by Luc Sante
There have been Jews in Paris for so long that there is no record of their arrival. Their first appearance in the historical register comes by way of a mention of forced conversions to Christianity in 581. In that same Merovingian era they may have constituted 20 percent of the population of Île de la Cité; its main street at the time was called Rue de la Juiverie. But numbers and importance did not spare them from being scapegoated every time something went wrong. Philippe-Auguste expelled them en masse in 1182 and called them back in 1198. They began the thirteenth century numbered at around three thousand, but they were down to a third of that figure by 1296. This was surely a result of an incident in 1290, when a certain Jonathas is said to have stabbed a host wafer with his dagger, causing it to bleed. He was burned at the stake, his family converted, and presumably most of his coreligionists decamped, but this did not prevent Philippe the Fair from driving out the remainder in 1306; he called them back almost immediately. Riots were directed against them in 1380 and 1382, and they were again expelled in 1394; the date of their return is uncertain. At the start of the eighteenth century there were only about five hundred Jews in Paris, some of them Spanish Sephardim, some from Avignon (including the families of two major twentieth-century composers, Ravel and Milhaud), but with a solid majority of Ashkenazim from the east, who were starting to arrive in significant numbers. In 1791 the Revolutionary government granted them citizenship, which was formalized by Napoléon in 1808, and then the July Monarchy extended full civil equality in 1831. Their numbers continued to swell, as Jews escaping pogroms in Russia established themselves in the area around the Marché du Temple previously settled by Jewish furriers. (It remains a Jewish neighborhood to the present day.)
A Jewish bookstore and bookbindery in the Marais, circa 1910
Their problems were hardly over. Soon the language began to distinguish between French Jews of long standing, israélites, and immigrants, juifs. And even the former were not immune to persecution, as demonstrated by the fate of Alfred Dreyfus, as exemplary a member of the assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie as you could have hoped to find. In the late nineteenth century, anti-Semitism was a cleaver that split nearly every subgrouping within the French population; there were, for example, pro-Semitic and anti-Semitic factions among the anarchists, which by the time of the Dreyfus Affair had roughly equal influence and vehemence, their anti-Semitism ostensibly spurred by the role Jews played in capitalist oppression—not for nothing has anti-Semitism been called “the socialism of fools.” Acknowledgments of the Jewish working class are sufficiently rare that the 1908 account by the investigative reporters Maurice and Léon Bonneff stands out as singular:
Among the workers of Paris there is one group of people, industrious and starving, who have held on to their customs and their language: the Jewish proletariat. Even when laborers have united in solidarity regardless of their origins, Jewish workers, for many reasons, could not assimilate. Most of them exiled, all of them exploited, Jewish workers have endured the burden of religious hatred, stringent economic subjugation, all the miseries of the Old World. The Jewish manual laborer, the Jew far from the shop and the cash register, is generally little known. But the Fourth and Ninth Arrondissements of Paris, the Bastille and Hôtel de Ville neighborhoods, give shelter to a population of Jewish tailors, cap makers, cabinetmakers, smiths, cobblers, sculptors, mechanics, tinsmiths, locksmiths, coppersmiths, and furriers, all speaking the same language: Yiddish.
The figurehead of race hatred then was Édouard Drumont, author of La France juive (1886) and editor of the poisonously influential newspaper La Libre Parole (1892–1924; its motto: “France for the French”). The maverick anarchist writer Georges Darien devoted his 1891 novel Les Pharisiens (the title puns on “Pharisees” and “Parisians”) to a satirical portrait of Drumont: “He had been completely a man of his time, and that was admirable. Like a sponge, his brain had absorbed all its gall and slime, all its bile and spittle, all its manure and filth, and when the day came, all he had to do was to press his dirty fingers onto white paper to let flow an entire generation’s covetous passions and unclean desires.”
A propaganda poster denouncing members of the Manouchian resistance network, the twenty-three members of which were all foreigners, many of them Jewish. They were executed early in 1944.
By the late 1890s there was a virtual pandemic of far-right organizations that traded in virulent anti-Semitism as a matter of course, such as the Ligue des Patriotes (founded by among others Félix Faure, seventh president of the Republic), the Jeunesses Royalistes, and the Ligue Antisémite. In 1899, in the course of the Dreyfus case, the government feared a right-wing coup and had the heads of those organizations arrested—but Jules Guérin, chief of the Antisemitic League, took refuge with a group of diehards in a Masonic lodge on Rue de Chabrol, near the Gare de l’Est, where they held out for thirty-eight days. In 1902, Henri Buronfosse, a member of the League of Patriots, blocked the chimney pipe in the house of Émile Zola, causing his death from carbon monoxide poisoning.
Supporters throwing supplies down to members of the outlawed Ligue Antisémite holed up in “Fort Chabrol,” 1899
In the same era, the hypernationalist Charles Maurras founded Action Française—at once a publication, a philosophy, and a movement that, while it swung back and forth between republicanism and monarchism, and despised Germans even as it kowtowed to them under the Vichy puppet regime, held fast to its xenophobia, particularly with respect to Jews. Maurras, who preached that Jews brought “lice, plague, and typhus while awaiting the revolution,” urged that Léon Blum, prime minister during the Popular Front era, be “shot by firing squad, from the back,” and that “his throat [be] cut with a kitchen knife.” Blum, France’s most prominent Jewish politician up to that time, was in fact very nearly lynched on the street in Paris in 1936 by members of the Camelots du Roi, a Maurras-affiliated intimidation squad. And Maurras was hardly an isolated extremist. In 1928 a proposed law brought before the Chamber of Deputies and signed by sixty-five members from both right and left was aimed at destroying the Jewish community:
The undesirables must be banished. By “undesirables” we mean all foreigners who cannot prove that they follow a profession that contributes to the economic prosperity of the nation. These are for the most part ruffians, croupiers, vendors of secondhand goods, etc.—exotics, who live in France as parasites. Currently they maintain nests of a dangerously unhealthy sort, particularly in the Fourth, Fourteenth, and Eighteenth Arrondissements of Paris, which the City Council has many times singled out for notice.
But of course such crimes and rhetoric were as nothing compared to the traque that began in July 1942 with the arrest of 12,884 Jewish men, women, and children, who were taken to the Vel d’Hiv, or Vélodrome d’Hiver, a bicycle racing stadium near the Eiffel Tower, or to a former housing project in Drancy, in the northeastern banlieue, before being sent on to Auschwitz. Eventually nearly seventy-six thousand French Jews were arrested and deported, 85 percent of them by French police; only twenty-five hundred returned. In Paris the toll was heaviest in the northeast, from the Marais to Belleville and Ménilmontant. In those neighborhoods, every school building that stood before 1940 bears a plaque by its front entrance commemorating the pupils lost to the Shoah, many of them pulled from their classes by agents of the French Gestapo.
A telephone booth prohibiting use by Jews, during the German occupation
No figure is more illustrative of the perniciousness and license of French racism than Maurice Papon, an ambitious civil servant, at first not especially ideological in his preoccupations, who rose quickly within the Vichy government and got himself appointed to the number two spot in the police department in Bordeaux, with a specific mandate on Jewish affairs. There he was directly responsible for the deportation of 1,560 Jewish men, women, and children. Nevertheless, after the war he simply claimed with no proof that he had been active in the Resistance—he would not be the only Vichy official to successfully pursue this t
ack—and was quietly absorbed into Charles de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic, serving in various high-echelon posts. He spent the better part of the 1950s as an administrator in North Africa, first repressing Moroccan nationalists and then playing a major role in the Algerian War (1954–62), personally taking part in the torture of prisoners. He was named prefect of police for Paris in 1958, a post he would hold for nine years. In that capacity he was directly responsible for a series of massacres.
In October 1961 a nonviolent march of twenty thousand to thirty thousand organized by the Algerian National Liberation Front in protest of curfew laws was kettled on the Pont de Neuilly on its way to the Étoile by a force of more than sixteen hundred from combined police services, who fired into the crowd. There are numerous eyewitness accounts of deaths, but they are unacknowledged in any official document, and numbers remain uncertain. Another, larger demonstration a few days later resulted in sixty-six thousand arrests, the prisoners taken to two sports stadiums. Many were seriously injured (gunshots, fractured skulls, broken bones, lacerations), but medical services arrived five hours late. Once again, there are reports of many deaths as a consequence, but there exists no formal accounting of them. Later that month a large protest march was broken up by police under the pretext that it violated curfew laws; eleven thousand were arrested and, significantly, locked up in the Vel d’Hiv. What was long known on the street (but not made public until an inquiry in 1994) was that as many as two hundred of the protesters were murdered by the police, who threw them trussed up into the Seine, where they drowned. The government to this day will admit to only two deaths. Four months later, a protest against the OAS (Organisation de l’Armée Secrète, a death squad operated by French police and military personnel in Algeria) was violently attacked by police, resulting in the deaths of nine trade union members at the Charonne Métro station. That event proved impossible to minimize; a plaque marks its site.
“Here we drown Algerians”: graffito on a quai around the time of the massacre that ended the peaceful demonstration of October 17, 1961. Poster for a 2011 film by Yasmina Adi about the massacre
North Africans applying for their cartes d’identité, 1920s
Papon was finally forced to resign in 1967 as a consequence of the furor after the 1965 kidnapping in Paris and subsequent disappearance of the Moroccan activist Mehdi Ben Barka, a matter that remains impenetrably murky even now. But Papon was eased into a series of comfortable jobs, including as head of Sud Aviation, the company that built the Concorde supersonic jet. He was finally convicted in 1998 of dispatching eight “death trains” during his tenure in Bordeaux and sentenced to ten years in prison—the usual sentence would have been life—but was released after less than three years on the grounds of ill health. He died in his own bed at the age of ninety-six.
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Algerians began immigrating to France in 1915, as a direct consequence of Algerian conscription into the French army during the war. By then, Algeria had been the property of the French for eighty-five years; for sixty-seven of those years it had been administered as three départements. In between those two dates, fifty thousand French citizens had emigrated there and had benefited from wholesale confiscations of tribal land. By the late nineteenth century, with the influx from France continually on the rise, any halfway significant town reasonably close to the Mediterranean looked indistinguishable from a provincial burg in France, with the Algerians themselves relegated to the margins and used as servants and cheap labor. In Paris they found work in industry (mines, gasworks, assorted manufacturing) and gravitated to the northernmost parts of the northern arrondissements and their adjacent suburbs. The first bidonvilles in the banlieue date back to the 1930s. The Algerians were especially vulnerable to tuberculosis, the cause of fully half of their deaths. They were harassed in innumerable ways large and small—for example, “Arab” cafés were required to close at 7:00 p.m. In the mid-1950s a Dutch journalist covering Paris-by-night was given an escorted tour by a police commandant, who told him that the city contained
200,000 Algerians … who are on a war footing with the French … Every North African who walks the streets after midnight is suspect. The chief proposed to us that he should arrest one of them, so that the photographer could make a picture of it. Just one or two at random, because they always had something on their records. And if, by any chance, they hadn’t done anything, then they were certainly going to do it soon.
Although Algerians were singled out because of their country’s status as a French possession, and later because of its very long and brutal war for independence, accounts official and otherwise usually fail to distinguish among North Africans (Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians), who are in any case ethnically intermingled. Formerly known collectively as Kabyles, today they are more commonly referred to in French as Maghrébites. While they have made their own the neighborhoods of Barbès and Goutte-d’Or, east of Montmartre—looking down at Boulevard de Rochechouart from the métro aérien at the appropriate times reveals a vast field of backs bent in prayer—and many have assimilated and have moved into the top professional tiers, an enormous number are stuffed into housing projects in the banlieue and relegated to the worst jobs.
The corner of Rue de la Goutte-d’Or and Rue de Chartres, circa 1910
For many years, immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa fared a bit better than those from the north—their numbers were smaller, and they were viewed by even the most racist of the French as a novelty rather than a threat. There was more than a bit of wishful thinking in the air as a result. Marc Kojo Tavalou, who was born in Dahomey (now Benin) in 1887, volunteered for the French army in 1914, was naturalized the following year and a bit later admitted to the bar, helped found the Ligue Universelle de Défense de la Race Noire in 1924. That same year, he addressed Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association at a meeting in the United States, urging that “the great black family make Paris its spiritual Palestine,” and later wrote that “France is the only country that not only lacks racial prejudice but labors toward its eradication.” Meanwhile, at that very same time, visitors to the Paris zoo (Jardin d’Acclimatation) could take in an “African village” in which a troupe of costumed natives engaged in typical activities, such as dances, for their benefit. The theme of the window display at the Galeries Lafayette for Christmas 1930 was a beauty contest in an African village, which provoked the laughter of passersby.
A Sudanese man being exhibited in a “native village” at the 1906 Colonial Exposition in Marseille
That laughter was perhaps better than violence, and foreigners could get the superficial impression that Paris was more evolved in racial matters than, say, the United States, at a time when the annual toll of lynchings there was in the dozens if not scores. Sherwood Anderson, visiting in 1921, noted black and white students in Left Bank cafés engaging in intellectual discussions, while American racists looked on aghast: “There is deep anger,” he wrote, then quoted something he overheard: “‘I saw a nigger with a white girl and the white girl’s mother, walking openly in the street. My fingers itched to have hold of a gun and shoot—all of them.’” But American racism could actually be enacted in the streets of post–World War I Paris, as described by Louis Aragon in his novel Aurélien (1944): “There was a commotion, shouts … On the terrace a drunken sailor was hoisting a marble-topped table. Women were screaming. We saw a tall, lean negro in a gray flannel suit, protecting himself from the table with his arms as he was struck … He had been hit in the face, and blood was flowing as the table continued to rise up and come down.”
There was Parisian resistance to this, at least from one sector of the population: “‘They’re disgusting! This is France, not Chicago!’ So shouted the pimps and prostitutes who always took the side of the blacks. Pressing his fat, bejeweled hand on a woman’s shoulder, a tall guy went on: ‘They piss me off, those Sammies! Are the Senegalese niggers or not? Who cares? They fought for us, the Senegalese!’”
The American ra
cism was not confined to war veterans: “One of the gentlemen says that last night he was in a champagne bar where some Americans—not sailors but very stylish people—had them throw out a black customer.” Aragon further notes that even the most violent incidents seldom made the newspapers, for fear of antagonizing the U.S. embassy. Aragon was, of course, a hard-shell Stalinist, and his book appeared on the stands not long after the Liberation, while the Americans were being lionized in Paris, so you would think a grain of salt might be in order. Given the state of race relations in the United States at that time, though—race riots in 1919 in Chicago, Omaha, Knoxville, and Longview, Texas; the Ocoee, Florida, massacre of 1920; and the devastating Tulsa riots of 1921—his account does not sound unlikely. It was perhaps this context that helped inform the famous if conditional Parisian hospitality toward African Americans, beginning in the 1920s.
Josephine Baker, probably in the early 1930s
Assorted Parisians gathered in Ménilmontant, circa 1910
Somehow, despite everything, Paris by the twentieth century had developed a worldwide reputation as a cosmopolitan magnet and a refuge. A census in 1889 enumerated citizens of forty-nine different countries living in the city. There were large numbers of Belgians, Italians, Swiss, and Russians, but also, for example, 524 Brazilians, 861 Turks, 63 Haitians, even a lonely pair of Abyssinians. Forty years later greater Paris held 33,000 people from the French possessions in Africa alone, and Île-de-France was 9.2 percent foreign-born.* The crowd on the street was by then mixed as a matter of course, as Carco noticed in his 1925 novel Perversité: