Paris

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PARIS.

CITYSCAPE
POLITICS AND ADMINISTRATION
FUNCTION AND IDENTITY
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Twentieth-century Paris was born in the 1860s, when Napoleon III (r. 1852–1871) put Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809–1891) in charge of creating a capital worthy of France. This remodeling of an old city involved annexing the communities situated between the enclosures of the fermiers généraux (enclosures constructed between 1784 and 1787 for the purposes of levying a tax on merchandise entering Paris) and the fortifications erected by Prime Minister Louis-Adolphe Thiers in 1841. Paris would be served by a network of streets and boulevards able to accommodate the subsequent arrival of motorized transportation; it would possess a modern sewage system and water supply, as well as parks such as found in London. A geographical cleavage between poorer eastern and wealthier western parts of Paris during the first half of the nineteenth century, according to Maurice Agulhon, was marked symbolically by the "national-military imperial triangle" (composed of the Place Vendôme, l'Etoile, and Invalides) and "the liberal-secular-republican couple" (the Pantheon and Place de la Bastille). The Second Empire preferred to play up the economic power and associated values of the new France, represented by the new aesthetic of the railroad stations, such as the ornate restaurant at the Gare de Lyon, or the grand hotels and the Opéra Garnier, all to affirm the city's cosmopolitan character. One consequence was to reinforce—though perhaps less than once thought—the east-west division and the social cleavage between the older center of Paris and newer, wealthier sections of the city.

CITYSCAPE

Governing powers in the nascent Third Republic in the late nineteenth century, and successive presidents of the current Fifth Republic, have all attempted to leave their imprint on the cityscape of Paris, the symbolic center of French government, finance, and cultural life. The Third Republic continued and completed the work of Haussmann without significant modification apart from the state's financial disengagement. The regime's pedagogic character and mania for erecting statues, which dominated the city until the turn of the century, prompted republicans to engrave their own values in the architecture of the schools and the mairies of the various arrondissements. Two statues in particular, each of which symbolizes the Republic, were erected at Place de la République and Place de la Nation, reaffirming the east-west division.

The World's Fairs of 1889 and 1900 were occasions for lasting edifices of another kind. The Eiffel Tower, opened in 1889, became for all the symbol both of the city and of a triumphant modernity, offering the world a new image of France. The Paris subway, inaugurated with the 1900 exposition, promoted a distinctive image of the "city of light." The city thus transformed was allowed to play host to dramatic spectacles that showed off France's new national identity—such as the funeral of the novelist Victor Hugo in 1885, when his body was transferred to the Pantheon, restored for the occasion as a civic temple. Similarly, the new Fêtes de la Fédération was an annual banquet for the mayors of France.

Such a profusion of construction erupted in Paris that it was soon saturated by buildings. Beginning in the 1920s, many existing structures were put to new uses, conferred with new symbolism. Indeed, the unknown soldier's entombment beneath the Arc de Triomphe was one example; another would be the transfer of the remains of the socialist politician Jean Jaurès (1859–1914) to the Pantheon in 1924. Construction of new monuments diminished for several decades prior to the 1960s, when urban planners in Paris created a project that might be dubbed New Haussmanism. This plan, inspired by radical designs for renovation presented by Le Corbusier (Charles-É douard Jeanneret; 1887–1965) in 1925 attempted to resolve the conflict between what was required to make Paris a great business center while still bearing the imprint of history and overall design. With legislation in 1962 (the Loi Malraux), the plan called for restoring historical monuments and full renovation of the decrepit peripheral neighborhoods that were annexed by Paris in the 1860s. The historic hub of food distribution in Paris, Les Halles, was transferred to Rungis, and the old Baltard pavilions were torn down to make way for the Forum des Halles, a shopping center inspired by the malls in the United States. Some new buildings markedly broke with the surrounding architecture, such the Tour Montparnasse. Whole neighborhoods were reconstructed from the ground up without regard for the original buildings or of the urban topography; this was the case at Front de Seine, La Défense, and Les Olympiades. Some buildings followed an international architectural style associated with the Fifth Republic, such as the Palais des Congrès and the Maison de la Radio. President Georges Pompidou (1911–1974) radicalized this modernization program, intending to "adapt Paris to the automobile and to renounce a certain aestheticism." He undertook construction of the voie sur berge by the Seine and the National Museum of Modern Art at Beaubourg. This architectural policy deeply affected the social fabric of the capital, which was losing small merchants, working-class jobs, and inexpensive lodgings, and declining in population.

This "second massacre of Paris," in the words of Louis Chevalier (1967), provoked a protest movement due to the conjunction of several factors, including studies that showed the importance of the nineteenth-century urban patrimony, the accession of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing (b. 1926) to the presidency, and, most important, an economic upturn in 1973. The plan for urban renewal soon was revised with greater concern for coherence of the cityscape, and renewed respect for the older lines of the city and for the overall fit of new construction within the existing neighborhoods. As one consequence, such projects as an express highway on the Left Bank and along the Canal St. Martin, more towers, and the "Vercingetorix" project behind Montparnasse were abandoned. The notion of historic monuments, broadened to include contemporary structures, preserved the Gare d'Orsay from demolition as well as the CitéFleurie, the studios of the painters Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) and Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920), and many others. When he came to office in 1981, President François Mitterrand (1916–1996) set about creating an architectural program that was sometimes described as "Pharaoh-noiac." The new Parc de la Villette and the project known as the "Grand Louvre," which involved transferring the Ministry of the Economy and Budget to Bercy, were part of the grand travaux; so was construction of the gigantic arch at La Défense, the new Opéra Bastille, and the much-discussed Tres Grande Bibliothèque. This was done with the intention of permanently reorienting Paris by constructing prestigious buildings in a way that would overcome the older tendency to develop the city to the west, with marked effects on its political, cultural, and everyday life.

POLITICS AND ADMINISTRATION

The state's stranglehold on Paris has not been accomplished exclusively or even principally through architecture. The domination has long been administrative and political.

For nearly a century, Paris was able to make and unmake political regimes, but this role diminished after the defeat of the Commune in 1871 and the rebirth of universal manhood suffrage in 1875. The law of 14 April 1871, passed with a majority of provincial representatives, restricted the role of Paris as much as possible and forbade its municipal council any political incursions into the nation's life. This legislation held with passage of the municipal law in 1884 after republicans were victorious. Paris, excluded by the law of 1884, remained without an elected mayor until 1973, when statutory modification brought it back under common law, permitting Jacques Chirac (b. 1932) to be elected to City Hall; Paris remains to this day formally under the supervision of the prefect of police.

Until 1909 Paris was politically Radical while the French government was obediently opportunistic and moderate. The municipal majority became right wing and remained that way even when the left wing took power nationally. However, the city recovered its role of opposition when Jacques Chirac was mayor of Paris and François Mitterrand became president of the Republic. Paris repeated the same pattern, passing power to the Socialist Party, at the time elsewhere in disarray, when electing a mayor in 2002 as the country chose Chirac the right-winger as president.

Its exceptionalism has long retarded the expression of a municipal identity that is distinctively Parisian. Putting to one side the city's motto, the capital has only with difficulty striven to acquire symbolic expressions; one example would be the equestrian statue of Etienne Marcel, provost of the Paris merchants of the fourteenth century, erected in the gardens of City Hall in 1888, though to little effect. Although a commemorative stela can be found in every commune in France, the honor of hosting the Arc de Triomphe with the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which symbolizes all the war dead of France, exempted Paris from erecting a monument of its own. Municipal efforts to impose itself politically have been unusual because of a war that forced the national government to flee the capital in 1914.

FUNCTION AND IDENTITY

Extending over some nineteen thousand acres, Paris is considerably smaller than either London or Berlin. The prevailing population density is somewhat greater, with about five hundred inhabitants per acre. In the mid-nineteenth century the city was clearly more multifunctional compared to London, which early became associated with the service sector, or to Berlin, a mainly industrial city. So Paris remains. Before World War I, the old trades and professions that long occupied the center of Paris began to give way to upscale value-added industries. Industry moved from the center to the periphery of Paris, to factories in places such as Quai de Javel or Ile Seguin, which remained operational until not long ago, when they closed to make way for new construction. This phenomenon continued during and after the war. The automobile took over and remodeled the space of the city. The Salon de l'Automobile became an annual event; with 1933 came the lighted Citroën sign on the Eiffel Tower, and the metalworker, popularly called a Metallo, became another symbol of Paris.

The growth of industry brought employment to the secondary sector of manufacturing, which predominated until the economic crisis of the 1930s. When it began, deindustrialization was limited to Paris, but later it spread to include the entire region. An economic downturn during the 1970s only amplified this tendency. Half of all headquarters of companies that employed more than five hundred employees represented an unparalleled concentration of large companies, both French and foreign, as Paris and its surrounding region came to occupy a strategic place in the world economy. This "global city" forms part of a transnational economy as one of the four or five major centers of international business; it ranks fourth in the world in terms of production, third in productivity. Diversification, long ahead of London, has lost steam, and deindustrialization is more intense than in the provinces; by 2006 Paris had just 850,000 jobs in industry, compared to 1,800,000 in 1975. As a consequence, Paris, long a working-class city, has become a city of executives and service workers. Where in 1975 the latter outnumbered factory workers by two to one, in 2006 that proportion was five to one.

These demographic shifts have effected the organization of the urban space and influenced politics—whether it is a question of luxury office buildings around La Défense, laws and regulations for preserving the city's historic center, or concern over the environment. They have sometimes affected political theater, such as the bicentennial parade organized by the graphic artist Jean-Paul Goude on Bastille Day in 1989, or various cultural celebrations and festivals, often playing to foreign visitors as much as to Parisians themselves and contributing to the exponential growth of tourism. The city runs a risk of turning into a museum and creating a nostalgic image of itself; in less than twenty years the city has added some seventy thousand square meters of museum space.

From a demographic standpoint, Paris has never ceased to expand as a region in terms of employment. With some 1.7 million inhabitants in 1861, Paris grew rapidly, less because of a rising birthrate than because of its status as a migratory magnet for the rural population. Until World War II, most newcomers to Paris came from the provinces, fewer from the surrounding countries; to this should be added the cosmopolitan influx of intellectuals and artists. By the end of the twentieth century, inflow from the provinces had ceded place to immigration from abroad; 14.5 percent of the Parisian population in 1999 consisted of foreigners. By 2006 immigration in Paris was more visible than in the past, whether in terms of politics or culture. It created neighborhoods of high visibility that remained nevertheless the space of more micro-local cohabitation than was found in other capitals.

This demographic growth, first confined to the twenty arrondissements (metropolitan boroughs) of Paris proper (2.9 million inhabitants in 1921 and 2.2 million in 2006) early on extended to the small, medium, and large suburbs, the constituents of what in 1976 became the region known as the Île-de-France (nearly 12 million inhabitants in 2006). The lack of working-class housing (43 percent of the population in overcrowded or unhealthy housing in Paris in 1926), the price of available land, the need for housing and new infrastructure to absorb additional industry (water mains in the first place), and hygienic concerns all rapidly brought about the development of industrial and living sites outside the city limits. This phenomenon, which started in the 1890s, only grew more prominent in the 1920s without any special official policy or regulation. The suburbs nearest the city, collectively known as La Petite Couronne, grew up in an anarchic manner and resulted in widespread substandard housing. Laws designed to remedy the situation were adopted but had no chance of being implemented before the economic crisis of the 1930s. There was also the problem of public transportation, with the subways only serving Paris proper, unable to meet the needs of a growing commuter population.

Gradual destruction of the city fortifications started in 1919, and the municipal customs barriers, which came down in 1930, did not create a single municipality, as in London or Berlin. The "Prost Plan" for the region, developed in 1934, was not approved until 1939, on the eve of World War II. But legislation passed under the Vichy regime and after the war created a state-run urban zone. A conception expressed by Jean-François Gravier in his Paris et le desert français (1947) helped to guide a policy of decentralization that contributed to reduced industrial employment in the region (loi de 1955) and to the plan for urban redevelopment of the Paris region (PADOG), adopted in August 1960. The Fifth Republic's ambitious aims, however, soon rendered the program obsolete. A new plan, created in June 1965, envisaged construction of an entire region around eight new towns that would be served by a vast network of highways and a railroad system, to be known as the RER. It was only approved in 1976, just when the economic conditions prevailing at the time of its conception had disappeared. From 1954 the government also attempted to deal with the housing crisis that worsened with the baby boom and economic growth. Beginning in 1964 it undertook construction of mammoth housing projects in various locations in the suburbs, though I within a decade they were being severely criticized. The creation of these projects and its consequences were said to be a new urban disease known as "Sarcellitis" (after the first project, at Sarcelles, just north of Paris). The suburbs were largely unequipped to deal with the presence of these projects, either in terms of their construction or their inhabitants. Their massive development around Paris, together with the péripherique, the circular highway that separated the suburbs from the city proper, seemed to more clearly mark the frontier, preserving the sense of a fortified city, turned inward toward its center. Paris alone was created as a department in 1964.

The common law status accorded both city and region, together with the "general orientation" law passed in 1991, permitted improved financial arrangements and regional solidarity—limited, however, by new ways in which the city was developing. The influence of Paris as a "world city" continued to extend in ways that favored the networks, at the risk of new tensions between the city thus reconstituted and the abandoned interstitial spaces, as Marcel Roncayalo said in a 1994 article in Le Debat "that we know only are to be labeled negatively."

The Parisian population owes to its history and to all these various factors its diversity of cultures. The suburbs support various ethnic groups while individual neighborhoods in Paris continue to possess distinct identities such as can be found in Belleville, Ménilmontant, Montmartre, and Montparnasse. Paris is filled with professional and social groups of all provenance and kind. The population, taken as a whole, has so long been blended and mixed as to create a singular people defined by a way of life and thought. Lively urban spaces, from the Faubourg St.-Antoine to Belleville, Billancourt, Montparnasse, and Bastille all express the city's essence. This culture is not confined to Paris proper but, as Louis Chevalier suggests, can also be found in the surrounding banlieues (suburbs). Paris understood in this way has long meant a mix of professional, social, cultural, and ethnic categories that make for porous interaction among various groups. These powerful social mediators allowed for rich social relationships, attested to by the nature of family and social networks and the possibility of social advancement, which was easier in Paris than elsewhere.

From diversity arises the fluidity that has permitted this scattered aggregation to become a people—a single word representing the social complexity by which Paris grew unified and became whole. The special fabric of traditional neighborhoods and homes, more populaire than working class, has been part and parcel of the same process. Such neighborhoods have long constituted a powerful social apparatus for absorbing migrants of all origins; they are places through which they pass, not points of segregation. The working-class neighborhoods of Paris have mixed populations; they are open to a city of a modest size in comparison with London or Berlin, facilitating appropriation. One can walk and wander; quite unlike London, the cafés are open meeting places. Though tourists or the upscale public may rarely venture into the working-class districts—at least before the recent gentrification—the inhabitants of those neighborhoods move about as they like. In this sense, Paris creates social spaces and events that facilitate the circulation of people and ideas, and a mix of cultures friendly to creativity.

The loosely defined efflorescence of painting sometimes called the School of Paris, as one example, invented new images of the city and other modern works, some of which were influenced by Parisian street life. In another vein, occupation of the same social spaces and events helps explain French manifestations of social rejection and xenophobia, which were always less prominent in Paris than in the provinces. This is still true in the early twenty-first century, as indicated by the small number of voters for the political Far Right within Paris proper. The capital's history can periodically bring back to life all the various myths of the people and the city, something that constitutes an additional unifying factor. Images of workers at the barricades, evoked around Belleville and in the suburban "red belt," or le peuple of France as a whole, are evidence of an uncommon political identity.

Thanks to its history-laden streets, cafés, and boulevards, Paris constitutes an unparalleled politicized space. Its specifics are expressed in atypical ways, in its role, for example, during the Boulangist crisis of the 1890s and in the early stages of the emergence of the extreme right-wing patriotic leagues, which played a major role in French politics until their dissolution. Paris became the site of robust and frequent political interventions and street demonstrations that targeted elected representatives. It has ceased to be the place where regimes were created and undone and no longer represents France as a whole. That high-profile demonstrations in Paris in 1997, in support of the illegal immigrants known as the sans-papiers, were actually larger than 1995 manifestations in defense of social security indicated still more recently the existence of a "moral-minded people" as distinct from the "social-minded" people elsewhere.

Demonstrations in Paris can create important moments in the life of the nation; two examples are the battles between groups on the extreme right and the antifascists in February 1934 and the events of May–June 1968. Political centralization and the repercussions of events in the capital helped Paris remain influential in determining which issues acquired a national dimension and the point of reference for public opinion. In May 1968 la France profonde, its "silent majority," managed to make its voice heard only after the Gaullists organized a powerful demonstration on 30 May, at the same time that the dissolution of the National Assembly was announced. The riots taking place in "sensitive" neighborhoods only became a national problem once they reached the outskirts of the capital. This is the way that the rhythms of Parisian history and those of the nation continue to blend together.