The Other Paris

by Luc Sante

  Gypsy wagons and bombed-out houses in the Zone, 1920s

  A murder in the Zone, 1930s

  All this is exploited with mythmaking verve in Francis Carco’s 1919 novel L’équipe, subtitled Roman des fortifs. The story, nearly generic now, was less so a century ago: a gang leader is released from prison only to find that his gang has been taken over by a rival; a protracted struggle between the two men ensues. The geography is as stunted as it would have been in the minds of the characters’ prototypes: the world is confined to Belleville, the fortifications, the Zone, and a few miles of outlying suburbs. The men on the street are

  fugitive personalities whose eyes lit up and went out rapidly. In that sector where the plaster shanties, isolated among vacant lots, gave an oblique appearance to everything, they added to that impression … The green shutters—a washed-out green—alternated with little shacks of a sickly yellow, their walls carved up with graffiti, and with the shuttered fronts of unfinished new houses, and when night fell the collection of things incomplete or already dead gave off a feeling of emptiness and weighty unease … The flat roofs of banal houses cut a silhouette against the sky that was only occasionally relieved by small chimneys that looked like still-smoking cigarette butts someone had glued there.

  Even Carco’s unsentimental camera eye could not dislodge the romance of the fortifications. After the wall was demolished in the 1920s its shadow haunted the city for decades. Until the construction of the Périphérique (1958–73), its site, according to Jean-Paul Clébert, was “a filthy ribbon of grass and piles of dirt, but where there remains under the big sky a restful view of loamy hillocks where laughing, grimy kids play all week long and of small, trampled footpaths like those worn down by animals headed to the watering hole.” Its fame endured in memoirs and old postcards and in Georges Lacombe’s 1928 documentary La Zone, in which you can see Toulouse-Lautrec’s favorite model, La Goulue, a denizen of the place in her old age, along with a variety of other characters, among them a formidable woman called mère aux chiens, “mother of dogs.” Its final monument, though, was Fréhel’s 1938 song “La chanson des fortifs,” the deep-dish sentimentality of which is balanced by the resolute strength of her delivery. All the childhood heroes of the Zone have been translated to other existences: P’tit Louis, the strongman, now owns a garage; Julot is being measured for an endowed chair; and Nini married somebody and acquired a château. The old embankment is now covered by six-story apartment houses with elevators and central heating. “Gone are the fortifications / and the little saloons by the gates. / Goodbye to the scenery of all the songs / the pretty songs of long ago.”

  “Mother of dogs” in the Zone, 1920s

  Music on the fortifications, Saint-Ouen, circa 1910

  Because while the Zone was a netherworld, a gray area, a borderland teeming with the sorts of shadowy activities that thrive on margins, it also at the same time represented a door to nature. Not everyone was comfortable in the heavily regulated parks; even the relative vastness of the Bois de Vincennes might have felt too constricted to people from the wrong part of town. In the Zone you could own the outdoors. You didn’t risk being run down by the carriages of the bon ton, weren’t subject to constant surveillance by the constabulary. You could drink and dance and smoke and swear while surrounded by garlands of flowers and Japanese lanterns under the trees. People could gather escargots in the trenches of the fortifications and herbs on its mounds, and after the wall came down parts of its site were occupied for decades by a patchwork of tiny garden plots worked by slum dwellers who might have to walk considerable distances to get to them. And then beyond the Zone was the banlieue.

  A pleasure boat dock in Nogent-sur-Seine, circa 1910

  Before the twentieth century the banlieue was primarily farmland punctuated by villages. Its waterways (the Seine, the Marne, the Oise) attracted boaters and day-trippers, familiar to us with their striped jerseys and straw hats in a long continuum that stretches from Manet’s rowers at Argenteuil (1874) to Seurat’s bathers at Asnières (1883–84) and loungers on the island of La Grande Jatte (1884–86) to Jean Renoir’s wedding party in Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932) to Cartier-Bresson’s picnickers on the banks of the Marne (1936) and Renoir’s holidaymakers in Partie de campagne (also 1936). There were guinguettes everywhere, from the classically minimal shack with a few tables under the trees to more elaborate installations with full restaurant service that might also include seesaws, swings, courts for boules, pedal-driven boats for hire, polished dance floors with bandstands, and even fairground rides. In 1848, in the southern suburb of Plessis-Piquet, an enthusiast of Johann David Wyss’s Swiss Family Robinson (1812) was inspired to build a guinguette in the form of an elaborate tree house. Competitors erected their own tree house bistros, and before long the village’s popularity as a Sunday destination was such that in 1909 it was officially renamed Plessis-Robinson. Although those establishments are long gone, some that are nearly as old survive today, such as Chez Gégène, on the Marne in Joinville-le-Pont, which dates back to somewhere in the pre-1914 mists and was repeatedly photographed by Robert Doisneau in the 1940s and ’50s; it looks much the same as it ever did.

  Le Vrai Arbre, the first café in the trees, in Robinson, circa 1910

  The permanent population of the banlieue was all the while steadily rising, with much of the influx coming from the city. Some went out to Pantin or Aubervilliers or Malakoff to buy their octroi-free staples and wound up staying. Ex-convicts were often declared interdit de séjour (forbidden to enter the capital) and while some became vagabonds, others chose to settle on the fringes. People with just a little bit of money built bicoques (shanties) of wood or plaster or concrete blocks, with names such as Malgré Tout, Ça Me Suffit, Mon Bonheur,* that served as summer retreats and represented the dream of retirement. Now and again some member of the Parisian minor bourgeoisie would round up sufficient cash to indulge a long-standing baronial fantasy and build himself a crenellated castle in the middle of nowhere.* The suburban experience manifested itself embryonically, first in the form of aspirational villas and then, after the First World War, as patchy developments of cheaply built pavillons aligned in neat rows, much like the pre-Levittown tract home enterprises in the United States.

  The wall and the village of Saint-Ouen, circa 1910

  In the unregulated banlieue these coexisted with muddy fields, gasworks, marshaling yards, stockyards, warehouses, slaughterhouses, military depots, abandoned factories, working factories, acres of rubble, illegal dumps, soccer pitches, convents, orphanages, hospitals where patients stood by the gates to sell their medications, and old-age homes where the inmates waited outside to sell their tobacco allowances. And everywhere there were bars, of every description, some of them corner establishments made of brick, intended to anchor a street of shops that may or may not eventually have been built; some of them plywood shacks with tin roofs although minus the rustic amenities of a guinguette, kept afloat by a strictly marginal clientele who inhabited a notional extension of the Zone. And through the postwar years the area saw the emergence of bidonvilles—favelas, that is: whole communities built of scrap and inhabited primarily by immigrants from North Africa, which could vary dramatically in tone. There were reasonably stable hamlets where families predominated and people took pride in their dwellings, of the sort that Didier Daeninckx describes in his novel Meurtres pour mémoire, set in 1961:

  She walked toward the water company buildings, where the first inhabitants of the bidonville had made their homes. The company for some obscure reason had let the land go to waste, in the process abandoning four rudimentary structures, big rectangular redbrick boxes. A few families had settled there, and had expanded their dwellings by building upper stories from boards and sheet metal. Over the course of months and years other families had joined them, and today the four structures formed the core and center of an agglomeration of shacks where five thousand people lived.

  At the other extreme were encampments, es
sentially hobo jungles, congeries of single men where violence was perpetually imminent and—unsurprisingly, as their shacks were covered with tarpaper, and as kerosene was the source of both heat and light—fires could erase the whole patch at any time.

  Meanwhile, the city of Paris had been attempting to address the problem of housing for the poor since at least the 1840s, and in 1894 the Siegfried Law, which stipulated financing and tax relief for such constructions, gave the impulse a practical footing. Not much was done until after World War I, however, when the housing problem began to reach crisis proportions, and the first proposals fell into two categories: garden cities, an idea borrowed from the British, and HBMs, or habitations à bon marché, or “cheap housing.” These began to be built in 1928, two hundred thousand low-cost units in addition to eighty thousand medium-range, generally squat six-story orange-brick buildings, the first ones going up on the site of the former wall. The poet Jean Follain noted, with a touch of superciliousness, that “now an entire population aspires to a light-filled apartment. The fairground wrestler, worn down, covered with hieroglyphic tattoos, wants nothing more in this fallen world than walls painted in soft colors.” But it didn’t take very long for these to decline, or at least for their mass-produced institutional lack of distinction to sap the spirits of their inmates. By 1933 the proletarian writer Eugène Dabit could describe “a circle of buildings, in the middle a courtyard with its flower beds filled with yellowed grass, a few flowerpots on a cement ground. Stairs and hallways all alike. When you were drunk you’d come home to some building, didn’t matter which one. Whatever—it was all the same termite mound.”

  An old-style workers’ cité, Île-de-France, circa 1910

  A bidonville in Saint-Denis, 1963

  But the HBMs could not adequately house even the forty thousand inhabitants of the Zone, all of them relocated by 1932. By then there were 2.1 million people living in the banlieue, as compared with 2.9 million in Paris itself; by the eve of the war the two populations were equal. After the war an enormous influx from the provinces further aggravated standing problems; there were bidonvilles within the city itself. And the banlieue terrified the municipal establishment—it was the “Red Belt,” overwhelmingly working-class, reliably Communist at the polls, which editorial Cassandras foresaw seizing Paris in a pincer grasp, making a revolution from the outside in. And the inhabitants of the HBMs were increasingly unhappy. Cendrars surveyed the scene in the text he wrote to accompany Doisneau’s photographs of the banlieue: “Everything is a sham in those big echoing barracks, from the broken elevators to the cellars where wine sours, turns to vinegar. The only real thing is misery: tuberculosis in proportion to the continual increase of children in cramped quarters, cuckoldry on every floor, worries drowned in drink, and women beaten like rugs.”

  In 1949 the HBMs became HLMs, habitations à loyer modéré, “reduced-rent housing,” a telling move from plain speech and toward bureaucratic equivocation. The only possible direction was upward and outward, toward the grand ensemble, “the big set”—like a low-budget, reduced-scale version of Le Corbusier’s apocalyptic cityscapes. The idea had already been tried out in the 1930s, in the Cité de la Muette in Drancy, which had buildings up to fifteen stories high.* Now, in the early 1950s, partly as a consequence of the agitations of Abbé Pierre, France’s most prominent media cleric, who was incessantly leading crusades to bring attention to the plight of the homeless and the ill-housed, the mechanism swung into gear and, one after another, the grands ensembles arose: Arceuil, Orsay, Plaisance, Créteil, Massy-Antony, Melun-Sénart, Cergy-Pontoise, Marne-la-Vallée, Sarcelles-la-Grande-Borne, Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. And very soon the constructions moved beyond Île-de-France and encircled every major city in the land.

  A grand ensemble represented by consumer goods, from Jean-Luc Godard’s 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967)

  The old cités had been rows of attached two-story houses with pitched roofs, grouped into courtyards and culs-de-sac, visually echoing the ancient layout of the walled farm as it can still be seen all over France. The new complexes looked like immense chests of drawers or speaker cabinets, like banks of Univac-style computers, like the Secretariat of the United Nations extended into a vast hedge. There were tower blocks with cross or tripod footprints, and some that were cylindrical, like silos. Their forward-looking architects eschewed the safe and familiar in favor of vanguard designs. Some had enormous walls of windows to which were assigned uniform drapes, while others had little slivers of windows in rows or stacks of two or three, meant more for the visual delectation of outsiders than for the use of the inhabitants. “The landscape being generally thankless, they’ve gone so far as to eliminate windows, since there is nothing to see,” says the narrator of Maurice Pialat’s short film L’amour existe (1960).

  The title frame of Maurice Pialat’s L’amour existe, 1960

  Pialat, who had grown up before the war in one of the little detached pavillons in Courbevoie, made his movie as an elegy to the old banlieue at a time when it was being mercilessly reconfigured. He acknowledges the grayness and drabness and boredom of the banlieue as it was, the German bombs that cratered landscapes already unprepossessing as they were. He cites statistics: twenty-nine lycées in the city as compared with just nine in the banlieue, which by then had nearly twice the population. He notes that the new projects segregate not simply by class but by age and family status as well. He suggests that there are more than superficial similarities between the designers and builders of the new cités and those of the Todt Organization, the Nazi engineering outfit that gave Germany the Autobahn and the Siegfried Line and gave France the Atlantic Wall. He shows a street sign, flung down and trampled: RUE ORADOUR-SUR-GLANE, it reads. The street had been named after that village in the Limousin where, in June 1944, the Waffen SS massacred 642 men, women, and children—they had targeted another, similarly named village nearby but had gone to the wrong address. Around the fallen sign a group of young men are pummeling and kicking one another, smashing wooden crates on each other’s heads, for no particular reason. Love still exists, Pialat’s title says, but very little in his footage suggests where it may be found.

  5

  La Canaille

  Censuses have been taken for as long as there has been taxation, and there has been taxation for as long as there have been human settlements, which is to say for as long as agriculture has existed. Still, it has never in any period been a simple matter to establish who “the people” are, or to determine their numbers. “The people,” it seems, is a highly subjective category. Think of all those human tribes whose name translates as “the people”—they are legion—which implies that all others belong to some different life-form. Consider that the Roman people in the formulation Senatus Populusque Romanus, or SPQR, might have been considered sovereign by the Republic, but the tally did not include women, servants, or the foreign-born. Elsewhere and at other times, though, “the people” might refer to the vast undifferentiated mass that existed below the level of the nobility and the Church.

  That was the case in the French language. Actually, to be more precise, the term usually applied to the roiling multitude before the nineteenth century was populace, which my edition of the Dictionnaire Quillet (1948) defines as “the inferior people; the dregs of the population.” Things began to change after 1789, when the notion arose of the peuple, a comparatively neutral term that implied more about quantity than quality. In Victor Hugo’s verse drama Hernani, the signal work of the revolutionary year 1830, the peuple is compared to

  … an ocean, a surge ceaselessly astir,

  Into which nothing can be thrown without affecting all,

  A wave that can crush a throne and lull a grave,

  A mirror in which a king seldom sees himself flattered. (iv, 2)

  In other words, the subject had passed from the mob to the crowd. The former is headless and directionless, a chaos, while the latter is a highly reactive organic entity, with its own sometimes
unfathomable purposes, that might be temporarily appeased but never quelled. It was around the same time that the term prolétaire was repurposed from the Latin to describe that portion of the population that depended for survival on compensation of its labor, as distinct from capitaliste, a word first used in French in 1788.

  Rent strikers, circa 1910

  “The bourgeois … nothing but a herd of cattle.” Illustration by Gavarni, from Les petits mordent, 1853

  To those who did not consider themselves members of the crowd, it was at best an environmental hazard, at worst a malign force. The people were dirty, treacherous, even murderous; they smelled bad, something that discouraged slumming almost as much as did the threat of crime. But then a view of the crowd from an appropriate distance could dissolve all the lower rungs of class, making the population a single pulsating mass. Thus Balzac, writing in 1834:

  One of the most distressing of spectacles is the appearance of the Parisian population, a people horrible to behold, pale, wan, sunburned. Isn’t Paris a vast field incessantly stirred by a storm of motives, in which eddies a harvest of humans which death reaps more often than elsewhere and who are reborn just as clenched as always, whose twisted and contorted faces exude through every pore the desires, the vices, the poisons with which their brains have been swelled—no, not faces but masks: masks of weakness, masks of strength, masks of misery, masks of joy, masks of hypocrisy, all enfeebled, all stamped with the indelible sign of panting greed? What do they want? Gold or pleasure?