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

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306 | chapter seven

armaments industries to the provinces, where they would rebalance the

country’s modernization according to the rational principles of aménagement

du territoire. During the war, the DGEN had taken the ﬁrst initiatives toward

solving the problem of industrial decentralization. Gabriel Dessus coordinated

a series of studies by various experts, including the historian and geographer

Jean-François Gravier, who was asked to reﬂect on the economic condition

of the Paris region. His conclusions were presented in November 1947 to the

MRU and CARP and then famously published as Paris et le désert français.

Gravier’s views were highly inﬂuential in government circles. The ﬁrst edi-

tion included a preface by Raoul Dautry. Gravier’s suppositions were also

vigorously supported by Eugène Claudius-Petit, who took over from Dautry

at the MRU in September 1948. “After the long night of oppression,” wrote

Claudius-Petit in 1945, “the light harshly glares upon the sores of our worn

out society, the ugliness and rot of our suburbs and worker cities, the ﬁlth of

our factories and their anachronism.”

Gravier’s remedies for these alleged

sores were also overtly hostile to Paris. He railed against the Parisian “cartel”

that was responsible for the demographic frailty of France and the disinte-

gration of its regional life.

He called for an immediate moratorium on all

construction in Paris and its suburbs for the next ten years. Furthermore,

he recommended the demolition of 75,000 slum buildings, which would not

be replaced, in order to reduce the city’s population. Gibel’s plan for Paris

essentially echoed Gravier’s vision. Rather than praising the postwar popula-

tion growth of Paris as a sign of regeneration, he blamed it for emptying the

provinces of vital talent. The war offered the opportunity to remodel Paris

rationally and adapt it to the currents of modern life. For Gravier and the

technocratic planners at the MRU, this meant destroying the capital’s su-

premacy for the beneﬁt of a more just equilibrium across the French nation.

It would be a salve for national wounds.

Despite the impression given by ofﬁcial state discourse that somehow

the monster of Paris could magically be tamed, the population of the Seine

basin continued to swell. So did all the accumulated problems that went with

it. More and more residents were added to the region’s population roll each

year, and the numbers inched upward toward eight million by the end of the

1950s. The Paris share of the French population actually increased slightly

from 16.6 percent to 17.8 percent. Given the fact that the state claimed all

decision-making authority over the Île-de-France, promoted a decentraliza-

tion policy that would rob Paris of its economic vitality, and yet failed to solve

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even the most pressing problems of public infrastructure and housing, the

municipal council could do little but throw up its collective hands in frustra-

tion. The reshaping of Paris was on everyone’s minds, but the state’s plans

were quickly exposed as overtly anti-Parisian. The whole territorial logic of

aménagement du territoire was stacked against the capital. Gravier’s Paris et

le désert français in particular was deplored. Gravier further infuriated local

elites by suggesting that even the traditional commercial activities of the

old districts be transferred out to the new green belt. In the 1947 municipal

elections, the tone of the city’s political leadership changed dramatically. The

communists were ousted from power. In a stunning victory, the Gaullist RPF

gained an absolute majority on the municipal council, now presided over by

Pierre de Gaulle, who represented the 5th, 6th, and 7th arrondissements of

the Left Bank. Yet regardless of the shifting political sands, the state’s hu-

miliating decentralization policies were a lightening rod for opposition. To

make matters worse, the state’s emphatic denial of bonds or subsidies for

municipal improvements left the city bereft of any real resources to invest in

public assistance programs, schools, hospitals, roads, or even housing. In the

vitriolic battles that raged between the state and the city between 1946 and

1958, the municipal council received only 51 billion of the 121 billion francs

in state funding it demanded.

It was hardly enough to make a dent in the

intractable problems that seemed to be accumulating exponentially. Even

the investment priorities set out by the municipal council were scrutinized

and altered by state ofﬁcialdom. In November 1948, the council passed an

ofﬁcial resolution protesting the intolerable interference of the state into the

affairs of Paris. Again in 1950 the council formally stood up against the cabal

of state ofﬁcialdom that blatantly disregarded Parisian interests.

The state’s plans for Paris were further elaborated in June 1948 with a

“communication” by the new prefect of the Seine, Roger Verlomme, that

reached the level of a “draft project” in March 1950. The report began with

an ofﬁcial bow to the built heritage and extraordinary richness of the city’s

life. Respecting them would require a sensitive and progressive evolution

and “ordering” of the city that would not radically modify its physiognomy.

Limiting building heights and protecting archaeological sites were offered

as proof of sincerity. That said, the project was driven by the state’s policy of

dispersing the city’s teeming masses, along with their muddle of trade and

industry. To replace the fragmented and deﬁant quartiers populaires, a ratio-

nal cartography was set in place that conceptualized the city as a cohesive

308 | chapter seven

whole. Six zoning districts were laid out for the center of Paris. Among them

were two separate districts for “business” and “commercial activity” as well

as zones for industry, warehousing, and transport. These delineations more

or less conformed to the traditional spaces of productive activity and did

not radically alter the landscape. Yet they were underpinned by an emerging

economic vision in which state-of-the-art commercial and business services

would make Paris a capital of Europe.

The proposal also embodied the

growing enthusiasm for regulating space through functional zoning. Not sur-

prisingly, Verlomme’s plan was soundly rejected by the municipal council.

In 1951 the political ﬁrebrand André Thirion attempted to shake things

up with an alternative plan that resolutely afﬁrmed the capital’s centrality

and preeminence. Thirion was a former surrealist, communist, and member

of the Resistance who had made his way into the municipal council on the

Gaullist RPF platform. Under his leadership, the municipal council set up

its own Commission spéciale d’aménagement de Paris, and its members

launched a public campaign on behalf of the city. Its report lashed out at “the

committees, ﬁlled mainly with technicians and functionaries, who may be

distinguished, but are irresponsible and who can dictate in Paris what would

be impossible in a lowly village without the agreement of its elected mayor.”

It was intentionally provocative and deliberately modern in orientation—a

daring vision of the future. The report excoriated the decentralization direc-

tives that would drive Les Halles, La Villette, the gare Saint-Lazare, and the

Renault and Citroën plants out of the city and condemned “everything in the

plan that in the most literal sense of the word blows Paris apart.”

Instead it

extolled Paris as “the capital of a great nation” and went on to plead that “the

attraction Paris has over men and over events is due directly to its legitimate

authority and the weight of its history. And given this grandeur . . . no one

has the right to commit the monstrous error of diminishing, for any reason

or in any sphere, this remarkable city.” The city’s historical legacy would be

saved from the havoc wreaked by planned inner-city thoroughfares and road

improvements: “The absolute respect for the sites, monuments, and even the

character of those places representing the long history of Paris . . . has led us

to propose the complete abandonment of the large number of road projects

planned for the districts of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Marais, and the

Opéra.”

Many of Thirion’s proposals were inspired by American planning tech-

niques and by the principles laid out by CIAM. An underground tunnel

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from the boulevard Saint-Germain-des-Prés to Les Halles would traverse

the central districts without disturbing them. The city’s outer corona of

boulevards (which basically follow lines 2 and 6 of the Métro on the site of

the old fermiers généraux toll wall) would be widened and modernized. The

municipal council fought the state’s downgrading of the planned trium-

phant boulevard périphérique to an allée-promenade. Thirion’s plan reinstated

it. Calling Paris a great industrial and commercial center, the plan antici-

pated the expansion of its economic life rather than its diminishment. It

recommended the clearance of a vast swath of central Paris to erect a new

business district bounded by the place de la République, the gare Saint-

Lazare, and the gare du Nord. The ideal was not far from that proposed

by Le Corbusier in the 1941 Destin de Paris. The area’s residents would be

moved to the rebuilt outer neighborhoods and arrondissements, as well as

to the suburbs, where they would ﬁnd a better life in modern apartment

complexes offered as a vision of domestic bliss.

The hostile reaction of the communists on the municipal council to

Thirion’s plan was immediate and ﬁerce, particularly because of the per-

sonal animosity between Thirion and his former colleagues among the party’s

leadership. The RPF was attempting to deport the working class from the

capital and reserve Paris for the privileged: it was the inevitable red scare, a

“bulldozer operation” that was nothing more than a continuation of the social

exile launched by Haussmann.

The communist municipal councilor Maria

Doriath rebuked the government: “You don’t want to build in Paris because

you are afraid of the Parisian workers, the workers of the Commune, the

workers of the Liberation.”

In large part the communists opposed grand-

scale modernist planning—especially that proposed by state functionaries—as

little more than vain promises. Although erstwhile urbanists conjured up no

end of utopian designs, little was actually done to solve the intractable hous-

ing crisis or to improve the deplorable slum conditions working people were

forced to endure day after day. The opposition assailed the RPF’s plan for

“its complete indifference to the hundreds of thousands of miserably lodged

families who make up the poorest, most forgotten people.”

The communists

offered their own plan, which removed the railroad stations to the suburbs and

linked them together with three new “express subway lines.” In their place,

thirty thousand new residences would be constructed in a reoccupation of

the central city. Thirion’s plan was narrowly defeated in May 1952 by a vote of

thirty-six to thirty-three, and the plan for Paris went back to committee.

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Achievement of any vision for Paris ﬂoundered. Negotiations between

the state, the city, and suburban collectivities were refracted through a ﬁerce

political lens. Authorization for infrastructure and public housing projects

was underhandedly delayed or blocked by the state’s anti-Parisian poli-

cies. Political opinion on the draft plan for Paris shifted from seeing it as

too modest to calling it overly ambitious. To confuse matters even further,

the municipal council partially approved a conciliatory document that laid

out three zones for Paris: a residential and commercial zone covering the

center of the city, an industrial zone to the east, and a warehousing zone.

In a March 1952 plenary meeting meant to hash out further concessions,

Prothin, who was head of the MRU’s Direction de l’aménagement du ter-

ritoire, offered four zones in place of the municipal council’s murky three.

Prothin was a zealous advocate both of zoning as a way to escape the inef-

ﬁciencies and disarray of the city and impose modern rationality, and of

state directives to carry it out. His ﬁrst zone was an “ofﬁcial Paris” in the 1st

and 7th arrondissements that would be composed of government buildings,

palaces, ministries, and embassies. A second zone would comprise business

and ﬁnancial activities in the 9th and 10th arrondissements, from which

the area’s residents would be expelled and the ancient housing torn down.

A university zone would continue on the Left Bank, and a residential zone

along the periphery rounded out Prothin’s streamlined, rationalized tableau.

The old slaughterhouse and meatpacking district at La Villette, the wine

market at Bercy, and the Halles aux Vins on the Left Bank at Jussieu—and

above all, Les Halles—would be either renovated or torn down and moved

to modern facilities in the suburbs.

C. Eyraud, the director of the Services d’architecture et d’urbanisme

à la préfecture de la Seine, refused to be taken in by this scheme “to make

Paris more pleasant and more organized.” He defended the city’s mélange

of housing, commerce, and industry as its heritage. The municipal council’s

plan for a vast “mixed zone” in the central city with two adjacent zones for

large-scale industry and for warehousing along the periphery conformed to

tradition. For the same reason, the municipal council refused to give up the

great industrial plants, including the Citroën auto works. It was exactly this

kind of self-protective, retrograde thinking that Prothin held responsible for

the “ugliness of cities,” which was a consequence of “narrow particularism, of

spatial disorder and a total absence of general directives.” Prothin cavalierly

shot back that this would succeed in “creating modern slums.” “We have to

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think in terms of the future,” he insisted, “a future that is better. We have to

create a ﬁrm attitude on this, and in this way, command.”

The MRU’s CARP insisted on more technical precision in delineating

the functional zones that would carry Paris into the future. The municipal

council retreated to its Commission spéciale d’aménagement de Paris to pre-

pare a response. It again offered its simpliﬁed diagram of three zones, with

a massive residential and commercial sector covering nearly the entirety of

central Paris. But as a compromise, this last was then subdivided into the

state’s more rationalized ofﬁcial Paris, business Paris, and intellectual Paris.

It was a useless attempt to satisfy all parties. Thirion’s scheme for a central-

city business center, which had created such a “violent and acerbic” backlash,

was banished to La Défense, where “a monument of comparable dimensions

to that of the Arc de Triomphe will carry through the triumphal panorama

from the Louvre to the Saint-Germain embankment.”

The commission

agreed that the city’s wholesale markets, especially Les Halles, had to be

broken up and moved outside the central districts. Then, in 1954, the Conseil

général des bâtiments de France and the Conseil de l’ordre des architectes

entered the fray, rebuking the state for abandoning the preservationist policies

that safeguarded the city’s built heritage and picturesque village landscapes.

CARP defended its position that “harmony is never found in disorder and

confusion, but in the perfect adaptation of functionalism.”

Urban planning

for the capital set off in opposite directions. Political rivals tore up the city’s

map and bickered over piecing it back together. The contest raged between

the abstraction of urban space as entirely functional and its preservation

as humanistic; between a uniﬁed, rationalized metropolis and a fractured,

particularist one. The municipal council staged another unsuccessful revolt

to wrest control away from the state. In March 1954 a commission set up

by the municipal council president, Édouard Frédéric-Dupont, a political

moderate, aired its long-standing grievances against a brutally autocratic

prefecture that “directs, administers, [and] manages the City of Paris” in

direct violation of the French constitution’s promise of independent munici-

pal jurisdiction. It set out to amend the city’s administrative statutes, which

were “unjust, outmoded, and humiliating,” and recommended reinstituting

election of municipal councilors by quartier as the only way to reclaim local

power.

Hopes of designing the capital’s future languished under the politi-

cal standoff.

As part of its reporting on Abbé Pierre’s campaign, in January 1954 Paris

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Match published an extensive interview with Le Corbusier. Year after year,

the article dismally reported, the same atrocious housing conditions exist in

Paris: “All the architects know it has become practically impossible to touch

Paris. Parisians and their assemblies simply refuse. They act as if it will be

a holocaust for their city if it does not keep its features of one hundred or a

thousand years ago.” When Le Corbusier proposes destroying the slums of

the north and east of Paris and replacing them with a modern, clean, practical

city, his ideas are welcomed with cries of horror. “Oh! The beauty of certain

streets in Paris! Perhaps they are not seeing clearly, the ﬁlthy buildings in a

state of collapse, the broken windowpanes, the ragged kids, the misery . . .

and this they say is atmosphere! Poetry!” For Le Corbusier, this is a perverted

taste for the old and dirty. The reality in this “monster of Paris” is that chil-

dren die of cold, of misery, of tuberculosis. “Paris,” Le Corbusier declared,

“is killing itself.”

Reconquering Paris

At the end of 1954 the new president of the municipal council, Bernard Lafay,

repeated the litany of proposals for the city and then intoned, “In sum, we

are at an impasse. The reality is that Paris has no land-use plan and we are

completely illegal.”

A doctor by profession and member of the Resistance,

Lafay was one of the most important leaders of the municipal council during

the 1950s and one of the most dedicated to urban planning. First elected in

1945, he served on the council until his death in 1977. His diverse political

trajectories carried him as a centrist from a representative of the 17th ar-

rondissement to various ministerial portfolios under both the Fourth and

the Fifth Republics. The pinnacle of his local political inﬂuence came in the

mid-1950s, when non-Gaullist centrists such as he were able to take advantage

of the change in political winds and suddenly make their mark on the city’s

future. The great age of communist power had peaked and begun its slow

decline. At the same time, the old Radical Party ﬁnally crumbled, providing

Lafay the opportunity to help build the Rassemblement des gauches répub-

licaines (RGR) movement as a springboard to city power. In collaboration

with the architect Raymond Lopez, Lafay wrote what is considered to be the

deﬁnitive report on planning in Paris during the 1950s. It was originally pre-

sented as an ofﬁcial municipal council report and then published in 1954 in

brochure format for general distribution by the Comité du nouveau Paris as

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“Solutions aux problèmes de Paris.”

It was promptly christened the Lafay

Plan. Regardless of the version or name, the report launched a more auda-

cious, dynamic approach toward planning the city and its far-ﬂung region

that would culminate in the 1959 Plan d’urbanisme directeur. If the ﬁrst half

of the 1950s was characterized by a bewildering miasma of false starts and

general state obstructionism, the second half of the 1950s was marked by a

much stronger hand.

The Lafay Plan was clearly inspired by the modernist movement and by

American planning theory. Raymond Lopez was a member of the postwar

generation of modernists for whom the ideals of the Athens Charter and of

CIAM were a religious conviction. He had ﬁrst gone to the United States on

a Delano Fellowship in 1935 and then returned again in 1956. Profoundly

inﬂuenced by the work of Mies van der Rohe and the designs of inﬂuential

American ﬁrms such as Skidmore, Owings & Merill, Lopez would eventu-

ally be involved in designing some of the most daring projects on the Paris

landscape, including the aluminum-framed ofﬁces of the Caisse centrale

d’allocations familiales (family beneﬁt fund) building in the 15th arrondisse-

ment, the Maine-Montparnasse Tower, and the ﬂashy Front-de-Seine project

that converted an old warehousing district into a model of modern urban

renewal. Lopez reached the height of his inﬂuence in the late 1950s and 1960s.

As chief architect in charge of the French Service des bâtiments civils et palais

nationaux and professor at the École nationale des ponts et chaussées, with

a vast architectural ﬁrm on the boulevard Raspail employing over one hun-

dred architects, he was perfectly placed to carry out his modernist utopian

vision.

Calling Paris “the most damaged city in France,” Lopez condemned

both the municipal council and the city’s inhabitants for their incompe-

tence. The ﬁrst was too politicized; the second simply had “no real interest

in the city upon which their physical, economic and social life entirely de-

pends.” Their minds were vacant. They were oblivious to the hideousness

around them. Abbé Pierre’s crusade and the housing protests, the calls for

urban renewal from every quarter, the communist protests and neighbor-

hood projects, all either escaped Lopez’s purview or were ignored as futile

attempts by the uninformed. The complex experiential knowledge and the

magical urbanism of local citizens were all disregarded. He acidly predicted

there would never be “crowds of men, women, and children parading the

boulevards carrying banners, the way we see in England, marked ‘We want

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our Town-Plan.’” As to intellectuals, Lopez dismissed them as mesmerized

by their own images d’Épinal: “‘Paris, Greatest City in the World’—‘Paris,

Capital of the West’—‘Paris, City of Light’—etc., etc., and thinking that

all is well in the world because we have built Notre Dame—because we

took the Bastille—because we have our place de la Concorde—because

we promenade down the Champs-Élysées.” Lopez metaphorically shook

his head in shame at a city where “the last chances of survival diminish

each day, where street alignments lack any regularity, where îlots close

themselves in on all sides; where the last open spaces are carved up, and

where all hope of saving the situation is in vain even if new construction is

accelerated.”

It was difﬁcult to paint a bleaker picture. The disassembled

city was a catastrophe. Paris had fallen under a curse. More chaos would

only ensue without a plan directeur that envisioned the whole of the urban

region. It was up to the French state and the architect to rescue the capital

from its own demise. They represented the common interest and shared a

civic-mindedness that would rise above the poisonous stew of squabbling

local bureaucracies, private interests, and politics.

“Solutions aux problèmes de Paris” was replete with comparisons with

American cities and heavily illustrated with American planning techniques

as well as with Lopez’s high-modernist designs. Although there was some

grousing about “making Paris into a new Chicago,” in general the mu-

nicipal council heeded the siren call of modernism by the mid-1950s and

consciously referred to American examples as symbolic of their progressive

spirit.

And yet, at the same time, the plan harked back to the capital’s long

history. Lafay placed the modernist vision for Paris neatly within the con-

text of the city’s design heritage. Using Gaston Bardet’s theories of urban

historical development, Lafay conjured up forerunners in the Bellarmato

Plan, the Plan des Artistes, and the urban renewal of the Second Empire.

Lopez also viewed CIAM and Le Corbusier’s modernist imaginary as suc-

cessors to Haussmann. “Paris,” he afﬁrmed, “is going to live through a new

Haussmannian era over the next ﬁfteen years of intense urbanization and

intense construction.”

Collapsing together French tradition and modern-

ism was not seen as a contradiction.

The result was that the agenda set out in the Lafay Plan was a compro-

mise, the product of a cacophony of voices in a noisy public debate. The plan,

at once traditional and modern, essentially invented two cities. The core of

central Paris was preserved in its historic monumentality. Admitting defeat

planning paris | 315

by the forces allied in defense of the historic districts, Lopez argued that it

was useless to try any radical transformation there. The architects Claude

Charpentier and Michel Holley, both close associates of Lopez and highly

inﬂuential in their own right, referred to the historic districts at the city’s

heart as the polygone sacré and the triangle sacré. They would not be touched.

The Lafay Plan abandoned the long-held dream of continuing Haussmann’s

grande croisée. No further boulevards or highways would be driven through

the historic districts; no vast campaign of modernization would be attempted.

The intensity and breadth of this protectionist defense of the city center was

astonishing. It included preservationists, communists, intellectual elites, the

Paris municipal council, and the local governing coalitions in the central ar-

rondissements. Even the Athens Charter had inscribed the “historic city” as

a speciﬁc zone where picturesque sites, monumental vistas, and the historic

built environment would be protected. Increasingly Le Corbusier had turned

toward a preservation and reiﬁcation of the city’s great historic monuments

that would be accentuated with aesthetic urban backdrops. Notre Dame,

the Arc de Triomphe, Sacré-Cœur, the Eiffel Tower, and the Louvre all sur-

vived his theoretical obliteration of the historical districts. The architect and

geographer Maria Gravari-Barbas argues convincingly that Le Corbusier

saw them not as “heritage” per se, but as a necessary part of the capital’s

fantasy machine and monumentality.

The Lafay Plan was simply putting

this modernist strategy into practice.

The plan certainly offered a program of road construction that surrepti-

tiously extended inside the triangle sacré. It may have been sacred, but the city

center was choking in trafﬁc and congestion. Subterranean tunnels under

Châtelet, Saint-Augustin, and Concorde would provide efﬁcient transporta-

tion arteries without disturbing the historic landscape. A long transverse ar-

tery was proposed that would cover the canal Saint-Martin and link the place

de la Bastille with the gare d’Austerlitz and beyond. Much of the debate in the

late 1950s also focused on the state’s attempt to extend the planned autoroute

de sud at least to the place Denfert-Rochereau in the 14th arrondissement,

if not to the place d’Italie. But the municipal council adamantly fought all

of these proposals, especially the proposed southern highway’s “mutilation

of the Montsouris Park” at the porte d’Arcueil. In December 1957 it ﬁnally

adopted the categorical proposition of the communist Albert Boisseau that

“the municipal council is opposed to any intrusion of highways into Paris.”

A vast alliance of strange bedfellows fell under the city’s spell. They turned a