

such as Gabriel Dessus, Pierre Gibel, Henri Giraud, André Gutton, René

Mestais, André Prothin, and Pierre-Armand Thiébaud—had all built their

careers studying and arranging the puzzle of the Paris region. A number of

planning paris | 297

them had attended the Institut d’urbanisme de l’Université de Paris (IUUP)

and completed their studies under Henri Prost, France’s leading architect-

urbanist of the interwar years. They worked together in the dizzying array of

public agencies and survived almost intact from the mid-1930s through the

Vichy years and into the 1950s to lay out the future of the capital and its sur-

rounding suburbs.

The combined inﬂuence of this midcentury technocratic

corps of professional urban reformers explains in part why planning for Paris

remained so remarkably consistent, from the designs worked out by Prost

and his students at the IUUP in 1935 through the 1959 Plan d’urbanisme

directeur. They moved urban planning toward a scientiﬁc professionalism

that disdained any association with the capital’s fractured localism or with

the political twists and turns of midcentury France. The rationalization and

modernization of Paris was their ultimate mission. Their work depended on

analytical research of urban conditions, mapping and cartographic study,

speciﬁc deﬁnitions of housing, and habitat norms: density and public health,

building quality and condition, availability of domestic goods and services,

and the amount of ground covered by buildings. These became the standard

measures of quality of life by a technocratic cadre that achieved ofﬁcial power

through the newly forming network of state planning agencies.

Despite this seeming professional neutrality, Vichy’s approach to the city

was clothed in moralistic ambitions for the renaissance of traditional France.

It reimagined the decaying monster of Paris as a capital worthy of French

greatness. Urban revival was a concocted brew of passéiste (backward-look-

ing) traditionalism and technocratic modernization. What was worth saving

in Paris, according to the Commission d’étude de la région parisienne, was

“the heritage made from the beauty of work by old artisans and the historic

souvenirs necessary for the spiritual and moral life of the population.”

Charles Magny, Vichy’s prefect for the Seine department, was a lifelong ad-

vocate of the “beauty of Paris,” an ideal that had emerged in the ﬁrst years

of the twentieth century and found its aesthetic expression in built heritage

and the preservation of the past. Although the preservationists were divided

between those who fought for the picturesque legacy of pre-Haussmann Paris

and those who wanted to continue Haussmann’s tradition, they unanimously

rejected high modernism as antithetical to the French capital. The insipid

monotony of towers, especially in American cities such as Chicago, as well

as the vision of Le Corbusier became the antipode to the traditional visual

fantasy of Paris. The historian and preservationist Louis Hourticq wrote

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with the approval of L’Architecture française (one of the quasi-ofﬁcial mouth-

pieces for Vichy’s urban principles) that “like topography, history guides

the urbanist. It counsels prudence more than audaciousness. In a city with

its own tastes and traditions, newness is rude and aggressively shocking. It

would be ridiculous to introduce into the historic center of Paris a ‘rational’

building . . . [and] completely insensitive to construct one of these modern

carcasses.”

Vichy was preoccupied with restoring the monumental image of the

capital, and its plans for Paris were prodigious. They were largely the work of

René Mestais, head of the Services techniques de topographie et d’urbanisme,

and his team of urban planners. A darling of the preservationists, Mestais

had been involved with planning the city’s future since the 1930s and was

largely responsible for the land-use plan ﬁrst presented at the 1937 Paris

Congress, held in conjunction with the Exposition Internationale des Arts et

Techniques. Along with the Services d’architecture et d’urbanisme attached

to the Seine prefecture (whose director was Maurice Baudot), they produced

voluminous studies on Paris, its history, and its landscape, including com-

parative research on the evolution of Europe’s capital cities since 1870 as a

basis for understanding the development of the French capital.

It was an

effort to rectify the lack of attention given the city in the years before the war

and to lay down the principles on which Paris, in Baudot’s words, “could

breathe better, be better built, and, in a word, live better.”

Their results

were presented in May and June 1943 at two conferences dedicated to Vichy’s

new Law on Urbanism. The more important of the two was the Salon des

Urbanistes, hosted by the prefect of the Seine, Guy Périer de Féral. It was a

remarkable display that featured extensive presentations, maps and graphs,

statistical tables, and photographs that captured the city’s debilitated state

and set out the vision for the future.

True to the French state’s urban planning heritage, the work of Hauss-

mann was presented as the model of achievement. A new grand cross of “mag-

isterial arteries” in the heart of Paris would replace the blighted areas of the

Right Bank and assure the ﬂow of transportation over the next century: the

east-west axis would stretch through a modernized faubourg Saint-Antoine,

and the north-south axis would run from Les Halles and the rue de Rivoli to

the gare de l’Est.

To round out this puriﬁcation of the Right Bank, the cul-

tural necklace of the Bibliothèque nationale, the Conservatoire national des

arts et métiers, and the Archives nationales would all be expanded. Altogether,

planning paris | 299

some 120 different projects were to be carried out throughout Paris. New

streets would be opened up, existing ones widened, access to the renovated

railroad stations improved, and new train lines to the suburbs opened. The

markets at Les Halles would be transferred outside Paris. Périer de Féral

presented Vichy’s commitment to transforming the newly acquired zone non

aediﬁcandi. Wartime legislation had facilitated its complete annexation and

expropriation. Maps and photographs of the great ring that girdled Paris

laid out its long history, its sordid state, and its glittering future. Schools

and sports complexes, gardens and public promenades would grace the new

“green belt” carved from the circle of Thiers’s old fortiﬁcations and ﬁeld of

ﬁre.

But the great aesthetic emblem of the “Renaissance of Paris” as the

“grand salon of Europe” would be the 55-yard-wide boulevard périphérique,

which would surround the city with a new monumentality and open the

Île-de-France to its natural splendor. When lit at night to reveal the great

entrances into Paris, it would appear as a glowing magisterial crown around

the capital.

The boulevard périphérique, the brainchild of Mestais, was a tra-

ditionalist patina, a Beaux-Arts vision of the Haussmannian boulevard as the

quintessence of urban renewal and innovative design. Here lay the creative

tableau upon which France would press forward into a modern renaissance

and regain its glory. State planning would revive the magnetism of la ville

lumière that symbolized the unique character of French modern. Mestais

predicted that “with all collaborating in the ‘Renaissance de Paris,’ France

will become, as yesterday, the second country of all men.”

For all its seeming emulation of Haussmann’s work tout court, Mestais’s

plan was a compromise. The renovation of speciﬁc îlots became the opera-

tional unit for planning and design. These interiorized districts were topo-

graphic evidence of vernacular tradition and history and the counterpart to

the idyllic rural village. It was these rustic patterns inherent in urban life that

Vichy sought to rediscover underneath the fetid slums and industrial squalor.

It was tantamount to uncovering true France. And Vichy had inherited the

witch’s brew of îlots insalubres to be cleared and redeveloped. In his presenta-

tion to the 1943 Salon des Urbanistes, Maurice Baudot explained that while

seventeen years of Haussmann’s projects had displaced 350,000 people,

the new slum clearance programs called for the number of expropriated

to reach 500,000.

Yet Vichy’s focus was not bent on wholesale slaughter,

but on a carefully chosen “clearing out” that would honor the “old places”

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and “conserve them for a living usage.” A new superintendance of buildings

would be instituted, “analogous to that of the ancien régime, which assured

down through the centuries a unity of views [and] the employment of local

materials, and reconciled the boldness of the new in a harmonious way.”

The city’s working-class population would be dispersed, and Paris would

be opened to the healthy beneﬁts of the countryside. Vichy’s new agencies

produced a land-use plan based on the sweeping incorporation of the 1934

Prost Plan with the city of Paris itself. It included the departments of the

Seine, Seine-et-Oise, and Seine-et-Marne, and ﬁve cantons in the department

of the Oise as the new, ofﬁcial Paris region. The area extended to a general

radius of thirty-seven miles from the center of Paris and was composed of

1,305 separate communes. Here charming cottages and apartments would

await the thousands of slum dwellers relocated from the central districts to

“city-villages” surrounded by parks and open space.

A technocratic, neo-

rural pastiche would be imposed upon the discredited, republican visions

of the capital. Families would ﬁnd social harmony and utopian existence in

a “greener” setting. The well-developed social-reform themes of sport and

health were crucial to Vichy’s renewal of the working classes and the citizen

body. Numerous designs were done for gymnasiums and sports centers, many

of them featured in the pages of L’Illustration magazine, because “refreshing

the body, training muscles, extending the chest cavity, [and] calming the

spirit lead to the physical and moral balance of our regenerated citizenry.”

To make way for this utopia, the diseased industrial viscera of Paris would

be thinned out by decentralizing factories to the provinces. “What will the

Paris of tomorrow be in terms of its population density and its industrial

infrastructure?” Baudot asked. “What type of wise and prudent policy of

deconcentration and industrial decentralization should we have? How will

provincial life be reconstructed and reborn, and how will Parisians ﬁnd them-

selves affected? How will this return to the land create the conditions for

restraining the capital’s population?”

The Reconstruction Years

Vichy’s DGEN was essentially perpetuated with the establishment at the

Liberation of the MRU, led ﬁrst by Raoul Dautry and then by Eugène

Claudius-Petit. The technocratic elites who led Vichy’s drive to reform Paris

merged almost seamlessly into the new regime. Politics were banished from

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their discourse, questions of collaboration turned aside. The ﬁrst priorities

in recruiting candidates for the MRU were technical knowledge, experience,

and intelligence. There was simply no question for these reform-minded

experts but to continue the modernization programs that would beneﬁt all

Parisians, regardless of political proclivities. But given the zealous militancy

of the Liberation years and the pretense of an administrative cleansing, this

ostensible continuity was veiled. The MRU immediately renounced Vichy’s

“regressive, narrow-minded” cultural vision. But the discourse and poli-

cies remained the same. A new discipline, a rational ordering of the city

would heal not only the ravages of war and occupation, but also the social

frictions that had led to the country’s ignominious fall. This would require

an overarching state power and vigilance. The MRU and its technocrats

shaped their image of Paris from a sweeping regionalist, even national point

of view of aménagement du territoire. This whole state logic veered sharply

away from the freewheeling localism of the city’s municipal elites and their

understanding of a fractured landscape of quartiers. The conﬂict between

the French state and the city of Paris sharpened intensely in this moment

of utopian postwar hope.

When the Paris municipal council was reinstated in 1945, it did not re-

ceive any independent jurisdiction over the planning of Paris. The prefect

of the Seine and the prefect of police, both appointed by the state, were

the highest-ranking municipal ofﬁcials. Although any city plan needed the

tacit approval of the municipal council before it could be instituted, nothing

could be done without the endorsement of the MRU. Central to under-

standing the political clashes that would ensue within this ofﬁcialdom was

that the municipal council had virtually no independent ﬁnancial authority.

Its pinched budget relied on the state Ministries of Finance and the Interior

and their largesse, or lack of it, in funding appropriations. Loans, subsidies,

and bonds all required state authorization. Given the postwar political ten-

sions, easy agreement was highly improbable. While state technocrats bran-

dished a professionalized urbanism as their primary weapon, municipal

authorities called upon their democratic political base for support. Each

accused the other of arrogant indifference and ineptitude. The municipal

council was hardly eviscerated by the looming presence of the state in the

city’s affairs. The power of the Resistance and the PCF was extraordinary

in postwar Paris, and they dominated urban politics. They, along with the

socialists and moderate Mouvement républicain populaire (MRP), could

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pack the municipal council chamber at the Hôtel de Ville with stalwart

representatives. In fact, the commitment to far-reaching social transforma-

tion and a new kind of society was as intense at the local level as it was in

the halls of state power. From the point of view of the communists, urban

reform was already being carried out daily under their municipal patronage

throughout the capital’s neighborhoods and suburban towns. Such was their

success that the PCF was pushing for autonomous councils for each of the

twenty arrondissements, which would see to the arrondissement’s own local

affairs (see chapter 3). The imposition of state authority over Paris and over

this resurgent left-wing localism tasted of cruel disdain, and the reaction

against it was visceral.

In August 1945 the MRU called upon the Seine prefecture to reﬂect on

how the land-use plan set out by Mestais might be adapted to the new postwar

circumstances. Various preliminary studies were undertaken between 1946

and 1948 and reported to the Paris municipal council by the Seine prefect,

Marcel Flouret. Flouret had been appointed directly from the government

in exile in Algiers and been responsible for cutting off the power of the city’s

local liberation committees after August 1944 (eventually he became head

of both SNCF and EDF). Newly installed in the Hôtel de Ville, he battled

local Resistance leaders, with their nerve centers in the various arrondisse-

ments, for control over the capital. It was Flouret’s plan that was presented

to the public in July and August 1947 at the Exposition Internationale de

l’Urbanisme et de l’Habitation at the Grand Palais. As the spokesperson for

the newly established French government, Flouret argued that the urban

planner’s role was not just to deal with the day-to-day problems of living in

the city, but to present a vision for the future and to “prepare our Capital

for the role it will play in Europe and the world of tomorrow.” “If we are

not careful,” Flouret intoned, “in twenty or thirty years, London, Berlin and

the other European capitals, which experienced such cruel destruction dur-

ing the war, will be rebuilt, while Paris, which by some miracle escaped the

storm nearly intact, will become the most backward of capital cities.” It was

a moment for public debate. “That is why, despite the tortured hours we

have traversed and the lack of investments, land-use planning shouldn’t be

considered a pointless exercise. It is an opportunity to toss around ideas, to

listen to opinion, to come up with the best solutions.”

Despite the call for “tossing around ideas,” the plan essentially continued

the vision that had been articulated since the early years of the twentieth cen-

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tury and codiﬁed under Vichy in 1943. On the one hand, ofﬁcial state policy

embraced modernism as a tool for political authority and centralization. The

ideals articulated by CIAM and Le Corbusier inhabited a momentary pin-

nacle as both revolutionary avant-garde and doctrinal mouthpiece for the

reconstitution of the nation. On the other hand, the policy looked backward,

to the heritage of French state tradition, as much as to the future. The build-

ing programs of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French monarchies

were honored as models of authoritarian urban policy, their order and visual

power hailed as successful urban design. Versailles was held up for its gran-

deur of planning, as were the royal squares in Paris, the place Vendôme and

the place des Vosges. The rue de Rivoli was cited for its rhythm, nobility, and

rigorous order. The Second Empire was considered the last great moment of

urban planning in Paris. Writing in 1951, Pierre Lavedan noted that “if Des-

cartes were to judge Haussmann’s work, he would recognize its reasonable-

ness.”

Not only were these paradigms of state power, they were nostalgic

images of French glory at a moment of national remorse and tragedy—an

effort to reawaken French élan vital in the Parisian landscape.

In fact, state elites did not wholeheartedly embrace CIAM’s modernist

principles for urban planning. They looked just as frequently to a French

rendering of urban form that preserved an indigenous physiognomy and

speciﬁcity of place. Reconstruction and the reality of postwar planning often

meant the reappearance and repetition of local urban form. In his work on

architecture and reconstruction in France, the urbanist Anatole Kopp called

this a “reasonable modernization” that forged a compromise between the

old and the new.

Flouret’s reincarnation of Mestais’s vision had the same

attention to sweeping vistas, to rationalizing the landscape, and to modern

circulation schemes and a loop highway that would open up the city. It also

retained an ingrained humanistic perspective that privileged the particulari-

ties and idiosyncrasies of place. Flouret argued that

it is to satisfy the needs of the great human community of the city that

the streets, public buildings, gardens, and houses are constructed and

maintained. It is to satisfy the needs of the modest community of the

family that housing is built. In studying these communities—large and

small—we will come to understand our priorities and the projects to

undertake. In sum, urbanism in general is neither an architecture nor a

geometry, but a social problem of the most important kind. In the same

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way, construction is a human problem. This is precisely what has led us

today to abandon the construction of vast ediﬁces advocated before 1939

in which families disappear and individuals lose themselves in barrack

life. The texture of a city is far from homogeneous. . . . Alongside the

millions of people, a multitude of small communities exist that possess

their own characteristics and their own particular psychology. It is es-

sential to take them into account.

Although modernist planners typically envisioned the urban landscape as vir-

gin space waiting to be ﬁlled with monumental morphology, Flouret pointed

to other sources for understanding place: “The special mentality of each

community has many sources, but one of the principal [ones] is the genre

of life created by the work that sustains families.” In a language matching

that of Chombart de Lauwe, his study of Paris planning went on to call for

for research on the needs of families—the old, the young, adolescents, and

adults—especially in terms of public space and infrastructure: “What are these

needs that we can quality as psychological” for gardens, open spaces, public

promenades, for public demonstrations and various activities, for sports and

recreational facilities?

Flouret’s plan marked something of a bridge from the Paris articulated

under Vichy to the modern Paris taking shape in the minds of postwar state

technocrats during the 1950s. They were resolute in using the apocalyptic

moment of Liberation as the springboard for modernizing France and its

capital. The public agencies in charge of planning the Paris metropolitan

area—that is, the Comité d’aménagement de la région parisienne (CARP),

the Service de l’aménagement de la région parisienne (SARP), and the Di-

rection des travaux de la ville de Paris—were all put under the jurisdiction

of the MRU. The culture parisienne of the Institut d’urbanisme de Paris and

many of its members, such as Pierre Gibel and André Prothin, were now in

the service of the Fourth Republic.

Their ability to survive professionally

was remarkable. An explosion of ofﬁcial working groups, task forces, and

research teams investigating the state of affairs in Paris let loose a barrage

of technical evidence on the horrendous conditions that had amassed. One

after another state edict and regulation thundered out orders to eliminate

them. Prothin, the state director of urbanism, espoused a new functional

segregation and zoning to “restore the natural rhythms and calm of the city.”

The urbanist, in Prothin’s estimation, had to “ﬁght the waste, the inhuman

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and miserable ambience. The hours lost . . . on poorly designed public trans-

portation trying to get from work to housing spread through the suburbs:

the waste of time driving to ﬁnd nature.”

In the ofﬁcial narrative, urban

and regional planning were interpreted as rationalizing the urban landscape

through functional zoning, through highway expansion and a systemization

of “circulation and transportation,” and ultimately through a policy of dis-

persion and suburbanization.

Gibel, the director of SARP, was charged with continuing the effort to

plan the Paris metropolitan region. In justifying the state’s sponsorship, he

raised the wise spirit of the social reformer Henri Sellier, quoting his concerns

before the Conseil général de la Seine that the communes and municipal

administrations in the Paris region could not, on their own, possibly make

the sacriﬁces and carry out the master planning that would ensure the public

good.

Gibel’s ofﬁcial report was ﬁlled with futuristic road maps that criss-

crossed the Île-de-France and opened up the region to efﬁcient circulation

ﬂows. Such a grand-scale vision of regional planning could be undertaken

only by urban professionals under state auspices. The city of Paris itself was

left a stark void in these visual diagrams. It would be emptied of people, in-

dustry, and commerce. The citizens of Paris would ﬁnd a better life in the

modern residential complexes planned throughout the suburbs, which would

be “ﬁlled with everything necessary for a humane life.” “For the good of the

country as well as the good of the working classes,” wrote Gibel, the new Paris

plan would take into account working-class social needs, the communities

and neighborhoods that had taken root amid the chaos, and new housing,

schools, hospitals, public services, roads, and public transportation. It would

be a plan directeur (master plan) that would design a better future through

public works.

In his study of urban policies in the Paris region, the sociologist Jean

Lojkine makes the argument that the state’s attempts to undermine the local

power of the Paris municipal council and the Seine general council required

nationalizing urban problems and mobilizing popular opinion around the

state’s cause, a process that had begun in the interwar years and continued

with ﬁerce intensity within the context of post-1945 reconstruction.

The

city’s future was put in step with the Commissariat général du Plan’s decen-

tralization policies. Rather than promote any further expansion of the squalid

Paris monster gorging on the country’s growth and potential, the MRU and

the Commissariat insisted on dispersing the city’s aircraft, chemical, and