the landscape of populism | 63
with an organic, naturalized portrait of a people embedded in their quartiers
in what amounted to a mythic urban folklorism. It found expression in the
reinvigoration of the traditional forms and scenes of public life, especially
at the level of neighborhood. This is where the peuple could be found. The
local neighborhood or quartier (the terms were used interchangeably) was
traditionally the location, the cultural nexus, of social consciousness and
everyday life experiences. It was also the physical space on which the city’s
working-class past was inscribed, traceable in the memories, stories, and
myths of its public history. We could say that the quartier was a spatial pic-
togram of meaning and of collective imagination. After the war, revalorizing
this most intimate of public spaces seemed the first priority. It was the glue
of urban society and created a moralized landscape imbued with a renewed
sense of consolidation and constructedness.
Until the end of the 1950s, a working, proletarian Paris remained em-
bedded and localized in these long-established urban territories. Some were
iconographic, legendary places and metaphors for urban insurrection, while
others were barely known. All were part of the city’s flourishing industrial and
commercial economy. Many of these neighborhoods have since become histo-
ricized tourist districts, and it is worth mentioning the most important of them
to remember the extent of this productive working-class world. Beginning in
the historic core, they included the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th arrondissements
on the Right Bank, especially the neighborhoods of Les Halles, the Marais,
and Sentier. Sections of the 5th and 6th arrondissements on the Left Bank
around the rue de Buci and the rue Mazarine, from the Contrescarpe down
the rue Monge and the rue Mouffetard were all archetypally working class.
Moving outward, the neighborhoods of the faubourg du Temple, the canal
Saint-Martin and around the railway stations in the 10th arrondissement, the
faubourg Saint-Antoine, the Bastille and République, the districts of Cha-
ronne and Nation in the 11th arrondissement, and the 18th, 19th, and 20th
arrondissements, which included Belleville, La Villette, and Ménilmontant,
formed a broad proletarian band that covered the entire east and north of the
city. Farther east along the working waterway of the Seine was Bercy in the
12th arrondissement, and to the south, the districts of La Gare and Maison-
Blanche, the Bièvre, and the Buttes aux Cailles in the 13th arrondissement.
To these were added Batignolles in the northwest and Grenelle and Vaugirard
to the south. The expression “people of Paris” also included the inhabitants
of Aubervilliers, Bagneux, Gennevilliers, Ivry, Montreuil, and Saint-Denis in