erhouse during the early 1950s. Within the city itself, industry and public
works employed 720,000, just about half of the 1,443,000 industrial jobs
found throughout the metropolitan area. Jean Bastié estimated that around
300,000 people were working directly in production in the Right Bank dis-
tricts. The Right Bank was the city’s industrial dynamo. In “Physiologie de
grands boulevards,” the novelist Armand Lanoux describes an “early-morning
flood of men and women on foot, on bicycle, by bus or subway, descend-
ing from Batignolles, Saint-Ouen, Clignancourt, Pantin, La Villette, Lilas,
and the Butte onto the Grands Bouls” and the surrounding neighborhoods.
63
Another 100,000 were employed in production on the Left Bank, and over
200,000 were working along the city’s periphery.
64
Altogether the Paris region
employed around 20 percent of all French industrial workers in 1954. Three
industrial sectors predominated. First was all of the diverse manufactures that
fell under the umbrella of the “mechanical” industry. They employed half a
million people in the Paris region, and of these 150,000 were directly involved
in automobile manufacture. The second sector was made up of the ready-to-
wear fashion, haute couture, perfume, gold, and jewelry of the luxury-goods
industry. Nearly 200,000 people were employed producing Paris’s fineries
and perfumes. The third sector was the publishing industry, with 80,000
workers.
65
The chemical and electric industries also employed vast numbers
of Parisians. There was virtually no unemployment, and indeed foreign work-
ers, the majority from North Africa, streamed into Paris in search of jobs. In
good part, the spectacle of public life was this reemergence and expansion of
manufacturing production and the urban culture created around it.
The fact that central Paris had been spared any damage worked to preserve
its traditional commercial and artisanal economy. The number of French ar-
tisans probably reached its twentieth-century peak in 1948.
66
The reconstruc-
tion years were marked by an effort to jump-start the city’s economy through
an informal, enthusiastic alliance between this substratum of small-scale
businesses that dominated the central districts and the large companies of the
industrial periphery. The furniture of the faubourg Saint-Antoine, the hats
and shoes made in the faubourg Saint-Martin, the ready-to-wear garments
and shoes of Belleville, Ménilmontant, and Charonne, the leather goods of
the Bièvre, and the ceramics and glass along the rue de Paradis stocked the
city’s great department stores and the boutiques of the quartier de l’Opéra.
Just to the north of Les Halles were the garment districts that wound from
the rue Saint-Denis, where each evening prostitutes appropriated public