control the spreading anarchy. The rue de Rivoli and other main boulevards
were turned into one-way streets to relieve the traffic congestion, while the
place de la Concorde became a one-directional merry-go-round. The din
of car horns and high-pitched buzz of motorbikes enveloped the city in un-
ending noise. The racket was such that the use of car horns was prohibited
in 1954—to no avail. But that year the central city’s entire transportation
system ground to halt when rain and ice from winter storms made roads
impassable while the Seine spilled over the quays.
The teeming crowds of people and vehicular uproar seemed utter chaos.
But beneath the surface clatter, the spaces of the city actually followed the
stark social divisions that were largely the legacy left by Haussmann. The
nineteenth century seemed to have definitively fixed not only the image of
monumental Paris, but also its social segregation. In 1951 André Siegfried,
an esteemed member of the Academie française and an itinerant urban ex-
plorer, conjured up a social mapping of the crowded city in his Géographie
humoristique de Paris. It was based on the subway lines. Siegfried’s choice of
the Métro as a mapping technique was apropos. Hordes of people streamed
underground to hop on what was by the early 1950s a system badly in need
of repair. Its initial postwar popularity was a symptom of the continuous gas
shortages and surface transportation restrictions. But even as early as 1954,
daily Métro commuters reached over one million. The Métro was quintessen-
tially Parisian. It was an emblem of the capital, the “big city,” its fluidity and
quick pace. Riding the Métro, Siegfried argued, gave a pretty good indication
of the pays de Paris. Each arrondissement was like a department of France,
a sort of individualized patrie that a Parisian left at the cost of self-imposed
exile. Each Métro station had its own particular type of passenger. A tour
through the stops on line 6 (today’s line 2), for example, on the Right Bank
could provide a flâneur such as Siegfried with some sense of the city’s social
landscape.
41
The western section of line 6, from the place de l’Étoile to Villiers,
threaded through the beaux quartiers of elegance, wealth, and cosmopolitan
sophistication. Class boundaries remained rigid in the 1950s. Every statisti-
cal study bore that out. The city’s upper crust still lived to the west. On the
Right Bank, the 1st, 2nd, 8th, 9th, 16th, and 17th arrondissements were the
haunts of the city’s well-to-do. In 1951 Siegfried’s contemporary, the writer
Henri Calet, left his beloved 14th arrondissement and toured the city’s “rich
neighborhoods,” in this case from the rear platform of bus 92: “From Alma, it
seems as if you are in a different city: the cars are shinier, the buildings more