Paris in Modern Times: From the Old Regime to the Present Day 9781350005532, 9781350005525, 9781350005563, 9781350005549

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Paris in Modern Times

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Paris in Modern Times From the Old Regime to the Present Day Casey Harison University of Southern Indiana, USA

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Casey Harison, 2020 Casey Harison has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover design by Tjaša Krivec Cover image: Paris Street Fighting in the Rue-de Rivoli 1871. The Illustrated London News. (© Antiqua Print Gallery/Alamy Stock Photo) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-0553-2 PB: 978-1-3500-0552-5 ePDF: 978-1-3500-0554-9 eBook: 978-1-3500-0555-6 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

Illustrations  xii Maps  xiv Acknowledgments  xv

Introduction  1 1 Old Regime Paris: The City before 1789  9 Chronology  9 Introduction  9 Salons and the “Republic of Letters”  11 Jansenism, Freemasons, and academies  12 Paris Parlement and pre-Revolution  13 Revolutionary language of Enlightenment  14 Population diversity and migration  15 Popular classes—“the people”  18 Upper and middle classes  19 Police and administration  19 Guilds  20 Faubourgs and clandestine work  21 Construction and expansion  22 Trade and commerce  23 Neighborhood sociability  25 High culture  26 La mode and demi-monde  27 Parisian mentalité on the eve of Revolution  28 Conclusion  30

2 Paris during the French Revolution and Napoleon, 1789–1815  33 Chronology  33 Introduction  34 The Revolution begins  35

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CONTENTS

The King and Paris  37 Political clubs  38 The Terror, Directory, and Napoleon Bonaparte  39 Popular politics  40 Sans-culottes  42 Parisian women during Revolution  43 Gilded Youth  44 Abolition of guilds and beginning of laissez-faire  46 Panthéon and Rue de Rivoli  47 Workers during Revolutionary and Napoleonic era  49 New Men  50 Jacques-Louis David  51 Dechristianization and Festival of Supreme Being  52 Guillotine  53 Festivals and Napoleonic style  54 Conclusion  56

3 Paris during the Restoration, 1815–1830  59 Chronology  59 Introduction  59 1815: Restoration of Bourbon monarchy  60 Reaction  61 Protest  62 Charles X  63 Population movement and growth  64 Foreigners  66 Vidocq’s underworld  67 Generation of 1820  68 New Regime of laissez-faire  70 Political economy  72 Hospitals and cemeteries  73 Notables  75 Romanticism in painting  76 Literature  77 Music  78 Lycées, academies, and grandes écoles  79 Conclusion  80

CONTENTS

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4 Paris during the July Monarchy and Revolution of 1848  83 Chronology  83 Introduction  83 Revolution of 1830  84 Louis-Philippe and public order  86 February Revolution of 1848  87 June Days  89 The “Other Paris”  90 Rue Transnonain  91 Parisian proletariat  93 Garnis and Place de Grève  94 “Decisive Years”  95 Rambuteau, urban planning, and a new wall  96 Hints of a labor movement  98 Paris economy at mid-century  99 The Social Question  102 Bourgeoisie and bohemians  103 Arcades and photography  104 City of exiles, expats, and artists  105 Conclusion  106

5 Paris during the Second Empire, 1852–1870  109 Chronology  109 Introduction  109 Republic to Empire  110 Workers and paternalist state  111 Administering Paris  113 Undercurrents of discontent  114 Haussmannization  115 Migrant stonemasons of Creuse  117 Belleville and Goutte d’Or  119 Paris bourgeoisie during the Second Empire  120 Financing Haussmannization  122 Railroads, manufacturing, and sewers  124 Les Halles  125 City of Light and modernity  126 Bohemians and Second Empire  127

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CONTENTS

Painting and photography  128 Bon Marché  130 The 1867 Exposition and modern tourism  131 Conclusion  132

6 The Commune of 1871  133 Chronology  133 Introduction  133 Politics and Revolutionary Tradition  135 Politics during the Prussian Siege  136 Rebellion of March 1871 and the war against Versailles  137 Governance  138 Radicals and fédérés  139 Opposition and anti-clericalism  140 Women  141 Dead and arrested  143 Mobilization during the Prussian Siege  145 Initiatives of the Commune  146 Businesses and Bank of France  147 Communalism of the Paris Commune  148 Revolutionary Tradition  149 Art and artists  150 Remembering the Commune  152 Legacies  153 Conclusion  155

7 Paris from the Third Republic to Turn of the Century  157 Chronology  157 Introduction  157 Sacré-Coeur, Communard amnesty, and Republic  159 Parisian labor movement  161 Boulanger Affair  162 Dreyfus Affair  163 Women’s work  164 Immigrants  165 Social class and society in Belle Époque  167 Public health and crime  168 Métro and sewers  171 Consumerism  172 Working-class residential patterns  173

CONTENTS

Entrepreneurialism  175 Café sociability  176 Montmartre and greenspace  177 Expositions and Eiffel Tower  179 Tourists and foreign artists  180 Conclusion  182

8 Paris from the Belle Époque to the Great War  185 Chronology  185 Introduction  185 Far Right  186 Political Left  188 Commemorating the past, celebrating the Republic  189 Paris on the eve of the Great War  191 Workers and clerks  192 Foreigners  193 Women’s lives  194 Wealthy western Paris  196 Organization of labor  199 Industrial banlieue  200 Labor and capital  202 Great Flood of 1910  203 Avant-garde  205 Pop culture crazes: Detective stories and bicycles  206 Film  207 Montparnasse  208 Conclusion  209

9 Paris from the Great War through Vichy  211 Chronology  211 Introduction  212 Great War and Union Sacrée  213 Fascism in Interwar Paris  214 Red Belt  216 Paris occupied  218 Wartime Paris: 1914–18 and 1940–44  219 Interwar expats  220 Parisian intelligentsia  222 Imperial capital  223 Industry: New and old  226

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CONTENTS

Suburban expansion  227 Colonial Exposition of 1931  228 Matignon Accords and economic nationalization  230 Post-modern mood  231 Pop culture and the “little people” of Paris  233 Jazz Age  234 Anneés folles  235 Conclusion  236

10 Paris: Post-War through de Gaulle  237 Chronolgy  237 Introduction  237 Fourth Republic  239 De Gaulle and Paris  240 The Algerian War and terrorism  241 May 1968  242 Colonial immigration  244 Suburban housing  246 University students  247 Embourgeoisement  248 Trente Glorieuses  251 Standard of living and material culture  252 Tourism  253 1968 labor strikes  254 Left Bank and Saint-Germain-des-Près  255 Youth culture of 1960s  257 New Wave film  258 Americanization  259 Conclusion  260

11 Paris from de Gaulle to Mitterrand  263 Chronology  263 Introduction  264 Après mai—post-1968  265 Pompidou  266 Giscard  267 Chirac  268 Parisian consumers  269 Population patterns  270

CONTENTS

Young Parisians  271 Legacies of immigration and new arrivals  272 Film industry  274 Big urban projects  275 RER and Charles de Gaulle Airport  277 City center and Châtelet-Les Halles  278 Gare d’Orsay Museum and BPI  279 Film, television, and literature  280 Post-modernists and other thinkers  281 Popular music  283 Conclusion  284

12 Paris from Mitterrand to the Present  287 Chronology  287 Introduction  288 Mayors  289 Trials of Papon and Bousquet  290 Challenge of the National Front  291 Terrorism  292 Troubles in the banlieue  293 Successes in the banlieue  295 Post-1989 immigration  296 2003 heat wave  297 Grands Projets  300 New technology and industry  303 Gastronomy  304 Transportation  305 Bicentennial of the French Revolution  306 Good Bread Is Back  307 New cultural vistas  308 Paris today and tomorrow  311 Conclusion  313 Chronology  314 Notes  318 Suggestions for Further Reading  325 Index  334

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ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1 Map of section of Paris, 1730  17 1.2 Palais-Royal  29 2.1 Storming the Bastille, July 1789  36 2.2 Republican Festival, 1793  41 2.3 The Panthéon  49 2.4 Vendôme Column  55 3.1 Bread seller  66 3.2 Père Lachaise Cemetery  74 4.1 Soldiers firing on rebels at the Palais-Royal during the February Revolution, 1848  88 4.2 Honoré Daumier’s “Massacre of Rue Transnonain,” 1834  92 4.3 Galérie Vivienne  97 5.1 Auvergnat Ball  117 5.2 Stonemasons at the daily hiring fair at the Place de Grève, 1869  118 5.3 Photograph by Charles Marville of Rue des Vertus, 1866  129 6.1 Communard Barricade in Ménilmonant, eastern Paris, during Bloody Week  134 6.2 Vendôme Column and Statue of Napoleon  152 6.3 Ruins of the Hôtel de Ville  154 7.1 The Place de la Concorde, 1895  160 7.2 The Zone, c. 1900  174 7.3 Eiffel Tower  180 7.4 Hôtel de Ville  181

ILLUSTRATIONS

  8.1 Sacré-Coeur Basilica  187   8.2 Plaque to the Communards  190   8.3 Arc de Trimomphe  196  8.4 Paris Sewers 204   9.1 Riots at the Place de la Concorde, 1934  215   9.2 Robespierre Métro stop  217   9.3 Left Bank Quay Bookstalls, 1931  230 10.1 North African Immigrants in Paris, 1950  244 10.2 Police use tear gas to disperse demonstrators in Paris, 1968  245 11.1 Montparnasse Tower  264 11.2 Pompidou Center  276 12.1 Plaque dedicated to Algerian protestors killed by police, 1961  294 12.2 The Pyramid at the Louvre Museum  301 12.3 Grande Arche  302 12.4 National Library  309 12.5 Bastille Métro stop  312

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MAPS

Map 1 Paris at the time of the French Revolution  16 Map 2 Paris before and after the annexation of 1860  116 Map 3 Paris and its suburbs, c. 1900  201 Map 4 Contemporary Paris  300

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A book such as this covering the history of modern Paris and directed at an upper-division undergraduate or introductory graduate student is long overdue. This book was completed over the course of approximately four years, during which I maintained a regular four-course per semester teaching responsibility. I have taught many courses over the years, including on occasion a course on the history of Paris (for which I wish I had had a book such as this!). This book is dedicated to the students I have taught at the University of Iowa, William Penn College, Kirkwood Community College, and especially at the University of Southern Indiana (USI), where I have been since the early 1990s. Even after decades in the classroom, I am gratified by my students’ enthusiasm and inquisitiveness. I would also like to express gratitude to my colleagues in French language at USI: Leslie Roberts, who shared her knowledge and joie de vivre with me; and Abby Alexander, who read and helped improve two of the chapters. I would also like to thank Patricia Sides for reading and improving a chapter. I am grateful for the close reading and helpful comments from two anonymous readers, and for the guidance and assistance of editors and staff at Bloomsbury including Rhodri Mogford, Laura Reeves, Beatriz Lopez, Sophie Campbell, and Kumeraysen Vaidhyanadhaswamy. The USI College of Liberal Arts provided funding for summertime reading and research at the libraries of Indiana UniversityBloomington and a last-minute research and photo-taking trip to Paris.

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Introduction

Paris is one of the great cities of the world—today, as it has been for centuries. Paris is great because of her physical beauty—a special urban landscape stretched along the banks of the Seine—her landmark architecture, and because of the people. Paris’s history is special, too, because it has placed her at the forefront of modernity. The main purpose of this book is to describe the many contributions that Paris and Parisians have made to modern history. Courses on the history of Paris have long been offered at Anglophone (English-speaking) universities across the world, and there are numerous textbooks on the history of France. Yet until now, there are no surveys designed for the college class room that focus on the city’s history. One reason a book like this has not been attempted before is because synthesizing the tremendous amount of work written about the city seemed like an impossible task. As a historian attempting to tackle such a big topic, I have had to approach the project with humility, even a sense of resignation that everything cannot be told. I do not pretend to cover all interpretations and certainly not all the details. Rather, I have made choices about what to include. In the end, I hope this book provides a framework and an introduction for understanding the modern history of the city. Paris—past and present—entices but never fully reveals. Everything has a history—cities, no less than countries or persons—and there is a vast scholarly and non-scholarly literature to draw upon for the history of modern Paris: literature, memoirs, general histories, biographies and primary sources, as well as the specialized monographs and journal articles written by and directed mostly at other scholars. The scholarly and general literature is so great that, like the history of Paris itself, this book uses only parts of it. There are texts covering the history of France, some of which I have looked to as models.1 A history of just Paris allows a focus on the city and the dynamics that shaped her urban landscape. Still, the two—

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Paris and France—are not separate. Paris was the centralizing and often overwhelming (or overweening) force that determined policy for all France in the modern era. “Paris and the provinces” and “center and periphery” are often the way we think about the relationship between city and nation. “Modern” here means Paris since the era of the French Revolution. Because the book is directed at an English-speaking student, there is an emphasis on Anglophone scholarship. The coverage proceeds in generally chronological fashion, though within individual chapters the arrangement is topical. While historians tend to get nervous if we get closer to our own day than a generation or so, I have nonetheless brought the coverage to near the present in order to remind the reader of the historical roots of current events. Each chapter is organized in sections devoted to Politics, Society, Economy, and Culture (inevitably with some overlap). Over the years, many authors have described Paris as a kind of universal emblem and so this theme is incorporated into the analysis. Each chapter has a Sidebar that covers an offbeat facet of the city’s history. The book’s organization is modeled on surveys of French history, beginning the coverage of the modern era in the eighteenth century just ahead of the French Revolution and concluding with developments in the early twenty-first century. There are occasional reminders about the historiography. The book is divided into twelve chapters corresponding partly to changes in political regime. This organization allows for a compartmentalized approach, providing readers with “signposts” that will help them not get lost in the details. Each chapter has an introduction and conclusion. I have constructed chapters so that they cover roughly the same number of years, with the chapter on the Commune of 1871 an exception. The book is intended to be accessible to students from a variety of academic fields, and so it may be used not only in history classes, but also in art history, cultural studies, urban studies, humanities, and the like. The book touches upon a variety of topics, and since it is a survey the analysis is broader than it is deep. For sources that provide greater detail on individual topics, the reader should consult the Suggested Readings at the end of the book. Certain themes have been emphasized. One of these is the “Other Paris,” which is the idea that too much of what we know of Paris and her history has to do with high art, high culture, high politics, and oversized personalities. As I try to demonstrate, this interpretation does not do justice to the city’s history. The Other Paris is mostly the Paris of the working and lower classes; of narrow and dark streets away from the grand boulevards, big department stores, great churches, and historic buildings that figure prominently in popular images of the city; it is the city of growing suburbs, with a look and population sometimes different from the Parisians living in the center of the city; it is the Paris, occasionally, of poverty and crime, but also of a neighborhood sociability that, no less than the more famous salons of Parisian upper-class life, helped to make the city what it is. The Other Paris has become increasingly familiar as it is explored by

INTRODUCTION

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historians, and so one of the tasks here is to introduce students to a view of the city that has emerged from the research of the last three or four decades. The Other Paris has always been there, of course, dating back long before the modern era described in this book. An idea related to the Other Paris that is more distinctly modern, and which informs the middle chapters, is the “Social Question.” This phrase was coined in the nineteenth century to describe contemporary conditions and disappointments about promises made and not kept: the political promise of citizenship and human rights broached during the French Revolution of 1789–1794, and the economic promise of improved living conditions that came with the introduction of laissez-faire capitalism during the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution. The idea of the Social Question was a phenomenon of the Atlantic Revolutions, for which Paris was one “capital.” Parisian commentators from all corners of life used the phrase Social Question in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as do I in the chapters that survey those eras. Paris was often a place of opposites: world expositions and epidemic disease; worldclass cuisine and “hungry times” during the Prussian Siege of 1870–1871; fancy hotels catering to the global jet-set and a perpetual lack of suitable working-class housing; polluted rivers and canals and the quiet greenspace of the Parc Montsouris—these seeming contradictions were targets of the Social Question. Paris as one of the centers and makers of the modern world is another persistent theme in the text. Other cities played a role in world or Atlantic history: Manchester, England, was the model city of the Industrial Revolution; London was the great financial center and capital of global empire; New York and Los Angeles became cultural trendsetters; and Moscow was the capital of world revolution in the twentieth century. Paris was a generator of ideas, cultural styles, art forms, and political models that have served as the basis for a great deal of what we consider modern. Paris was not the only place where modernity was born, but she was arguably the most important. Some of the seeds for Parisian ingenuity came from the fact that the city was a tremendous draw for a great variety of talented and energetic people. Persons from across the world saw Paris as a beacon, a place where innovations, the avant-garde, and new forms were welcome. The accounts of travelers and visitors are an important part of the city’s historical record that this book draws upon. It is not as though Paris was a “melting pot” in the American sense, since native Parisians mostly expected new arrivals—travelers, tourists, migrants, expats, refugees, and exiles— to become something close to “Parisian” themselves. Nonetheless, one cannot help but be struck by the increasing diversity and mix in the city’s population over the course of time. It seemed like anyone who was willing to integrate could eventually do so. The cosmopolitanism of Paris and the seeming self-centeredness of Parisians did not sit well with everyone, including many in other parts of France. For some French, Paris was too out-sized: both too self-absorbed and too absorbing. In the modern era,

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France was ruled as a centralized state from the capital, even as—perhaps paradoxically—Paris was not allowed to govern herself (until 1977, when elected mayors returned). The rulers of France recognized that Paris was very large and something special, and for those reasons could not be left to herself. For some French cities, Paris was the rival. Though migrants were drawn to the capital from across France, the city often generated resentment. For their part, Parisians often unified in reaction to the resentment of others. To survey Paris’s history, it is necessary to take into account the tremendous range of cultural accomplishments in art, music, theater, literature, and film that we rightly associate with the city. And while these topics are important parts of this book, the emphasis, frankly, is on social history. This means thinking in terms of an urban population composed of the social classes, groups, and categories that historians often work with: workers (skilled and unskilled; sedentary and migrant), bourgeoisie, professionals, bureaucrats, migrants, exiles, and so on; of contests between groups, such as professionals and the state (especially in the twentieth century); between working classes and bosses; between migrant populations, either from France itself or in the twentieth century from outside the country, and those who considered themselves part of “True France”; between youth and elders (as in the revolt of May 1968); and over gender. I have been conscious of giving the lower classes of Paris their due, partly for the practical reason that they made up the majority of the population, but also because for a long time they were mostly overlooked. An analysis that stresses the French capital’s social history also inevitably emphasizes the Other Paris and the Social Question. The book probably gives more coverage to places and social groups than to personalities; more to structural developments than to the actions of individuals. This is textbook history mostly, as it used to be called, “from the bottom up.” Paris’s population and physical dimensions expanded enormously in the modern period. Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, more and more Parisians lived outside the city walls in an ever-expanding suburban zone called the “banlieue.” The expansion of Paris beyond her original boundaries is another theme in this book, and one that likewise coincides with the city’s social history and the idea of the Other Paris. Most “banlieusards” have been members of the working and lower classes and beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, descendants of recent migrant populations—especially from North and West Africa. Paris has become more and more racially and ethnically diverse since the end of the Second World War. Most of these twentieth- and twenty-first century generations of Parisians have lived in the banlieue. The suburbs thus became part of the Other Paris, and the Other Paris is a different place from the Paris of famous landmarks visited by tourists. Even as the banlieue evolved in the second half of the nineteenth century, Paris proper was re-imagined and rebuilt during the Second Empire (1852–

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1870) under the guidance of the departmental prefect Baron Haussmann. “Haussmannization” was the physical transformation of Old Paris, the medieval city of winding, often dark and unhealthy streets, into the Paris we think of today—the capital city of wide boulevards, romantic vistas, parks, and historical attractions that draw visitors from across the world. Paris sometimes seems very old, and many of its buildings and spaces indeed date from the Middle Ages or Early Modern era, but Paris, the “City of Light,” the “Capital of Modernity,” and the most visited city in the world, is in many ways a recent creation—the product of Haussmannization. The Haussmannization of Paris was a colossal undertaking that re-made and re-vitalized the city, though at a cost and with unintended consequences. Some Parisians never took kindly to the visions of urban renewal that began in the nineteenth century (even before Haussmann) and that have proceeded off-and-on in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. One short-term consequence of Haussmann’s work was the Paris Commune of 1871. The Commune was the longest-lived and most tragic of Paris’s many nineteenth-century rebellions and revolutions. Paris was not only the Capital of Modernity, but also the “Capital of Revolution.” Indeed, for most of the nineteenth century the first thing that probably came to mind when one thought of Paris was not her architectural or artistic accomplishments, but the fact that the city generated so much rebellion, some of which, as in 1830 and 1848, spurred revolutionary waves across Europe. Many French and Europeans dreaded Paris as the tireless (or tiresome) source of revolution that threatened to topple regimes across Europe. Memories of the great French Revolution of 1789–1794, which had its epicenter in Paris, lingered for a long time. In fact, the Commune, which erupted in March and ended in May 1871, did not inspire a wave of European revolutions as previous Parisian rebellions had done. It remained mostly local, though nonetheless important for Paris, for France and for observers like Karl Marx who saw it as the sign of universal proletarian revolution. But at the time, the Commune was especially a social struggle and a French civil war, ending in bitter defeat and the massacre of Parisian Communards. In this book, the Commune is given a full chapter of coverage as a bridge between the Old Paris and the new. Many of the persons killed or arrested during the Commune were migrant workers from various regions of France. Migration from France, Europe, and the world has been an important element in the history of modern Paris and so it is given coverage in each chapter. Whether French, Polish, Portuguese, Algerian, or Malian; male or female; skilled or unskilled, migrants have been drawn to the city to live and work, even in the face of many challenges. Paris, like other big cities, invites and entices, and yet also sometimes reacts with suspicion, surveillance, exploitation, and segregation. Migrant populations to Paris have in the long run almost always integrated, but the process has been capricious, partly reflecting the place of origin, race, ethnicity, religion, or any variety of cultural attributes

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that native Parisians—or first- or second-generation new Parisians—have reacted against. Migrants, especially from the working classes and no matter their origins, have not always been welcomed into the French capital: in the first half of the nineteenth century, migrant workers from central France were virtually ghettoized in the city’s central neighborhoods, while today something similar has happened to persons of North African descent in the Parisian banlieue. And yet among the many enticements Paris offered to the outside world was the promise of acceptance and social mobility, limited perhaps, but nonetheless real. Migrants who came to the city to work in the construction trades, for instance, might one day marry into a Parisian family and open up a neighborhood restaurant, perhaps specializing in the cuisine of the old province or country. Paris is filled with stories of integration and the biographies of ordinary people settling in, prospering, raising families, and themselves becoming Parisians. Paris was not only the Other Paris, but also the city of entrepreneurs and department stores; of artisans producing the articles de Paris that catered to the sophisticated or wealthy; the city of the petit bourgeois baker or butcher and of the newly wealthy rentier or “New Men” looking to make money as quickly as they could in the atmosphere of laissez-faire that thrived after the Revolution of 1789. The economic sections in the chapters reflect on what was for a time thought of as Paris’s peculiar path toward modernity—different from London or Manchester in England, but in its own way no less successful, and though it took some time for the promises of laissez-faire capitalism to be answered. The economic sections of the book highlight the growth of capitalist enterprises after the French Revolution; the decline and improvement in the working-class standard of living; the physical expansion of the city that was part of the story of economic modernization; the ongoing role of the luxury trades in the city’s prosperity; and the development after 1830 of modern industries that included railroads, manufacturing, and textiles, and in the twentieth century automobiles and airlines in the suburban zones. There were ups and downs, booms and busts for the Paris economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Tragedies—the economic malaise of the German occupation of 1940–1944—followed by triumphs—the remarkable stretch of economic growth of the post-1945 period (Trentes Glorieuses). These sections of the book describe the emergence of important firms, banks, influential families, and lending institutions like the Crédit Mobilier. Governments played a crucial role in financing major building projects in the French capital in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for reasons that included placating unemployed workers and enhancing Paris’s reputation as a place to visit and spend money. Paris became a mecca for tourists, and since the second half of the nineteenth century the tourism industry has generated an increasingly large portion of the city’s wealth. Over the decades, friends, observers, and residents have sometimes seen Paris as a universal emblem—capital of France, but much more: the

INTRODUCTION

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spiritual and intellectual home, and the object of fascination and affection for persons across the world. Authors and historians have described Paris as the Capital of the World. For observers looking at her from the outside, there is a “mind’s eye” view of Paris. Some of this has to do with the city’s physical characteristics and her climate: the gray ribbon of the Seine and hilly Montmartre; her often cloudy and damp weather (a product of the city’s proximity to the Atlantic Ocean); the wide boulevards, historic buildings, and unique neighborhoods; the striking uniformity of building materials, styles, and heights. There are so many other images generated by what we know, or think we know, from her history, and from the astonishing bounty of art, literature, music, film, and philosophy that Parisians and lovers-ofParis have produced about the city. I have acquired my own understanding of Paris over the years from reading and taking courses as an undergraduate, and from research and reading as a graduate student and history professor. Since 1987, I have spent a good deal of time in Paris’s libraries and archives. The places most important to my work have been the Bibliothèque Nationale (original and new institutions), Archives Nationales, Bibliothèque Public d’Instruction, reading room and library of the Hôtel de Ville, Archives de la Département de la Seine, and Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris. When I am in Paris and not at an archive or library, I spend most of my time walking the streets, boulevards, and bridges, escaping the noise and congestion in the parks and cemeteries, or moving inside to one of the many small museums dedicated to the work of a single master, like those for Pablo Picasso and Victor Hugo in the Marais. What are the images that leap to mind when one contemplates Paris? It might be a mélange of current sensations—there is always something new, innovative, and young in Paris—inevitably mixed with images and thoughts from the city’s past and present: barricades, crowds in the street, bohemian hangouts, Left Bank cafés, bridges across the Seine, museums, churches, and the hôtels of nobles or wealthy bourgeois; as the epicenter of revolution, the physical and intellectual playground of ideas and the meanings of liberté, egalité, fraternité. Paris is a refuge and oasis from the mundane, a place of the imagination that people know from film, art, and literature. Some of this fits the historical record, and some does not. This book surveys the imagined, but especially the historical Paris.

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1 Old Regime Paris: The City before 1789

Chronology 1763

Place Louis XIV (now Place de la Concorde) inaugurated

1770

Marriage of the dauphin (future Louis XVI) to MarieAntoinette

1774

Death of Louis XV—Louis XVI becomes king

1782–84 Palais-Royal constructed 1783

Flight of Montgolfier balloon

1787–88 Assembly of Notables 1785–88 Construction of Farmers’ Wall 1789

French Revolution begins

Introduction In broad terms, Old Regime (ancien régime) describes the world before the start of the French Revolution in 1789. Of course, the phrase was used only after the Revolution had done away with many existing institutions, practices, and norms, and had inaugurated what historians have called a New Regime marked by comparatively open democratic and republican political institutions, the idea of laissez-faire economics, and human rights. The French Revolution was a “world-historical” event centered in Paris.

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Paris, of course, has a history long pre-dating the modern era. The physical site of central Paris has been inhabited since 4200 BCE. The Parisii, a Gallic tribe who gave their name to the city, lived there in 100 BCE. When the Romans defeated the Gauls in 52 BCE, the place was known as Lutetia. The Catholic bishop Saint-Denis was martyred there in 250 CE. The name “Paris” was being used not long after. Clovis made it his capital in the early sixth century and it was the hub of a growing hinterland by the Middle Ages. The landmark Notre-Dame Cathedral was completed early in the thirteenth century and about the same time sections of the Louvre—another landmark—was being erected. Paris was occupied by English invaders from 1420 to 1436 and was beset by turmoil during the Wars of Religion, including the terrible Saint Bartholomew’s Massacre (1527). King Henri IV sought to end the strife partly by making Paris his capital, but was assassinated there in 1610. After the rebellion of the Fronde in the mid-seventeenth century, Louis XIV made nearby Versailles the administrative and royal capital of France. But, Paris remained the country’s cultural and historical heart. The Old Regime that was pushed aside by the Revolution was changing or evolving well before 1789. In the seventeenth century, the French king Louis XIV represented what was later called Absolutism: a strong central government with a large, efficient bureaucracy loyal to the monarchy; reliance on mercantilist economic practices to generate revenues for use by the central state; large armies and police forces to fight the king’s wars and keep things in order; and the use of symbols to embody, almost cult-like, these elements in the person of the king. Absolutist France was a powerful state—perhaps the first modern “nation”—whose strengths compelled European neighbors to emulate her. Paris remained the great city of France, though not Absolutism’s center of operations: distrustful of the Parisian populace, Louis XIV built a fabulous palace at nearby Versailles to which he and the court moved in the late seventeenth century. Versailles, not Paris, was the capital of France. Even before the eighteenth century, Paris sometimes generated distrust and resentment among other French. Though Paris was no longer capital of France, she was a center of so much else, including the eighteenth-century Enlightenment—the movement of ideas that underlay not only the Revolution, but many of the political and economic concepts that would help shape the Atlantic basin and then virtually every corner of the world. The philosophes who wrote about constitutions, republican government, and natural law and rights—Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau—belonged to the city’s “Republic of Letters.” Their ideas and recipes for change were by and large founded on a belief in reason, rationality, and tolerance. Secular, rather than religious solutions for society’s problems, helped diminish the influence of the Catholic Church as well as religious reform movements like Jansenism. The Enlightenment and French Revolution were, among other things, reactions against established religion. During the last decades of the eighteenth century, philosophes used critical analysis to undermine fundamental institutions of the Old Regime: monarchy,

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church, and nobility. France was on the verge of great change. The kings to come—Louis XIV’s great-grandson Louis XV and the latter’s grandson Louis XVI—struggled against the tide of change. The coming shock seemed to be symbolized in Paris in 1770 with a celebration for the marriage of the dauphin (the future Louis XVI) to Marie-Antoinette of Austria. This should have been a moment when king and “people” reasserted traditional bonds, replaying the give-and-take relationship that often characterized ties between monarchy and populace before 1789. Instead, when fireworks for the celebration were accidentally ignited, the crowd panicked, setting off a rush in which scores of persons were killed or injured. This seemed a bad omen.

POLITICS 1 Salons and the “Republic of Letters” Paris had been the home of French kings since the Middle Ages. As France grew out from Paris and her hinterland (the Île de France), the city came to dominate the country politically, economically, and culturally. Parlements were judicial courts established in different parts of France, but the Paris Parlement, because of its proximity to the monarchy, had special authority. Louis XIV made nearby Versailles the capital in the seventeenth century and further centralized control of the nation. But the Revolution made Paris the capital once again. Politics in Paris, and between Parisians and the royal government, reflected the tensions and ideas that helped produce the French Revolution of 1789. Throughout Parisian society, ideas and resentments were percolating that called for change. In the middle of the eighteenth century, a Parisian intelligentsia developed that took up the habit of meeting and talking together in salons. These people included well-known writers, philosophers, and political thinkers who met to socialize, share readings, and talk about the events of the day. We know something about the inner dynamics of the salons from epistolary (letter-writing) evidence. Parisian salons began in the seventeenth century but became an intellectual force in the two or three decades ahead of the Revolution. Many were organized and hosted by noble or upper-class women, though most attendees were male. The physical settings of salons in this “age of comfort” were apartments and hôtels, now furnished with heating, flush toilets, luxurious fabrics, and sofas in the lavish, Rococo style introduced to Paris during the eras of Louis XIV and Louis XV. There were many well-known Paris salons. One was hosted by Julie de Lespinasse, from humble provincial origins, whose salon was held at her comfortable hôtel on the Rue Saint-Dominque. Madame Necker (Suzanne Curchod), born in a Swiss canton and the wife of one of Louis XVI’s finance ministers, hosted a famous salon on the Rue Chaussée d’Antin. The salons were settings where philosophes like Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Diderot, and d’Alembert came together to make

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Paris the capital of Enlightenment-era political dialogue. The salons were distinctive because of the important role played in them by women and because they became a model for modern political discourse. In the years before the Revolution they contributed to an emerging “public sphere” that helped make the idea of change—really, revolution—acceptable to a public that was becoming politicized. This was the “Republic of Letters” described by Dena Goodman without which many of the revolutionary developments in France and Europe after 1789 seem inconceivable.1 But conversation about change—some of it political, some of it only indirectly so—was happening at a more popular level, too. Robert Darnton located this alternate discourse among the “forbidden best-sellers of preRevolutionary France,” which were illegally published books and pamphlets circulating among the lower and middle levels of Parisian society. These “bestsellers” offered scandalous or lascivious portraits of well-known personalities. This was “charivari” in literature: words that sought to turn the world on its head, putting the low on top and the high at the bottom. This kind of message found a receptive audience among ordinary Parisians in the 1770s and 1780s.2 Did the words and ideas exchanged among high-flying philosophes and writers at Parisian salons, or surreptitiously in the “forbidden” literature on the streets, make revolution in 1789? At the very least, they played a role.

2 Jansenism, Freemasons, and academies Talk about politics, the financial difficulties of the monarchy and the king’s relationship to Paris, along with the disruptive rhetoric of the Enlightenment, circulated not only among the “salonnières” and in the illicit literature of the streets, but also in sections of the Catholic Church, in masonic lodges, and in the literary and scientific academies headquartered in Paris. By the mid-seventeenth century, there were 8,000–10,000 Protestants in Paris, including many German and Swiss who had moved to the city early in the eighteenth century. The Edict of Nantes of 1598 had designated Paris a Catholic city, and so there were no Protestant churches (though Protestants could worship at nearby Charenton). Unfortunately, many of the records describing Parisian Protestants were destroyed in the fires of the Commune of 1871. But as the historian of Paris David Garrioch discovered, we do know that the most popular personal names for Protestant male and female babies in Paris were, respectively, “Jean” and “Marie” (though this was true as well for Catholic babies).3 Jansenism was a dissenting position within Catholicism that drew its inspiration from the bishop Cornelis Jansen (1585–1638) and the writings of Blaise Pascal (1623–62). It gained a foothold among nuns at the PortRoyal abbey on Paris’s Left Bank in the seventeenth century, and then among other Parisian clergy in the eighteenth century. Jansenists drew upon both the Gallican tradition of independence from Rome and themes from the Protestant Reformation to promote an austere version of the Catholic faith. Opposed

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by the Jesuits, periodically persecuted under Kings Louis XIV and Louis XV, the Jansenists nonetheless offered a steady drum beat of resistance to the monarchy and established church that, like the ideas of the Enlightenment and the legal arguments plaguing the guilds, undermined traditional authority. A handful of masonic lodges opened in Paris in the early 1700s, and by 1789 there were as many as 100 of them in the city. In some ways, Freemasonry served the same disruptive (perhaps unintentionally so) function as Jansenism: providing a venue and voice—secretive and public at the same time—to critique the established institutions of church and state, but also to insert a logic of “reason” and “rationality” into discussions about how to govern. Freemasonry differed from Jansenism because it had adherents across the Atlantic World, and though it was marked by elaborate rituals, it was not a religion like Catholicism. Its members tended to come from the bourgeoisie: merchants, bankers, and professionals such as lawyers and architects. Parisian Freemasons and Jansenists alike contributed to an emerging public opinion that was often critical of church, monarchy, and nobility. Learned academies played an indirect political role in the pre-Revolution ferment. The first royal academy in France was the Académie Française, established in Paris in 1635 (it still exists) as a way for the monarchy to both protect traditional culture and keep an eye on writers and opinion. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, other learned academies devoted to the protection of language, sculpture, architecture, and the propagation of scientific ideas were established in Paris and other French cities. Most of the members belonged to the nobility, clergy, and upper bourgeoisie. Though dependent upon the state, through their journals, papers, presentations, and prizes, the academies contributed to the climate of critical inquiry that coursed through Paris in the decades leading up to the Revolution.

3 Paris Parlement and pre-Revolution The political distance between Paris and the monarchy ahead of the Revolution seemed greatest in the actions and words of the Paris Parlement. The Paris Parlement was the oldest and most prestigious such body in France, dating from the thirteenth century. It was a court, among whose functions was the obligation to ratify legislation coming from the king. This was an important duty that gave the institution considerable power. The Parlement’s jurisdiction covered not just Paris and the Île de France, but a great deal of territory through the northern and central sections of the country. Its members belonged to the Parisian elite: jurists and administrators coming mostly from the nobility. The Paris Parlement had long asserted its independence, sometimes inserting itself aggressively into the affairs of state. Its bold actions during the rebellion of the Fronde (1648–53), for instance, had been one of the reasons why Louis XIV had moved the court to Versailles, which became the de facto capital. The Paris Parlement, sometimes working with other parlements across the country, sought something akin to the parliamentary system in England.

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Paris parlementaires posing as supporters of Parisian “rights,” argued with French kings about prerogatives and finances. This long, combative history reached a culmination just ahead of the Revolution. When the finance minister Charles-Alexandre de Calonne reported to Louis XVI that the government was going bankrupt, he was allowed to convene an Assembly of Notables with the task of re-structuring finances in order to restore solvency. In some ways, the convening of an Assembly of Notables—142 delegates, including parlementaires from Paris and across France—was a first step toward revolution. It was part of what historians later called the pre-Revolution. The Assembly met at Versailles in 1787 and 1788. During this period, Parisian parlementaires made their case to Parisians by emphasizing a language of liberty and calling for shared government, while at the same time accusing Calonne of “ministerial despotism.” The Republic of Letters and the pre-Revolution came together to undermine the monarchy. In turn, similar criticisms would soon be turned against the parlements themselves. The Paris Parlement, like so many of the institutions and customs of monarchical France, would not survive after 1789. In the meantime, there was no agreement between monarchy and the Assembly of Notables. Crowds gathered in Paris to demonstrate against the king and burn the finance minister in effigy. In a bold move, a new finance minister, Loménie de Brienne (he replaced Calonne in April 1787), tried to abolish the parlements, including the Parlement of Paris. The ensuing protests led the king to another extraordinary act: calling a meeting of an EstatesGeneral—a national convocation of delegates from the three Estates. The last time an Estates-General met was in 1614. But France’s political and financial problems had become so intractable, there seemed to be no other solution.

4 Revolutionary language of Enlightenment Many of the persons who wrote and spoke the words of the Enlightenment that would have such impact across the world and help make the Revolution of 1789 were Parisians by residence and work if not always by birth. Paris was a gathering spot and clearinghouse for ideas and words in the eighteenth century. It was a magnet for thinkers and personalities from France and across the Continent and Atlantic. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson spent intellectually formative periods in Paris that would bring a cosmopolitan flavor to their roles in the American Revolution. Voltaire was born in Paris, spent most of his early years there, and amid many travels periodically returned. Suzanne Curchod—Madame Necker after her marriage to the royal finance minister—left Switzerland for Paris in the 1770s. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was from Geneva but spent his most productive years in and near Paris. Denis Diderot, from the Champagne region east of Paris, came to the city as a student, and around his many travels abroad made it his home as primary editor and compiler of the multi-volume Encyclopedia. The abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès was born in southern

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France but was educated at the seminary of Saint-Sulpice in Paris; he made Paris his home off-and-on in a checkered political career through his death there in 1836. Maximilien Robespierre, the revolutionary who would head the Committee of Public Safety during the Terror, left his home in northern France for Paris in 1769 to attend the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, a strident revolutionary and member of the Committee of Public Safety, was in and out of Paris as a young man after 1786. And Jean-Paul Marat, who became one of the most influential and notorious journalists of the Revolution, was plying his original profession of doctor in Paris by 1776. Whether through published books, papers or letters passed from one person to another, or via the ideas disseminated in the salons, or illicit literature circulating in the streets, a rhetoric and logic emerged out of Paris in the 1770s and 1780s that helped turn the events of 1789 and after into a great revolution. The language of Enlightenment contributed to many historical developments in the short and long run, revolution among them. The words, printed and spoken, undermined the traditional institutions of France—monarchy, church, and nobility—by insisting that they were archaic and, just as bad, neither reasonable nor rational. In the second half of the eighteenth century, philosophes like Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot helped to create a logic for change and a blueprint for what might replace existing institutions; and then revolutionaries like Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Marat put the ideas and words into effect.

SOCIETY 1 Population diversity and migration Paris’s economy, population, and boundaries expanded in the eighteenth century, making it one of the most vibrant cities in all Europe and the Atlantic basin. Paris was one of Europe’s most populous cities, second in size only to London. Reliable population figures for the eighteenth century are missing because there were no accurate censuses, but to cite Daniel Roche, the preeminent historian of eighteenth-century Paris, in 1789 the city probably had between 600,000 and 700,000 people, which was about 30 percent more than in 1700; of these, perhaps 10 percent belonged to a “floating population” of urban poor. Deaths roughly equaled births, so the increase came from migration, mostly made up of the lower classes. Paris was a magnet for provincial populations in the Early Modern and Modern eras as she has been through most of her history. The constant influx of French provincials was necessary to maintain the city’s size. In the nineteenth century, Paris would also become a great draw for foreigners from other parts of Europe and the world. Some sections of eighteenth-century Paris were densely populated. More people lived on the Right Bank of the Seine than on the Left Bank. The city center was packed with working-class families and single, male workers,

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MAP 1  Paris at the time of the French Revolution

many of them seasonal migrants staying in garnis (rented rooms). The suburban faubourgs at Paris’s eastern edge also held large populations of workers engaged in artisanal and petit bourgeois production. The western and northern sections of the Right Bank were less densely populated. The western side of Paris stretching along the flanks of the Champs-Élysées saw much new construction in the eighteenth century, and with it the arrival of an upper middle-class population. Western Paris would remain wealthier than Eastern Paris through the Modern era. Some of the older, noble families who had built sumptuous residences (hôtels) near the center and in the Marais district remained, but in general nobles and the upper bourgeoisie were moving from the old central city around the Île de la Cité and Hôtel de Ville to better-off, newer districts like the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Mortality rates of children dying soon after birth or persons succumbing to disease were higher in the poorer, densely populated neighborhoods than in the more expansive quartiers linked by broad streets and boulevards. The standard of living may have been declining for a section of the working-class population in eighteenth-century Paris, though an “industrious revolution” probably led to material improvements that, even with stagnant wages, allowed people to live better lives.4 There was a growing middle class, or bourgeoisie, some of it made up of what would later be called the professions, like lawyers or teachers. Records from the period show that ordinary people owned more goods than their predecessors; living quarters were warmer and more

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FIGURE 1.1  Map of section of Paris, 1730, depicts royal buildings including the Tuileries and Louvre on the Right Bank of the Seine. The Palais-Royal is to the left. Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images.

comfortable than a century earlier. In order to watch over this population and provide an organized way to think about the maze of streets, the authorities began numbering the shops and residences along streets—a detail that seems perfectly normal to us today, but which was an innovation in the eighteenth century. By 1803, the numbering of buildings in Paris was almost complete.5 Visitors to Paris were struck by the diversity of people sharing the streets and public spaces. In the eighteenth century, much of this diversity was the product of provincial French coming to the city to live and work. These provincial Parisians often brought particular skills: stonemasons came from Limousin and Normandy; water-carriers from Auvergne; young chimney sweeps from Savoy; household servants from nearby Brie and Paris’s immediate hinterland, the Île de France. Provincials also tended to live in neighborhood clusters, where they ate, drank, and entertained with their own kind. Nonetheless, they were not isolated from the rest of the population, and over time virtually all provincial groups would integrate. In many European cities, Jews lived separately from their neighbors. This was less true of Paris. The Marais district on the eastern side of the Right Bank would host a large Jewish population in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but in the eighteenth century individual Jewish families lived in different districts across the city. There was no Jewish ghetto in eighteenth-century Paris.

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2 Popular classes—“the people” Most of eighteenth-century Paris’s population was made up of what we would today call the “working classes.” But since this phrase really dates from the nineteenth century, historians—echoing contemporary observers whose accounts they use as primary sources—have taken up other terms to identify this part of the urban populace. Daniel Roche used “the people,” which conveys a good sense of the diversity of skills, origins, and neighborhoods where the popular classes lived. The people were distinguished from the bourgeoisie and upper classes because they worked with their hands and lived poorer and more precarious existences. But even so, there were important distinctions among them. Artisans often belonged to guilds, and so had some opportunity, a regular income, and (though this seems to have been decreasing) job mobility. Skilled workers unattached to the guilds might work “clandestine” jobs— clandestine because certain jobs and skills belonged by custom and law to the guilds. Artisans had prestige within their own communities and in the larger population, since the luxury trades they plied were drivers of the city’s economy. Skilled artisans attached to guilds also had a very old and important relationship with municipal officials and the monarchy itself. At mid-century, as much as two-thirds of the adult male working population, along with a smaller percentage of females, belonged to the more than 120 officially recognized Parisian guilds.6 Some skilled workers not attached to the guilds lived in faubourgs on the eastern side of Paris. These areas hummed with production: the Faubourg Saint-Antoine was famous for furniture-making in the eighteenth century; wallpaper, porcelain, mirrors, and other “articles de Paris” were also produced in the faubourgs. The “faubouriens” had developed their own economic and, increasingly, political identities, and would play an important role in the revolutionary events of 1789–95. Some of the city’s skilled workers were seasonal migrants who did not live or work in the faubourgs: migrant stonemasons from the Limousin region of central France, for instance, stayed in rented rooms (garnis) in the city center, working jobs on construction sites from spring through fall before returning to provincial homes during the building industry’s “dead season” of December through February. Unskilled workers, male and female, and including children, worked the mundane, sometimes dangerous and dirty jobs: cleaning stables and abattoirs; digging ditches; hauling rubble stone at building sites; and endless other tasks. Domestic servants, who were often young women from the provinces working under the supervision of their employers and thus typically isolated from peers, were also part of the unskilled labor force. At a rung below unskilled labor, but also drawing from it, was the floating population of itinerant peddlers, day-laborers, and criminals. The flotsam and jetsam of eighteenth-century French society came ashore in the great city along the Seine.

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3 Upper and middle classes Sharing Paris with the people were the bourgeoisie, or middle-class members of the Third Estate, the nobility of the Second Estate, and the clergy of the First Estate. The Estates were social categories defined by law and custom. A great debate on the numbers, composition, and customary rights of the Estates would open the meeting of the Estates General at Versailles at the start of the Revolution in late spring 1789, but in fact by the second half of the eighteenth century the language of “Estates” hardly seemed to apply any longer to Parisian society. The idea of Estates would come to an end in 1789, as privilege was abolished and both nobility and monarchy were undermined by the actions of the revolutionary bourgeoisie and their allies. The Revolution would challenge the nobility in Paris, but before 1789 perhaps 20,000 persons from noble families made the city their home and center of their activities. Both Sword and Robe nobles favored Paris over Versailles, setting up residences in the western faubourgs. Some of these noble families were very old (nobility of the Sword) and some were more recent products of Louis XIV’s efforts to generate revenue by selling titles to well-off bourgeois (nobility of the Robe). Noble and bourgeois families were joining in marriages by the seventeenth century. Nobles sometimes ran business enterprises or were tax farmers. A kind of financial neighborhood of tax farmers lived near the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Some nobles lived in Right Bank hôtels in the Marais where they were secluded from adjacent streets by high walls and courtyards. As Daniel Roche noted, there was a “hierarchy of appearances” in eighteenth-century Paris. The Parisian bourgeoisie, like the people, was marked by diversity of origins (native Parisian or provincial), income, and vocation. Bourgeois families might live in the same building with working-class families, though in the more comfortable and expensive lower stories. Some of the haute bourgeoisie lived alongside noble families in the richer quartiers of Paris. The bourgeoisie engaged in business enterprises, banking, and professions like law and architecture. Literacy was the norm. Enlightenment ideals had penetrated this group, and so, like the people, the bourgeoisie was quickly politicized in 1789. Many members of the Parisian bourgeoisie would play crucial roles during the years of Revolution.

4 Police and administration Overseeing, administering, taxing, and policing Paris and its population was a large cohort of municipal and royal officers. Because Paris was by far the largest city in France, she required thousands of royal officials, tax collectors, and police—though fewer police for the size of the population than in subsequent centuries. As later historians observed, eighteenth-century Paris, for all its tumult and great size, was a reasonably well-governed and orderly

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city. Police and neighborhood commissaires exercised what historian Steven Kaplan characterized as “benign neglect.”7 Daniel Roche wrote that prior to the Revolution the police of Paris were considered a “model for all Europe,” even if they “did not so much combat crime as govern it.”8 This was one reason why the Revolution of 1789 came as a surprise for many. Eighteenth-century police operated under a philosophy different from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The term “police” meant attention to public order, provisioning of food and other goods necessary for daily sustenance, and oversight of markets. The police were concerned with the people’s well-being, and not simply with the prevention and arrest for crime. Police pursued criminals, but also maintained street lighting and checked on the cost of bread, the condition of horses at stables, and other sundry affairs. At the top of Paris’s police apparatus was the lieutenant-general, first established in the 1660s under Louis XIV, whose office was located at the Châtelet. The lieutenant-general was officer of the law, administrator, and judge, working closely with royal officials and the forty-eight district commissaires to monitor the city. Out in the streets and often operating in the shadows was an assortment of police forces totaling just over 3,000 for a city with a population of 600,000 in 1789—approximately one police for every 193 residents. These included 150 Guet, an institution dating from the sixteenth century, whose positions were purchased from the king.9 The Guet patrolled on foot and horseback. There was also a much larger force of Guards stationed at posts throughout the city, whose main duty was patrolling the streets. And there were various other forces that included the Maréchaussée (a kind of national police); guards stationed at the hospitals; and police inspectors checking prices and persons at markets, boarding houses, construction sites, and hospitals. Regular troops were available, too; when there was a threat of civil disorder, eighteenth-century French kings, like their nineteenth-century counterparts, were prepared to call upon the army to disperse crowds. There were also scores of informers and spies (mouches or mouchards) who reported to police and the lieutenant-general, and who became the stuff of urban legend.

ECONOMY 1 Guilds Historians have learned a lot about Paris guilds, though not as much as we might know had their records not been destroyed in the fire that burned the Hôtel de Ville—Paris’s city hall where the records were kept—during the Commune of 1871. The production of most goods in Paris, as in other cities of Old Regime France and Europe, was carried out and organized by the guilds (or corporations). The governing boards of guilds cooperated with municipal and royal authorities to set prices, wages, and production

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levels. Guilds existed for most trades: butchers, hatters, drapers, goldsmiths, tailors, carpenters, and others. To take just one example, there were hundreds of guild butchers in Paris. As the consumption of meat grew along with Paris’s population in the eighteenth century, there was an increasing need for apprentices and journeymen. Masters and their families worked and lived alongside bachelor journeymen and young apprentices. Butchers, like most trades, operated their own shops, usually along busy streets. Many Parisian butcher shops were located along a north–south axis of the Rues Saint-Michel and Saint-Denis. There were other shops on an east–west axis of the Rues Saint-Honoré and Saint-Antoine. Most customers came from the bourgeoisie and nobility. By the 1780s, there were 30,000 to 40,000 guild masters in all trades across Paris.10 Most guilds were dominated by males, but there were a handful of trades, such as seamstress, controlled by women. Socially, arrangements within the guilds were hierarchical with young people beginning their livelihood as apprentices, advancing to journeymen as young adults and then, perhaps after a period on the road as a compagnon of the Tour de France, acquiring the status of master. At least this was the promise. The reality was that in many trades journeymen were stymied in their efforts to advance. Masterships had to be purchased and were expensive—in 1789, a mastership for a draper cost the equivalent of wages for 2,500 working days.11 Between 1735 and 1776, 2,741 master tailors entered the guild; among these, about 60 percent did so via a family relation. Some were masters’ sons; others entered through marriage. It was very different for female seamstresses entering their guild during this period: about 92 percent of the 5,497 seamstresses were newcomers.12 In the second half of the eighteenth century, guilds and the idea of corporate production came under attack by financial officials and philosophes. There was an effort in the 1770s to break up the guilds by the reforming finance minister Anne-Robert Turgot. These changes did not stick, but the challenges kept coming. The roiling frustration of Parisian journeymen unable to advance in their fields against the established interests of guild masters prompted labor strikes (an innovation) and endless legal disputes between the two groups. The internecine struggle in the guilds was one of the underlying tensions that led to the eruption of 1789 and the rapid breakdown of the guilds during the Revolution.

2 Faubourgs and clandestine work Most of the production accomplished in Old Regime Paris probably was done through the guilds. But there was also a lot of work done independently of the guilds either in the faubourgs on the urban frontier or by clandestine labor in the city proper. Paris, like other large French cities, was partly surrounded by faubourgs—originally, the areas just outside the city walls that were later incorporated. In one sense, the faubourgs were fully part of

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the city since so many products were made there and because workers from the center went to the faubourgs where food and drink were cheaper. But in another sense, the faubourgs remained places apart because the population was overwhelmingly from the laboring classes and because the work and commerce done there was not part of the city’s corporate structure. At the time of the Revolution, the best-known Parisian faubourg was Saint-Antoine on the east (today, straddling the eleventh and twelfth arrondissements). Saint-Antoine was a large, bustling, and overwhelmingly working-class community. The people of Saint-Antoine were cognizant of their economic impact and, after 1789, of their potential as a political force. Out of Saint-Antoine came fine furniture (the district was famous for its woodworking), porcelain, mirrors, wallpaper, and, by the early 1790s, the revolutionary “sans-culottes.” While the faubourgs had a large working-class population—perhaps one-fifth of the city in 1789—whose production was not controlled by the guilds, there were many other workers not attached to the guilds, who lived in Paris proper. The unskilled among them were labeled by the police under various categories: alloués (“rented” workers), ouvriers sans qualité (workers without credentials), or gagne-dernier (“penny earner”). Historians sometimes label the group clandestine labor—clandestine because they did not come under the oversight of the guilds, even though they typically worked alongside apprentices or journeymen. Guild and clandestine labor thus co-existed, and both were crucial contributors to the eighteenth-century Parisian economy. Most non-guild workers were from the provinces. They dug ditches, hawked goods in the streets, or hired themselves out as laborers or servants. Many were seasonal migrants hauling stones at construction sites. In a foretaste of the coming New Regime of laissez-faire, they were often hired by moonlighting masters or journeymen looking for laborers to do a day’s work. The typical gagne-dernier moved from job to job, living hand-to-mouth, and subject to the police who checked their livret (internal passport). Most lived in cramped rooms, subsisting on bread and soup. For some unskilled workers, there was not much distance between gagne-dernier and gens sans aveu (vagabonds). These people belonged to the floating population of poor described by Jeffrey Kaplow.13 With the Revolution and the end of the guilds in 1791, clandestine laborers would become open and legitimate, even though their quality of life would not really change for a long time.

3 Construction and expansion In the eighteenth century as later, the construction industry was an important driver of the Paris economy. Private building was part of this, particularly in the construction of housing, but the monarchy, various municipal entities, and the Catholic Church were responsible for many large projects, including a series of walls erected at the city’s edge, the first of which dated from the thirteenth century under King Philip Augustus. Construction was also

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crucial because it created jobs. At the end of the 1780s, perhaps 6 percent of the city’s population belonged to one of the building trades: masonry, carpentry, painting, or associated trades like locksmithing and paving. As the population of Paris and her faubourgs expanded in the eighteenth century, so did the need for housing. There were boarding houses with cramped rooms that many newly arrived migrants rented or shared with others. Wealthier residences were built on the western side of the city near the Champs-Élysées. The Place Louis XV—today’s Place de la Concorde— and the Champ de Mars were finished under Louis XV. A rise in rents added to a “fever” of construction. Contemporaries thought that in the two decades before the Revolution one-third of Paris’s residences were either new or rebuilt. But in the eighteenth century—like the nineteenth and most of the twentieth—housing would not keep up with demand. Still, with all of the new construction, there was a continuing need for building workers, particularly stonemasons, some of whom came from the Catholic Netherlands (later, Belgium) or German lands, but most of whom arrived from Limousin in central France. All this new building work was a source of concern for eighteenth-century Parisians, including the Chambre Royale des Bâtiments which set the tarif (wage rate) for the building trades. Architects schooled in the royal academies were replacing master masons and carpenters at the building site. To some observers, construction was in a state of perpetual chaos. A century earlier, Louis XIV had tried to impose order on the industry. But by the 1770s, public anxiety about shoddy building techniques and speculation were rife. Some of this had to do with the emergence of a seemingly new breed of architect-entrepreneur who gave the impression of being eager to make a quick profit off the housing crisis. The peripatetic observer of pre-Revolution Paris, Louis-Sébastien Mercier, believed these “veritable secret entrepreneurs” were moonlighting master masons—profiteers, conniving with unscrupulous architects, ready to cut corners and risk public safety. Where “architect” had once signified a bourgeois expert, probably trained by and working for the monarchy, and master mason had meant a leading member of the guild, by the second half of the eighteenth century both terms could conjure negative images connected with profit-making and corruption.14 Mercier’s comments reflected a general perception in Paris that public safety, good building technique, and traditional artisanship were being undermined, with neither government nor guild able to remedy the problem.

4 Trade and commerce Construction was important, but of course there was so much else to Paris’s economy. Luxury trades producing items for both local consumption and European and Atlantic markets made the city’s economy tick. Luxury trades comprised a big part of the workforce, employing perhaps 100,000 skilled and semi-skilled artisans (one in every six or seven persons), both

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men and women. While furniture production and tailoring were mainstays in the faubourgs, the manufacture of luxury goods including silk, jewelry, tapestries, clocks, mirrors, toys, and umbrellas was concentrated in older neighborhoods. The Gobelins royal factory for furniture and tapestries had opened in the seventeenth century. There were thirteen porcelain factories operating in the capital by the late eighteenth century, many in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Raw materials were brought to Paris from the provinces; timber from Auvergne in central France, for instance, was floated along rivers joining the Seine where it was sawed in the Parisian suburbs and then carted to the furniture- or parquet-floor producing workshops in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Artisans produced pricey goods for the nobility and upper bourgeoisie, and “knock-offs” for less well-off consumers and tourists. Some of the factories producing luxury goods like porcelain never fully recovered after the Revolution drove off many of the nobility. For all its vitality, the Parisian economy was not part of the “industrializing revolution” that was taking off in Manchester and Glasgow in Great Britain or in areas of the European Continent. There was manufacturing, but little real industry. Paris’s economy was overseen by municipal and royal officials who worked with guild officials (jurés) to set rules for production, and to manage prices and wages through tarifs. Despite the guilds, it was normal for masters, independent “jobbers,” itinerant peddlers, and shop owners to buy and sell as they wanted, neighborhood-by-neighborhood. Beyond the faubourgs and through the outlying Paris basin, farms sent produce to the city as they had for centuries. Rye, barley, and grapes for wine-making were raised close by. Montmartre, the hilly area to the north that would become a famous artists’ enclave late in the nineteenth century, was still a rural setting of viniculture before the Revolution. Rich and poor peasants in these nearby rustic “pays” were no less a part of the thriving Parisian economy than watchmakers and tailors in the faubourgs and central quartiers. In the eighteenth century, the peasants living outside the city walls could be “Parisians,” too. Parisian trade and commerce before the Revolution, writes historian Michael Sonenscher, remained as it long had been: an “economy of the bazaar.”15 Trade into the city was taxed at the Farmers Wall built between 1784 and 1787. The Farmers Wall, stretching twenty-four kilometers with fifty-six toll gates designed by the architect Claude Ledoux, was a commercial and administrative barrier, not a defensive wall. Some of the city’s poor depended upon credit from the Mont-de-Piété, which was the municipal pawnshop. At a time when bread remained the staple of the diet, control of the grain trade was viewed as a common good, and so the bread supply was overseen by police. Custom, expectation, and a sense of “fair price” played as much a role in governing the economy as the laws of laissez-faire. In times of shortage—as during the Flour War in the spring of 1775—crowds, often composed of and led by women, might enforce a taxation populaire on merchants, millers, and bakers. As Stephen Kaplan notes, “The police

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intended that the marketplace should not throttle commerce but rather domesticate it and moralize it, not to obliterate the market principle but to correct it.”16

CULTURE 1 Neighborhood sociability One difference between Paris before the Revolution (Old Regime) and Paris after the Revolution (New Regime) has to do with the culture of the street and neighborhood sociability. In retrospect, Paris of the eighteenth century appeared to be “self-regulating,” a quality which meant the city required relatively few police for a population of more than a half-million. Old Regime Paris seemed not to have the predisposition for rebellion that became so striking a characteristic of the nineteenth century. Some of this sociability had to do with the fact that individuals and families of almost all classes lived in the same neighborhoods, even if on different floors of the same building—the upper floors for the poorer and the bottom floors for shop owners and middle classes. Historians no longer identify eighteenth-century Paris as a place of social and economic extremes. Daily relations between masters and journeymen, between shop owners and consumers, and between local officials and the people helped preserve an ambiance that made the events of 1789 and after a bit of a surprise. Arlette Farge writes of the customary “rules” that tied together a “fragile” urban society.17 Daniel Roche describes neighborhood sociability in terms of “savoir-vivre” and “savoir-faire”: the knowledge and habits that people of all ranks acquired to negotiate the travails of daily life, to simply get by from day to day.18 Still, there were rules: male and female “spaces,” for instance—taverns for men, and for women the public fountains or the Canal Saint-Martin where clothing was laundered. Much about Parisian life was not appealing by modern standards: violence and petty crime was common; animals—the horses that pulled carriages and carts, or dogs and cats making their own lives on the streets—were treated cruelly by modern conventions. Rumors coursed through the narrow streets and sometimes disrupted the peace: stories circulating in the 1750s that officials were abducting children—strange to the modern ear—subsided but were evidence of a growing distance between people and government that would contribute to revolution in 1789. Vibrant descriptions of street life and the “street smarts” of Old Regime Parisians come from the memoir of Jacques-Louis Ménétra (1738–1803), an artisan attached to the glazier’s (glass window installer) guild. Ménétra’s Paris of the 1760s was a Rabelaisian world of colorful characters and adventures. There was both mundane violence and the fraternity of compagnon journeymen. In Ménétra’s Paris, one was careful to walk the streets at night

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because criminals lurked. Police spies (mouches) were despised as much as thieves. It was a place both of increasing popular literacy and endemic casual violence against women. Neighbors and vagrants turned into crowds when bread prices rose too quickly or to celebrate festivals like the marriage of the dauphin (the future Louis XVI) and Marie-Antoinette in 1770. As a young man, Ménétra spent much of his time at the tavern and took part in wild escapades, but as he grew older he became more settled. This was the life of the “titi”—the ordinary working-class Parisian—before the Revolution.19 It was the historian Daniel Roche who introduced Ménétra to us, resurrecting his memoir and his world by researching the archives of eighteenth-century Paris. For Roche, the people were not static, but always in flux and deeply complex. Influenced by the Annales school of history-writing and the work of an earlier historian (Ernst Labrousse), Roche has told us much about material culture and the history of “ordinary things” (choses banales) in Old Regime Paris.

2 High culture Eighteenth-century Paris produced much art—painting, literature, music, architecture, and interior decorations—that we still value today. Much of this art remained within the realm of the wealthy upper classes. But there was also movement between “high” and “low” culture, contributing to a broader “popular culture” familiar to us today. At Versailles, Marie-Antoinette dressed as a peasant, while her servant girls donned silk—the fascination with clothing and style a hint of the consumer revolution of the late nineteenth century. Parisians of all classes were spending more on entertainment in the eighteenth century. Italian opera arrived in Paris in the seventeenth century, but by the next century operas performed in French were common. Despite protests from traditionalists, the opéra-comique was made legal in 1714. Theater was very popular among all social classes. Among the most popular plays in Paris before the Revolution was Pierre Beaumarchais’s comic love-story “Marriage of Figaro” (1778), later transformed into an opera by Mozart. “Figaro” bridged high and low culture. In poking fun at the nobility, the play (as well as its operatic form) had a tremendous effect that is hard to imagine today. The sly, critical themes of “Figaro” made rulers across Europe, including at Versailles, nervous. Theaters and opera houses, including the “parterre” where tickets were cheaper and the crowd loud and raucous compared to the expensive seats of the loge, were becoming “contested (public) spaces.” In hindsight (perhaps less at the time), the tensions of the pre-Revolution could be seen not only in theater and opera, but also in painting. Paris would become the capital of artistic painting in the nineteenth century, and though this was not quite true of the eighteenth century, important artists made the city their home. Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842) was

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born and died in Paris. One of the rare successful female painters of her day, Vigée Le Brun was a skilled portrait artist, most famously of the queen Maire-Antoinette and her children (1787). Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699–1799), a master of still life painting, like Vigée Le Brun, was born and died in Paris. He was the son of a cabinet-maker, closely attached to the city, which he rarely left, and sympathetic to ordinary life, which he depicted in meticulous detail in works like Woman Cleaning Turnips (1739). JeanHonoré Fragonard (1732–1806) was a contemporary of Chardin who was born in southern France and spent much time in Italy, but otherwise made Paris his home. Fragonard was part of the Late Rococo style of painting that was popular with the upper classes. His work reflected the leisurely hedonism of the nobility and upper bourgeoisie: The Swing (1767) depicts a sumptuously dressed young woman on a swing, a figure (servant or husband?) doing the work of pushing and pulling, while another male figure (friend or suitor?) is placed strategically below the young woman as she swings to and fro. Observers of the painting could be titillated when they viewed it. Communicating quite different messages was the work of JacquesLouis David (1748–1825). David was born into a well-off Parisian family and lived in the city most of his life, including during the Revolution, of which he was a notable participant. Many of David’s paintings of the 1770s and 1780s drew upon classical themes to impart political messages that were virtually the opposite of Fragonard: Oath of the Horatii (1786) shows a family ready to defend ancient Rome from its enemies; the neo-classical messages here have to do with sacrifice, civic duty, masculine courage, and patriotism. These were ideas that correlated with the Revolution. Not surprisingly, David’s career thrived after 1789, while Fragonard’s did not.

3 La mode and demi-monde Since the age of Louis XIV, Paris has been the city with which we are still familiar: the symbol and model for elevated taste, cultural innovation, the good life—la mode, an untranslatable phrase meaning something like “trendsetter.” Consumption of luxury goods produced in Paris was a driver of the city’s economy in the eighteenth century. But something like a cultural middle class was also developing, so that servants and persons from the lower classes were sometimes purchasing goods and clothing for design as much as function. Parisians across the social strata—not just persons in the salons in Paris and Versailles—participated in la mode. Paris of the eighteenth century was a literate space where persons at virtually all ranks were reading a variety of materials from the pornographic to the esoteric. Royal and municipal officials mostly overlooked the trade in illicit writing. This was the world of Rétif de la Bretonne (1734–1806), like Jacques Ménétra another picturesque ambler and describer of Old Regime street life. Rétif was a chronicler of the intimate and the particular; the man-in-thestreet observing and recording the odd and mundane in the years before the

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Revolution. Best known as a “pornographer” for the works he produced as a printer, Rétif adopted a skeptical view of the world. He knew enough about Paris and Parisians to be more fascinated than in love with them. He was a denizen of Paris’s “half-world” (“demi-monde”). Like many Parisians, he was born and raised elsewhere, in his case on a farm in Burgundy. The book that made him famous was Le Paysan Perverti (1775), about a young peasant corrupted by the great city. Rétif was a prolific writer who moved easily in the demi-monde situated between salons and the criminal milieu. He drew grist for his writer’s mill on night-time jaunts, favoring the narrow streets of the Île Saint-Louis and the Palais-Royal—the latter, the property of the Orléans family built in the seventeenth century. Rétif’s Paris was a city of beggars, prostitutes (20,000 of them he thought), mad dogs, pungent odors, laundresses, graverobbers, and ragpickers. Though some of what he described was fanciful, his was also an authentic picture of an Old Regime Paris that has since vanished.20 Rétif spent much time at restaurants and coffee houses. (Coffee-drinking arrived in Paris in the seventeenth century.) Both were relatively new forms of private–public establishments just becoming the kind of places we are familiar with today. Restaurants were originally places where customers could “restore” their health by drinking a special broth (bouillon). By the Revolution, the restaurant menu had expanded to include other healthful foods and drinks—not quite the gastronomic palaces of subsequent years but getting close. It is impossible to measure, but no doubt some of the intellectual groundwork for the Revolutionary years was laid in the talk brewing in Paris coffeehouses before 1789. By the first decade of the next century, there were probably 1,800 coffeehouses and 4,000 restaurants in Paris. Café au lait was starting to become an essential part of the Parisian breakfast.

4 Parisian mentalité on the eve of Revolution Where did the Revolution of 1789 come from? Jacques Ménétra— the journeyman artisan whose memoirs reveal the Other Paris of the Old Regime and who was among the last of his kind in a fading Rabelaisian world—gives almost no hint. Paris was a really large European city, second only to London in the eighteenth century, increasingly secularized, with a growing middle class, relatively low rates of violence and in most ways politically passive; yet, there were fissures. The “making of Revolutionary Paris,” as David Garrioch writes, took place over about one-hundred years in a city that was both “plebeian” and “metropolitan.” There were shifts— hard to identify, but perceptible to the nuanced historical eye—in mentalité after 1750. Public opinion emerged after mid-century and was critical of the status quo. Guilds were lively but riddled with divisions. Paris was a city of contrasts. There was poverty, with most of the poor living and working outside the corporate structure. There were the “known” and the “unknown” poor of the Other Paris.

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FIGURE 1.2  Palais-Royal. Built in the seventeenth century and the property of the Orléans branch of the royal family until 1848. Camille Desmoulins and other speakers stirred up crowds here in the revolutionary summer of 1789 © Casey Harison.

Two events of the 1780s seemed in retrospect to be a forecast of changes on the horizon. One was the creation of the first hot air balloon to lift persons off the ground. The balloon was the work of the Montgolfier

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brothers, Joseph-Michael (1740–1810) and Jacques-Etienne (1745–99). Born into a paper-manufacturing family in the Ardèche region of southern France, they made their name and career in Paris. The young brothers were inventors in the tinkering tradition. Small balloons had been around for some time, but the Montgolfiers wanted something more—they wanted to fly. Using their knowledge of paper materials light enough to be lifted into the air, the brothers experimented with bigger and bigger balloons. At first, animals—a sheep and a rooster—were sent off. Finally, a large balloon was built at a factory in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and in November 1783, two volunteers ascended from western Paris near the Bois de Boulogne, reaching almost 3,000 feet before landing several miles away at the Butte aux Cailles on the Left Bank. The flight was a sensation. Others were to follow, and more manufacturers began building balloons. Science and human invention seemed to open up all kinds of possibilities. The sky was no longer the limit. The Montgolfiers showed the kind of ingenuity and ambition present in Paris, and the public was thrilled. But many Parisians were infuriated in 1786 by what became known as the “Diamond Necklace Affair,” which implicated the queen Marie-Antoinette in an ill-advised financial and sexual escapade. The royal court at Versailles was humiliated, and the chasm between monarchy and the people seemed as wide as it had ever been. The intellectual, cultural, economic, and political groundwork was laid for the Revolution of 1789—a revolution for all France and for the world that was centered in Paris.

Conclusion Old Regime Paris, like the New Regime Paris that followed, was a city of contrasts: wealthy and poor (though there were many more of the latter than the former); high culture and the popular culture of “the people”; rich, new quartiers and the narrow, poorer streets of the city center; satisfied and unsatisfied sections of the population. And yet curiously for the historian looking back to this period, there are few clear signs of the Revolution of 1789—and all that was to follow through Napoleon Bonaparte—in the years leading up to the Revolution. Paris and Parisians had often muddled through anxious times in the past, but the basic institutions governing the city and the nation had persevered. Parisians seemed to have an understanding or consensus about how the city governed itself. The underlying issues plaguing Parisian and French society became clearer once the Revolution began; and once the Revolution began, there seemed to be no going back to the days of the Old Regime. The fundamental institutions that had long governed French life—monarchy, nobility, and church—and which were centered in and around Paris, seem, in hindsight, to have exhausted their political and cultural capital. After 1789, other groups and social classes, including the

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bourgeoisie and the Parisian sans-culottes, quickly showed themselves ready to assume active roles and even prepared to lead the nation. Economically, Old Regime Paris remained tied to the production of luxury goods and the daily provisioning necessary to feed the gargantuan city’s population. The eastern faubourgs were thriving and industrious and this contributed to their being ready to play an important political role after 1789. During the Old Regime, there were only hints of manufacturing and the Industrial Revolution of the next century; Montmartre to the north of the city and Montrouge to the south, which in the future were to become part of the working-class suburbs (banlieue), were still rural and lightly populated. There were hints of a consumer culture among the upper classes, but also among the people. In hindsight, colorful writers and observers of ordinary life in Old-Regime Paris like Jacques-Louis Ménétra and Rétif de la Bretonne, not to mention tragic figures like Louis XVI and MarieAntoinette, appear almost as quaint vestiges of a long-ago time.

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2 Paris during the French Revolution and Napoleon, 1789–1815

Chronology 1789

French Revolution begins—fall of Bastille—National Assembly and royal family move to Paris

1790

Completion of Panthéon—Festival of Federation

1791

Guilds abolished—Champ de Mars Massacre—Louis XVI’s Flight to Varennes

1792

Attack on Tuileries and overthrow of monarchy—Republic established—September Massacres—foreign war begins—arrival of volunteers, including Marseillaise

1793

Execution of Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, Olympe de Gouges, Girondin leaders—assassination of Marat—start of Terror

1794

Terror continues until Thermidor—execution of Danton, Desmoulins, Hébert, Robespierre, Saint-Just

1795

Directory established—Paris reorganized into arrondissements and quartiers

1797

Babeuf Plot

1799

Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état—end of Republic and start of Consulate

1804

Napoleon becomes Emperor in ceremony at Notre-Dame Cathedral—Père Lachaise cemetery established

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1805

Numbering of streets completed

1806

Construction of Arc de Triomphe begins (finished 1836)

1814

Defeat of Napoleon and Restoration of Bourbons (Louis XVIII)—Paris occupied

1815

Napoleon’s “100 Days”—second Restoration of Bourbon

Introduction The French Revolution that began in Paris, Versailles, and the countryside in the summer of 1789 is a famously complicated historical event. To simplify, one might say that its five most intense years (1789–94) amounted to an unprecedented struggle over the meaning of words and ideas, among them liberty, equality, republic, and laissez-faire. It turned out that in a complex, old-fashioned society like eighteenth-century France, the ideals of liberty and equality were difficult to reconcile with each other. Many French and foreigners were against the Revolution, and so the era was also marked by civil and foreign wars. The drawn-out struggle took the form of writing laws and constitutions, and acts of public protest, so that one of the lasting images we have of the Revolution is of crowds in the streets of Paris. The Revolution reached a climax with the Terror (1793–94). Eventually, and partly as a reaction to the years of turmoil and the civil and foreign wars, a dictatorship emerged under Napoleon Bonaparte (ruled 1799– 1814). Napoleon’s reign was important for its creation, through a series of military victories, of the first modern European empire, stretching from Spain on the west to Russia on the east; the first modern police state (a hint of the twentieth century); and the Napoleonic Code (1804). The Code was based upon some of the ideals of the Enlightenment, particularly the concept of equality—except for women who were allowed almost no personal or economic rights. However, over time the Code proved malleable enough so that in the twentieth century French women gained their rights. The Code also proved transferable, serving as the basis for legal systems across parts of Continental Europe (where it had been carried by Napoleon’s armies), Africa, Latin America, and Asia. The Napoleonic Code is probably the most widely emulated legal system in the world. The era of the French Revolution and Napoleon represented or introduced important modern ideas and practices. The Revolution showed that democracy is difficult to achieve and sustain, but while the transformation of subjects into citizens is complicated and even dangerous, it is a worthy goal. At the same time, a democratic society must be vigilant in protecting itself. The French Revolution, along with the American Revolution, ushered in the legal and symbolic beginning of the era of modern laissez-faire capitalism and the first articulation of what would later be known as human rights. Napoleon Bonaparte’s promise of “Careers Open to Talent” operated on

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the proposition that individuals should advance based on merit and ability rather than family name or inheritance. The Revolution helped establish a modern definition of the republic as a form of government underlain by the principles of the Enlightenment (including natural rights, and the right to vote and hold political office); whose functions are defined in law; and operating under a written constitution describing rights and duties belonging to its citizens. Finally, the French Revolution is important because of the emphasis on the universalism of its principles. Indeed, many revolutionaries were self-conscious about a mission to spread democracy, and indeed of their own important role in world history. This self-consciousness, which sometimes translated into self-sacrifice, is one of the reasons why the Revolution has ever since been a subject of fascination for artists, writers, filmmakers, and of course students and scholars. Similarly, the Revolution has been viewed as a “microcosm,” an encapsulated view of everything to come. Accordingly, the history of the French Revolution is still given a great deal of emphasis in college courses on modern world history. The French Revolution was centered in Paris. Indeed, we can hardly think of the Revolution without thinking of Paris. Napoleon knew this, and partly for this reason he found ways to keep the city under control and at arm’s length. Though he spent much time in Paris, turning it into an imperial capital and overseeing the construction of many impressive buildings and new streets, his reputation came especially from what he did in Egypt, Spain, Germany, and Russia, not Paris.

POLITICS 1 The Revolution begins The “People’s Revolution” of the summer of 1789 began in the corridors of the royal palace at Versailles, the villages and roads of rural France, and the streets of Paris. There had been earlier signs of unrest. France’s economy had struggled since the 1770s, and bad weather in 1788 and 1789 led to popular protests. In April 1789, Paris saw riots by workers at the Réveillon wallpaper manufactory in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. About the same time, Parisians and French were invited to draw up grievance lists (cahiers de doléances) to be considered at the meeting of the Estates General, set to begin at Versailles in May. Parisians’ grievances mirrored the demands of other French for economic and political reform, but there were also specific requests: the tearing down of the Bastille (a former royal building now used as a jail) and the wall of the Farmers-General (tax collectors), built in 1785, where fees (octroi) were collected for goods going in and out of the city. The debates and maneuverings of the Pre-Revolution, the Réveillon riots, and the discussions leading up to the cahiers saw Paris politicized in the months ahead of the Revolution.

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By early summer, as the Estates General was mired in intractable questions of representation among delegates, Paris became a pressure cooker of angry voices in print and on the streets. The actions of King Louis XVI did not help. Paris and Versailles had had an uncomfortable relationship ever since the royal court was moved from the city in the seventeenth century. Now as the delegates at the Estates General bickered, the king summoned troops and fired the finance minister, Jacques Necker, who was a favorite among the people. These moves were viewed as provocations, and Parisians of all classes mobilized: an electoral assembly that had earlier selected deputies to the Estates General reorganized itself into an informal municipal government called the Commune. The National Guard, which was a militia drawn from the bourgeoisie and headed by the Marquis de Lafayette (of the American War of Independence fame), was created, though in reality as much to protect the city from crowds as from royal troops. As news about the ongoing political revolution at Versailles arrived, Parisians, joined by soldiers leaving the ranks, took matters into their own hands. In early July, crowds attacked toll booths along the tax wall, and encouraged by enthusiasts like the journalist Camille Desmoulins, seized weapons, first at the Invalides (a rest home for military veterans) located on the Left Bank and then at the Bastille near the eastern faubourgs. Crowds of working-class men and women along with soldiers attacked and seized the prison from its handful of defenders. There was some bloodshed: almost 100 Parisians died, and the commander of the Bastille and a few soldiers were killed. But for a city as large as Paris and in such a dramatic moment, the violence was limited (Figure 2.1).

FIGURE 2.1 Storming the Bastille, July 1789. Soldiers joined Parisians in the assault. “Vanquishers of the Bastille” were later given rewards. Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

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This was a turning point. With the fall of the Bastille on July 14, Paris had shown itself to be on the side of the revolutionaries at Versailles, now calling themselves the National Assembly. As the countryside erupted in the Great Fear, Louis XVI backed down, withdrawing the troops from around Paris and conceding ground. The Revolution was on.

2 The King and Paris Paris had been the capital of France and home of the monarchy since the Middle Ages. Over the centuries, the relationship between king and city had sometimes been fraught with mutual distrust. Kings, their families, and courts had occasionally felt unsafe living amongst Parisians. The unsettled years of the Fronde (1648–53) convinced Louis XIV and his advisors to build a new residence at Versailles, about twenty miles southwest of Paris. From 1682 until 1789, France’s kings kept themselves physically and psychologically apart from Paris. Where in some sense the king had once been a Parisian, this was no longer the case. The fact that Marie-Antoinette, who became queen of France in 1774, was from Austria, was another argument during the Revolution that the people, and not the king, should exercise sovereign rule over France—indeed, that the king had become “alien” to the “nation.” The undercurrent of animosity between Parisians and royal family persisted after the October Days (1789), during which Parisian working-class women had brought the royal family back to Paris. Once more the city became France’s rightful, as many believed, capital. The tense co-existence between king and capital played out repeatedly during the Revolution. During the Festival of Federation (July 14, 1790), before an enormous crowd of National Guards assembled on the Champ de Mars, Louis XVI swore an oath to a constitution that he did not support. Thereafter, crowds periodically threatened to invade the royal family’s living quarters at the Tuileries. In June 1791, the king made the fateful decision to take his family and flee his Paris “prison.” The plan was to leave under cover of night, meet a small escort, and make their way to Austrian territories across the frontier. But Louis was recognized at the town of Varennes, and he and his family were returned to Paris in disgrace. The Flight to Varennes was a fiasco for the king, whose long-suspected faithlessness toward the Revolution and capital was now revealed. Louis XVI was pressured by the Legislative Assembly to go along with a declaration of war against Austria and Prussia in the spring of 1792. War further radicalized the Revolution, leading to the August invasion of the Tuileries by crowds made up of Parisian sans-culottes and volunteer fédérés from the departments. The royal family was held in custody as the monarchy was abolished and France made a republic by the newly elected National Convention (September, 1792). Following the attack on the Tuileries, the king was kept separate from Marie-Antoinette and their two children. In late 1792, Louis XVI was tried by the National Convention on charges amounting to treason. He was found guilty and, following

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debate among the representatives, was sentenced to death. The execution of “Citizen Louis Capet,” as his death warrant read (Capet being the first dynasty of France and so designated as the surname), was carried out before a great crowd on the Place de la Révolution (today, Place de la Concorde). The former king was led to the scaffold protected by rows of soldiers and guillotined, the severed head displayed to the audience by the executioner in accordance with the routine of the day. The long-troubled history of king and capital seemed to have ended in trauma. In fact, there would be more French kings in the future, but after January 1793, the relationship between Paris and monarchy could never be the same.

3 Political clubs One of the distinctive features of the French Revolution in Paris was the emergence of political clubs. Clubs brought together men (a club for women was closed not long after it opened) of like political ideas and social class. Clubs hosted meetings where members debated, printed important talks from their leaders, wrote petitions, and organized demonstrations. Many club leaders were also politicians elected to the national legislature or municipal government. Most of the best-known Parisian clubs took their names from the building where they met. The Feuillants were organized in summer 1791 as a break-away by moderates from the Jacobins (see below) and in response to the radicalization produced by the Flight to Varennes and the Champ de Mars Massacre. They took their name from the former monastery on the Rue Saint-Honoré where they met. The Feuillants supported a constitutional monarchy and were opposed to the popular politics of clubs like the Cordeliers and Jacobins. The Feuillants had a friend in Lafayette, but after he forsook the Revolution, and with the fall of the monarchy in August 1792, the situation of the Feuillants became impossible. Several Feuillants, including their political leader Antoine Barnave (1761–93), were arrested and executed during the Terror. Members of the Feuillants mostly came from the middle class, and many were from other parts of France. The Cordeliers, on the other hand, were a popular club composed primarily of Parisian sans-culottes. The formal name of the group was the Friends of the Rights of Man and Citizen, but they organized at the former convent of the Cordeliers on the Left Bank and so this became their nickname. The rules governing the Cordeliers were democratic, with no single leader dominating. Among the guiding lights of the Cordeliers at various times were Marat and Hébert. The most famous Cordelier was Georges Danton (1759–94), originally from the provinces, and one of the great orators of the day. Unlike many politicians, he was comfortable mingling with the people. The Cordeliers and Danton were at their height of influence from spring 1792 through summer 1793, taking part in the August 1792 attack on the Tuileries and the creation of the People’s Armies. Danton had

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just become minister of justice when the September Massacres occurred. But the Cordeliers and Danton lost out in the factional struggle with Robespierre, the Jacobins, and the Montagnard section of the National Convention. The Cordeliers were suppressed in the spring of 1794, and Danton—one of the popular favorites of the Revolution, whose statue sits today on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, not far from the site of his club—was tried and executed. The Jacobins were probably the most famous of the Revolutionary clubs. They were founded in October 1789, taking their name from the former convent on the Rue Saint-Honoré where they met. They were the most influential of the clubs, creating a national organization with 1,200 affiliates across France, and having numerous members elected to local and national government. The Paris Jacobin club was especially important. After the King’s Flight to Varennes and under the leadership of Robespierre, the Jacobins were further radicalized, becoming outspoken proponents of a republic to replace the monarchy. Many radical Montagnards in the Convention were Jacobins. Members of the Committee of Public Safety, including Robespierre and Saint-Just, were Jacobins. The Terror was in many ways a Jacobin program, and when the Terror came to an end with a conspiracy in the Convention, the Jacobins paid a price. Robespierre and Saint-Just were executed, and the clubs were closed in Paris and throughout France late in 1794.

4 The Terror, Directory, and Napoleon Bonaparte The Terror was a period of severe, repressive government during the French Revolution. It lasted about a year, from summer 1793 to summer 1794. Historians have long debated the origins and meaning of the Terror. Today, there is some consensus that the Terror came about especially for two reasons: first, as a response to numerous crises—foreign war, civil war, economic downturn, political factionalizing—that threatened to undo both the Revolution and the Republic; second, as a product of rhetoric that drove political actors to extremes. The Terror was especially a Parisian phenomenon because most of the policies that defined it were done so by national governments that were influenced by political life in the city, including the role of crowds.1 Yet most of the founders and leaders of the Terror, including those who made up the twelve members of the Committee of Public Safety, were not from Paris. Among the most influential were the lawyer Maximilien Robespierre (1758–94), who was from Arras in the north, and Louis Antoine de Saint-Just (1767–94) from central France. The Committee of Public Safety guided the National Convention during the Terror, producing the Law of the Maximum and the Law of Suspects, as well as suppressing revolutionary groups, including the Girondins, Hébertistes, and Cordeliers. Assisting in the prosecution of the Terror in Paris was the Commune, the city’s municipal government. Created as the Bastille fell in 1789, the

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Commune became “insurrectionary” when it helped organize the attack on the Tuileries in August 1792. Throughout the Terror, the Committee of Public Safety and the National Convention relied upon the Commune to carry out local directives, including suppression of political opponents. The Commune met at the Hôtel de Ville, today Paris’s city hall. It was dissolved in August 1794, just after Thermidor. In Paris, there were two phases to the Terror: an initial one of about ten months and then the Great Terror of June and July 1794. In the first phase, the government executed approximately three persons each day and during the Great Terror approximately thirty persons each day. “Thermidor” was a month of the revolutionary calendar (July 19–August 17), which was adopted after the fall of the monarchy and the declaration of the Republic in September 1792. Thermidor also stands for the end of the Terror and the end of the reign of the Committee of Public Safety. The end came because of a conspiracy within the National Convention, several representatives of which believed themselves in peril of becoming victims of the guillotine. Robespierre, Saint-Just, and other members of the Committee were arrested on July 27 and executed the following day. Ordinary Parisians—sans-culottes, sectionnaires, and club members—did not rally to their defense, and the Commune quickly backed down from threats to go against the Convention. In a sense, the Terror had succeeded too well in addressing France’s military and economic crises, so that by the summer of 1794 there was no longer a need for overly strong government. Parisians and all French had become sick of the bloodshed. The shift of the Revolution in Paris from moderate to radical now produced the suspicion that republics, which had seemed to hold out so much promise, could also become instruments of repression. The Directory (1795–99) repudiated the Terror but continued the Republic, which to ordinary Parisians seemed plagued by corruption. The triumphant general Napoleon Bonaparte (1799–1814/1815), helped by his supporters, promised to end corruption, even as he also ended the Republic.

SOCIETY 1 Popular politics During the Revolution, and really for the first time in Paris’s history, ordinary people from the working classes participated in political affairs openly and as members of a legitimate movement. Women, too, though they were not allowed to vote or hold office, became participants in the great political events of the day. This political participation mostly took the form of section meetings, reading sans-culotte newspapers and participating in demonstrations, both peaceful and violent.

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Too often overlooked is the element of peaceful protest in Paris during the French Revolution. As Micah Alpaugh has written, the history of non-violent political demonstrations between 1789 and 1795 has been largely overshadowed by the memory of violent collective action. Alpaugh counted 251 political demonstrations in Paris during these years, of which the vast majority were peaceful, and during which crowds and their leaders were far more likely to seek fraternal dialogue with elites than to try to overpower them.2 Popular demonstrations in Revolutionary Paris were often organized by sections, which were the forty-eight municipal bodies created in 1790 that gave the working class a voice in politics. To be a Parisian sectionnaire meant working during the day, attending a meeting at night, keeping up with events by reading the newspapers, and being ready to mobilize for demonstrations— or insurrection—when called upon by political leaders. Some sectionnaires joined the National Guard when admittance became open to them in 1792. To be a Parisian sectionnaire was to have a full political life (Figure 2.2). Popular political life in Paris during the Revolution was also impacted by outspoken journalists like Jean-Paul Marat (1743–93), the publisher of L’Ami du Peuple, a newspaper directed at sans-culottes that often used violent language and sometimes openly advocated similar policies. Marat’s assassination in July 1793 was depicted in the famous painting by JacquesLouis David. Similar to Marat in the use of strong language was Jacques

FIGURE 2.2  Republican Festival, 1793. Celebrating the anniversary of the adoption of a constitution for the new republic following the assault on the Tuileries that overthrew the Bourbon monarchy. Photo by Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo. (Alamy MHPHC7—RM)

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Roux (1752–94), a Catholic priest and spokesperson for an element of the sans-culottes who styled themselves enragés. The enragés demanded radical economic and political reforms. Also similar in the use of violent language, but more skillful as a politician, was Jacques-René Hébert, the editor of Père Duchesne, which employed Parisian argot (the popular language of the street) in its articles. The Hébertistes were proponents of the Dechristianization campaign of 1793. Robespierre thought the Hébertistes went too far, referring to them as ultras. Essentially progressive in their political and economic ideas, but with few specific policies and caught up in the factional infighting of the day, the Hébertistes made the fatal error of threatening insurrection against the Convention and Committee of Public Safety. This led to the arrest and execution of their leaders in early 1794. Popular politics in Paris during the Revolution is best remembered in terms of crowds, demonstrations, and insurrectionary journées: the Champ de Mars Massacre of June 1791, when a large crowd demanding the end of the monarchy was fired upon by troops commanded by Lafayette, killing many persons and sending the Revolution in a more radical direction; the August 1792 attack on the Tuileries palace that overthrew the monarchy, during which Parisian sectionnaires and National Guard were joined by fédérés (army volunteers from other parts of France, the “Marseillaise” the most famous among them); the “September (1792) Massacres,” which saw prisoners from the jails, including priests, summarily tried and killed; and the “purge” of the National Convention in late spring 1793, during which leaders of the faction called Girondins were arrested or driven from the capital. During the Thermidorean years (1795–99), Gracchus Babeuf (1760–97), yet another journalist, whose ideas made him perhaps the first modern communist, attempted to rally Parisian sans-culottes, but his plans were discovered, and he was arrested and executed in 1797. The sections were ended in 1795, and aside from a few labor strikes, popular politics in Paris during the reign of Napoleon were quiet.

2 Sans-culottes A number of images from the French Revolution linger in the imagination through today, among them crowds of Parisians pouring into the streets to protest. The popular events of the Revolution, either peaceful or violent, were called journées. Crowds were composed of men, women, and children, mostly from the laboring classes, including all ranks of the guilds (soon to be former guilds), workers unattached to the guilds, along with elements of the floating poor. Crowds played an important role in Paris through 1795, influencing the course of events and sometimes frightening governments and persons from the upper classes. But when crowds carried the day— as during the taking of the Bastille in July 1789 or the overthrow of the monarchy in August 1792—they were applauded. The Vanquishers of the

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Bastille, most of them from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, received medals for their good deed. As the Revolution proceeded, many Parisians joined political groups, including clubs like the Cordeliers or section meetings that were part of the new political apparatus. In 1789, crowds mostly reacted to events, but by 1791 and 1792 politicized crowds were pro-active, armed wings of clubs, sections, or political factions. This was the situation that saw the emergence of the sans-culottes—working-class activists who came together to influence the course of history between 1791 and 1795. They were “sans-culottes” because they were without “culottes”: the short trousers worn by the upper classes. Sans-culottes belong to the people and were fiercely proud of their origins, confident that their time had come and that they were agents of change. Dressed in distinctive garb that for men might include striped trousers, the short jacket known as the carmagnole, and red Phrygian cap (an ancient sign of manumission), the typical sans-culotte worked during the day, attended a section meeting in the evening, and was ready to come into the streets when political leaders or favored journalists made the call. Sans-culotte crowds participated in the great journées after 1791: the Champ de Mars Massacre (July 1791), the attack on the Tuileries palace that overthrew Louis XVI (August 1792), the September (1792) Massacres, and the purging of the Girondins from the National Convention (May– June, 1793). Parisian sans-culottes and their leaders were also instrumental in the creation of the People’s Armies of 1793–94. The People’s Armies were Parisian militias that marched through the countryside compelling peasants to bring their grain to market and to ensure that the rural population was not abandoning the Revolution, sometimes hauling along a mobile guillotine to enforce the point. The People’s Armies faded as their excesses provoked a reaction, even from revolutionary leaders like Maximilien Robespierre, which in turn eventually led to the repression of sans-culotte political leaders and their newspapers. The sans-culottes were a fleeting, but eye-catching phenomenon. Later historians such as Albert Soboul would interpret the sans-culottes as precursors of Karl Marx’s revolutionary proletarians.

3 Parisian women during Revolution The French Revolution promised liberty, equality, and brotherhood, and over the long term, these goals were delivered, if imperfectly. As Lynn Hunt describes, the French Revolution produced the first articulation of what we now know as human rights.3 Since 1789, the pursuit of human rights has swept the world, and much of the history that led to the concept began in Paris. At the same time, the history of the Revolution is striking for its exclusion of women from the promise of emancipation that was made to working-class men, Jews and Protestants (whose beliefs had been suppressed

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under the Old Regime), and slaves in the French Caribbean colonies. During the Revolution, women’s rights were not yet fully part of the thinking about human rights. Yet Parisian women, as members of crowds and as individual actors, played an important role from the start of the Revolution. Women were in the crowds that besieged the Bastille in July 1789, and then dominated the October Days, when a large group of working-class women marched to Versailles to confront the king and force the royal family to return to Paris with them. The march succeeded and Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, and their two children, with the National Assembly following, were brought to Paris where an eye could be kept on them. Parisian women thus returned the king to Paris after an absence of more than a century. This was another turning point in the Revolution. Parisian women were politicized after 1789, and though they could not vote or hold political office, some formed clubs, the best known of which was the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women. But the movement of women into politics also provoked a reaction among male revolutionary leaders, including sans-culottes, and the women’s clubs were closed by 1793. When opportunities arose to include women in the political sphere—for instance, during the voting for the National Convention in fall of 1792 and the subsequent writing of the Constitution of 1793—women were excluded. With the Napoleonic Code of 1804, patriarchy was reasserted in virtually all spheres of French society. The actions and writings of individual Parisian women during the Revolution left a legacy that would contribute to the women’s rights movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Madame Roland (1754–93) had been an influential voice favoring the Girondins (a prominent political faction) during the Legislative Assembly (1791–92). Germaine de Staël (1766–1817), the daughter of one of Louis XVI’s finance ministers, was an early supporter of the Revolution before she fled Paris, setting up a salon and establishing herself as an opponent of Napoleon. The playwright Olympe de Gouges (1748–93) penned the “Declaration of the Rights of Women” (1791), which took seriously the promises and logic of universalism and human rights. She, like Madame Roland and other Parisians during the Revolution—female and male—met a tragic end, with arrest and execution at the guillotine during the Terror. The queen, Marie-Antoinette, who had never been popular with Parisians, was tried and executed in the fall of 1793.

4 Gilded Youth The Revolution in Paris was mostly the work of persons in what we would today think of as early middle age: Olympe de Gouges and the painter JacquesLouis David were forty-one years old in 1789; Maximilien Robespierre thirty-one; Georges Danton (the popular leader of the Cordeliers club) thirty; and Lafayette thirty-two. There were a handful of youthful revolutionary

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leaders, Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just (age twenty-two in 1789) the most famous. A generation of Parisian children and teens came of age during the Revolutionary era, many of the boys to become soldiers during the long era of war that began in 1792. As under the Old Regime and later during the nineteenth century, unsupervised or abandoned children—“gamins”—lived in the streets of Paris where they were quick to join crowds. A distinctive feature related to youth during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era was the phenomenon of the Muscadin (from the musk perfume they wore), also known as jeunesse dorée or Gilded Youth in English. The Muscadin were elegantly dressed young men, prone to posing and violence (many of them ostentatiously carried large clubs), and among whose pursuits was intimidating—sometimes assaulting—Jacobins and sans-culottes. Muscadin passed the time on street corners and in the cafés of the Palais-Royal. They were a product of the Thermidorean Reaction, the period after the Terror and fall of Robespierre when middle- and upper-class Parisians—intimidated themselves during the height of the Revolution—now returned to the public sphere and the streets. A government—first, the postTerror phase of the Convention and then the Directory (1795–99)—was now in place that favored the bourgeoisie, as the Convention had seemed to favor the sans-culottes. Muscadin assisted the government in putting down the last two popular rebellions of Parisian sans-culottes in April and June 1795. While the phenomenon of the Gilded Youth faded fairly quickly, the sartorial reaction by young people against the cultural impositions of the Revolution continued. Outlandish dress by young men, dubbed Incroyables for their eye-catching outfits, briefly followed the Muscadin. Young women from the Parisian middle- and upper-classes joined male counterparts to mark the Directory, in retrospect, as a period of hedonism. As the Parisian sans-culottes retreated after 1795, the elegant youth of Paris partied.

BHVP

P

aris has an abundance of libraries that are repositories for wonderful collections and places for study and research. The city’s internet website currently lists seventy-two “municipal and specialized” libraries. Among these are the National Library (Bibliothèque Nationale), both old and new locations, where researchers from across the world come to research; the Bibliothèque Forney in the aristocratic Hôtel de Sens on the Right Bank, which is dedicated to the decorative and fine arts; the Bibliothèque Louise Michel, a perfectly modern and typical Right Bank neighborhood library; and the “BPI” (library of public instruction), situated in the busy center of the city on an upper floor of the Pompidou Center, with open stacks perpetually crowded with students and the public.

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If one wants to do research on the city of Paris, the place to go (naturally) is Paris itself. The specialized library devoted to the history of the city is the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris (BHVP), located on the Rue Pavée in the Right Bank’s Marais district. The BHVP was founded in 1871, and since 1969 has been housed at the Hôtel de Lamoignon— an old, aristocratic residence (complete with courtyard) that dates from the mid-sixteenth century. In fact, the library originated in the Hôtel de Lamoignon in the mid-eighteenth century as a gift from the bibliophile Parisian Antoine Moriau. This was the very first public library in Paris (it was open two days a week). Later, the collections were expanded and moved to different sites across the city. In 1871, the library was housed at the city hall (Hôtel de Ville). When that building was burned during the Commune, all the collections were destroyed. A new collection was begun with a donation of 6,000 books by Jules Cousin and space was set aside for the library at the Hôtel Carnavalet—now the museum of the city of Paris and close to the Hôtel Lamoignon. By the early 1890s, the collection included more than 100,000 volumes. The city bought the Hôtel Lamoignon in 1928, and the BHVP moved there in 1969. The BHVP’s collections are especially strong in materials from the sixteenth century to the present, and include books (about a million), journals, manuscripts, newspapers, prints, posters, maps, photographs, and postcards; there are excellent special collections on theater, literature, and feminism. Just to cite a few examples, the BHVP holds papers from the writers George Sand and Gustave Flaubert; from the philosophe Voltaire; from the Revolutionary-era journalist Camille Desmoulins; and from the prosecutor of the Terror, Antoine Fouquier-Tinville. The BHVP is not an open-stack library. To use it, one has an audience with the staff, fills out a form, and acquires a picture ID. There is a reference room for preliminary research. The reading room itself is a long, rectangular space with tables and lamps. Requests for materials are written out and presented to the président de la salle, and materials are then brought to the researcher. The BHVP is a quiet, classic space to immerse oneself in the history of Paris.

ECONOMY 1 Abolition of guilds and beginning of laissez-faire Parisian guilds were in trouble even before the Revolution. Under the Old Regime, skilled journeymen found fewer opportunities to advance against masters entrenched in their position in the corporate hierarchy. Critics advocating the introduction of a free market had the momentum. Even the

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monarchy, long a friend of guilds, seemed to have lost the will to defend them. The Revolution brought to the fore persons who were ready to introduce laissez-faire into the workings of society and economy. Laissez-faire was founded on the notion that natural laws should govern economic relations and that removing constraints imposed by the guilds or government would, over time, improve production and the standard of living for all. It was a doctrine formulated in the middle of the eighteenth century by French physiocrats, though it reached a pinnacle of expression with the Scottish philosophe Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776). Laissez-faire ideas showed up in the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen of August 1789 and in subsequent debates of the National Assembly as that body wrote a constitution for France. In March 1791, the Assembly voted to abolish the guilds. Laissez-faire thinking meant that nothing should interfere with the free play of economic forces, and so soon afterward (June 1791) the Assembly passed the Le Chapelier Law outlawing all economic “coalitions.” The Le Chapelier Law would render labor unions and strikes illegal in France for most of the nineteenth century. The guilds were gone, and workers were not allowed to organize for their economic interests. Many sans-culottes, now “free agents” in the labor market, were former masters and journeymen from the guilds. The many Revolutionary crises that began in 1791 with the king’s attempted flight (he and his family were discovered at the town of Varennes and returned ignominiously to Paris), the Champ de Mars Massacre, the political fracturing of the country, and the movement toward foreign and civil wars, all led to the Terror, which at its core was strong, oppressive rule in the face of multiple crises. Another crisis was economic, as grain supplies became short and prices rose. The National Convention (1792–95), at the urging of Parisian sans-culottes and the Committee of Public Safety, which was the executive government of the Terror, passed the Law of the General Maximum (September 1793) to set prices for essential commodities like bread. Not long after the end of the Terror in summer 1794, the Convention ended the Maximum and a new government (the Directory) resumed the application of laissez-faire practices in the economy. However, laissez-faire did not bring general prosperity. Grain distribution and the price of bread continued to be problematic. The decline in value of the assignat (paper currency) and bad harvests led to high bread prices that were partly behind aborted sans-culottes uprisings in the spring of 1795. This period of renewed laissez-faire and hard times in Paris spawned the theft of a loaf of bread that began the character “Jean Valjean’s” long pilgrimage to justice in Victor Hugo’s nineteenth-century epic novel Les Misérables.

2 Panthéon and Rue de Rivoli In most respects, the day-to-day machinery of the Parisian economy— shops, building sites, manufactories, and all the rest—continued without interruption during the first years of the Revolution. Strikes among building

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workers in the spring of 1791 were a sign of unhappiness, and then in 1793 prices rose and bread became expensive, which led to the price and wage controls of the Law of the Maximum. Regardless of laissez-faire principles, municipal authorities, the National Assembly, and the monarchy—now permanently seated in Paris following the October Days of 1789—were keenly aware of the need to find jobs for the unemployed; in the mind of the authorities, jobless Parisians could turn to riot. The need to create jobs, better the city’s economy by improving transportation, along with a desire to create monuments to the new political order, were factors in the inauguration of several large building projects in Paris during the Revolution and Napoleonic era. Many of the main thoroughfares and buildings that come to mind when we think of Paris today are the result of work begun (though not always completed) between 1789 and 1815. One of the largest projects was the Panthéon, situated on the Left Bank. Construction of the building had begun under Louis XV as a church dedicated to Sainte-Geneviève and designed by the architect JacquesGermain Soufflot. After the Revolution of 1789, the National Assembly completed the project with a workforce composed of Parisian and migrant stonemasons, stonecutters, carpenters, and other construction trades, who under the Revolution now fashioned themselves “citizen-builders.”4 The church was re-christened, befitting the tenor of the Enlightenment and in the tradition of Roman antiquity, as a “pantheon,” or temple of great men. The famous Enlightenment philosophe, Voltaire, was among the first to be interred there. Periodically a church in the nineteenth century, Paris’s Panthéon has the remains of France’s greatest personalities, women now included (Figure 2.3). The Panthéon had two purposes: celebrate the great figures of France and signal a change from the age of institutional religion to the age of secular reason. Its construction also created jobs for unemployed workers. Another large project that brought jobs was the construction of the Rue de Rivoli, named in honor of one of Napoleon Bonaparte’s military victories (Italy, 1797). The plan here was to create a major east-west thoroughfare linking the faubourgs of the east with the Tuileries (and eventually beyond to the Champs-Élysées) in the west. The work would be completed in stages. One section was open by 1800, but it would take until the mid-nineteenth century for the full thoroughfare to be finished. As the Rue de Rivoli took shape, it was given a special look: commercial activity was limited and arcades—a distinctive feature of the nineteenth-century Parisian landscape—were added to protect pedestrians from the elements. The numbering of houses and buildings had begun in the 1760s and was mostly completed under Napoleon. The Rue de Rivoli was a major thoroughfare that helped the city’s economy and yet remained alluring to flâneurs: pedestrians strolling to look and be looked at. There would be more of this style of roadwork in the city’s future. At the same time, older buildings were redesigned to newer purposes: Luxembourg Palace on the Left Bank, built by Marie de Medici in the seventeenth century, became the new Senate; and work on the Madeleine

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FIGURE 2.3  The Panthéon. Dedicated to the secular heroes of France, the building was finished in 1790. The remains of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other makers of the Enlightenment and Revolution were brought here from the start; women were not honored until the twentieth century. © Casey Harison.

Church on the Right Bank was completed under Napoleon to become a “temple of glory” (during the Restoration, it would become, once again, a Catholic church, as it remains today).

3 Workers during Revolutionary and Napoleonic era As elsewhere across the Atlantic, something like a modern working class began to emerge in Paris during the “Age of Revolution.” It was modern in the sense that laborers were no longer members of a guild and so, in theory, could act as free agents in the labor market; modern, too, because they were citizens, voting in elections and holding a range of civil rights, though female workers did not. But Parisian workers in the era of the Revolution and Napoleon were not particularly modern in the jobs they performed and in their places of work: in Paris, there was almost nothing in the way of industry and factories like those in a contemporary British city such as Manchester. Parisian workers still performed the same kind of artisanal or unskilled work

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they had done for a long time. The sans-culottes phenomenon—politically precocious, but vocationally old-fashioned—represented this transitional stage in the evolution of the Parisian working class. The politicization of the Parisian working class concerned authorities during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic years. In the first half of the 1790s, the crowds that played such an important role during the insurrectionary journées were mostly composed of working-class males between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five. Periodic labor strikes (occurring even though they were illegal) through 1807 were an additional concern. The response by Napoleon to collective action from workers was to exert more government control. A law of 1800 created the office of prefect for police and departments all across the country; in Paris, a new police headquarters was set up on the Quai des Orfèvres (where it is still located). The livret—an internal passport that employers and police had to sign when workers changed jobs or residence—had been mandatory since the 1780s. Now under Napoleon, prefects in departments across France were assigned the task of watching seasonal migrants going to and from the capital. Police spies (mouches) circulated among the crowds of workers looking for jobs at the city’s hiring fairs. At the upper reaches of Napoleon’s government, there was discussion about control of the workforce and production: indeed, something like a “corporate revival” was even considered. Bureaux de placement, which were hiring offices designed to bring together unemployed workers and bosses in a setting controlled by the authorities, were opened in Paris in 1810. These bureaux did not last long, but nonetheless this was a sign of the government’s reservations about the laissez-faire inclination to turn workers into free agents. More important in determining the future terrain of workerboss relations, and another way the state negotiated a path between laissezfaire and public order, were the conseils des prudhommes (first opened in Lyon in 1806). The conseils were mediating bodies organized according to industry and composed of workers, bosses (patrons) and the holders of licenses (patentes) that gave individuals the right to operate workshops. The intent was to “restore order” to production, as well as to address a variety of “abuses” that had come to light since the dissolution of the guilds. From the start, the conseils had some success, as both workers and bosses began to look to them to solve disputes. Still, it was only near the end of the nineteenth century that the conseils would become effective in addressing the issues that especially troubled Parisian workers: long hours, low wages, and exploitative subcontracting.

4 New Men A development during Paris’s transition from Old Regime to New, and one that reflected the fluidity of the city’s labor market, was the emergence of New Men: ambitious, small-time entrepreneurs. New Men seemed to be a novel social phenomenon. In terms of numbers and influence, this is in some

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ways true. Yet historically, arrivistes have thrived periodically in Paris’s long history. As early as the seventeenth century, the presence of nouveaux in the Paris construction industry alarmed Louis XIV. By the late eighteenth century, this new breed seemed to reflect the process by which enterprise and entrepreneurs had begun to take on the modern quality of seeking a profit rather than aspiring to quality in the production of goods. A great many New Men belonged to the construction industry. If not always easily absorbed into the older elite, and the continuing object of criticism and concern, after 1789 New Men came to be viewed as legitimate economic actors. By the mid-nineteenth century, they were familiar figures in the social and cultural landscape of the capital. And slowly but surely, the values they adhered to mixed into the larger society. By the Bourbon Restoration (1815–30), New Men had become a virtual stereotype in Paris—stock characters, for instance, in the novels of Honoré de Balzac. Despite their growing prominence as a type, it is difficult to know much about the social origins of New Men. The usual image is of a working-class or petit bourgeois upbringing in the provinces. Every indication is that the crucial impetus in their rise was the abolition of the guilds, which set the stage for improved social mobility. The changes wrought by the Revolution and Napoleon encouraged speculation in housing during the first half of the nineteenth century, with which the flowering of subcontracting in the building trades and the emergence of New Men seemed to go hand in hand. New Men in New Regime Paris were small-time capitalists ready to take advantage of opportunities in an age of ascendant laissez-faire. They possessed just the right qualities to do so: the willingness to work hard, hustle contracts, locate and hire cheap labor, and acquire the patente required of those selling services and employing workers. At the same time in a nineteenth-century economy that would see repeated “busts” and “booms,” New Men could quickly become “has beens.”

CULTURE 1 Jacques-Louis David Many leading figures of the Revolution in Paris did not survive the era. The painter Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) did, applying his talents through virtually all phases of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic years. David was unusual among contemporary painters and revolutionaries in being a native Parisian. He was born into a prosperous family and honed his talent as a young man by working with prominent artists in academies and studios in Paris, and then going on a tour of Italy to see the works of the masters of Antiquity and the Renaissance. David had talent, and though he could be difficult to get along with, his abilities were recognized. He was also ready to make a break with the Rococo style favored by his teachers. The

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paintings that brought David fame at an early age looked back to Antiquity for stories, highlighting civic virtues like patriotism, vigilance, duty, and sacrifice that in hindsight seemed a forecast of 1789. This was much different from the usual aristocratic frivolity of Rococo. David’s Oath of the Horatii (1786) signaled the serious politics of the Revolutionary years. His Neoclassical tastes were combined with a steady, meticulous technique. Politically, David was a supporter of the Revolution; he became the great painter of the era through the reign of Napoleon. The Tennis Court Oath (1794) shows the epic birth of the Revolution when members of the Third Estate, meeting at a tennis court at Versailles, vowed not to disband until a constitution was written. The Death of Marat (1793) depicting the moment of assassination of the Revolution’s secular martyr may be the most famous painting of the period. As a Jacobin elected to the National Convention in 1792, David took part in the great political decisions of the day. He and his students designed costumes for representatives in the Convention. David was “pageant master” for the Festival of the Supreme Being (June 1794) during the height of the Terror. His charcoal sketch of Marie-Antoinette seated in a tumbril on the way to the guillotine is one of the most chilling images of the day. David survived Thermidor (though he spent some time in jail) and after 1796 painted large canvasses celebrating Napoleon and the Empire. His best-known works for Napoleon showed the general’s mythic crossing of the Alps with his army during the Italian campaign of 1800, and the crowning of the emperor in 1803, surrounded by family and dignitaries at Notre-Dame Cathedral. David rarely painted scenes of Paris, though he painted portraits of Parisians. His penetrating portrayals of personalities like the Abbé Sieyès (1817) and Madame Récamier (1800) were much different from the epic narratives of his larger canvasses, but no less memorable. Girouette—weather vane—was the term used to describe persons who survived the Revolution by shifting their loyalties with the political winds, and there was some of this in David. With Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815 and the return of Louis XVIII to the throne, David exiled himself to Brussels where he continued to paint until his death in 1824.

2 Dechristianization and Festival of Supreme Being A rejection of the Catholic Church was implicit in much of the work of the philosophes during the Enlightenment. Voltaire was an open skeptic of religion and Rousseau thought it better to replace formal Catholicism with a kind of state-sponsored belief in a non-sectarian supreme deity. In July 1790, the National Assembly put into law the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which radically reformed the practice of Catholicism in France, upending the old hierarchy, requiring the election (rather than appointment)

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of priests and bishops, and obliging all clerics to take an oath to the political constitution. The Civil Constitution split the country and turned many, especially in the countryside, against the Revolution. In Paris, anti-clerical attitudes were strong, certainly during the intense months of the Terror. The number of clerics in the city dropped from several thousand to a few hundred after 1789, and as elsewhere in France church property was declared biens nationaux: seized and sold to pay off the national debt. The Dechristianization movement of 1793 was a direct challenge to established religion, and the most radical and eye-catching of the anti-clerical movements in Paris during the Revolution. Dechristianization was marked by iconoclasm (the destruction of religious symbols or the renaming of buildings or streets) and even an attempt to replace Catholic belief with non-sectarian worship. Churches were attacked and the tombs of French kings at the cathedral of Saint-Denis, just north of the city (now part of the Parisian banlieue), were desecrated. The Commune took the lead in Dechristianizing in the fall of 1793, closing the remaining churches and staging a Festival of Reason at Notre-Dame Cathedral. The radical popular leader Hébert, along with Pierre Chaumette, the head of the Commune, envisioned something like a complete Dechristianizing of the city. This was too much for Robespierre and the National Convention, and the movement was shut down and its leaders arrested. As an ardent follower of Rousseau, Robespierre was both a critic of the Catholic Church and a believer in a non-sectarian deity—a Supreme Being. Few revolutionaries were out-and-out atheists. Like Rousseau, Robespierre saw a civic function in the practice of religion. Accordingly, during the Great Terror, Robespierre persuaded the National Convention to authorize a Festival of the Supreme Being. Jacques-Louis David and his artistic school designed the event, creating costumes for political leaders, including Robespierre, who seemed to take a peculiar pleasure in all the extravagance. The Festival took place on June 8, 1794 (20 Prairial, Year II of the Revolutionary Calendar). Large crowds turned out to watch Robespierre and representatives from the Convention parade through the streets, culminating with elaborate ceremonies at the Champ de Mars. A little more than a month later, Robespierre was guillotined, the Terror was ended, and the turn away from traditional Catholic practice—brief in historical hindsight—was over.

3 Guillotine Many long-term accomplishments, which most persons today would deem “positive,” took place in Paris during the Revolution. These accomplishments included the creation of a modern republic, the writing of constitutions, and the granting of the right to vote for all eligible males (universal manhood suffrage). Indeed, there is an argument to be made that the principle of human rights, which has done so much to transform the politics of the world,

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was founded in Paris during these years. Yet, in popular culture and memory it is usually images of demagogues, surging crowds, and the guillotine that define how we remember the Revolution in Paris. The guillotine was endorsed by the surgeon Joseph Ignace Guillotin near the start of the Revolution as an efficient, comparatively humane form of capital punishment. The device was introduced to the Place de Grève (now the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville) in central Paris in April 1792. From 1792 to 1795, the guillotine was shifted from location to location: to the Place de la Révolution, the Place de la Bastille, the Place du Trône-Renversé (now Place de la Nation), and back to the Place de Grève, where it would remain until 1830. The Place de Grève already had a unique history in Paris as a center of politics and economic activity, as well as a setting for public executions. Notorious criminals of the Old Regime—Ravaillac, Cartouche, and Damiens—had been legally tortured and put to death there. There was also a tradition of popular celebration attached to the Place, since it was where the annual bonfire of Saint-Jean—celebrated in June during MidSummer’s Day and very popular with ordinary Parisians—occurred. But beginning with the Revolution, the Place de Grève more and more evoked macabre images that would linger well into the nineteenth century. Almost every day from the summer of 1793 through the summer of 1794, tumbrils carrying the convicted rumbled through the streets of Paris on the way to the guillotine. The list of political leaders and personalities who were publicly executed at the guillotine in Paris still leaves us bewildered. They included figures of the Old Regime like Louis XVI (before a large crowd at the Place de la Révolution in January 1793), the queen Marie-Antoinette (October 1793), and Philippe Égalité, formerly the Duc d’Orléans (November 1793); political moderates like Olympe de Gouges (November 1793) and Jean-Pierre Brissot (October 1793); and the revolutionaries themselves: Hébert (March 1794), the journalist Camille Desmoulins (April 1794), Danton (April 1794), Chaumette (April 1794), Saint-Just (July 1794), and Robespierre (July 1794). More than 2,600 persons were executed by guillotine in Paris during the Terror. Like later revolutions, the Revolution in Paris seemed to consume its own.

4 Festivals and Napoleonic style Festivals were a distinctive aspect of the French Revolution in Paris. For a long time, they were considered by scholars to have been frivolous events, but their history was cast in a fresh light with Mona Ozouf’s Festivals and the French Revolution (1988), which used insights from the work of the nineteenth-century French sociologist Emile Durkheim to make sense of the Revolution’s seeming obsession with public celebration.5 Almost from the start, there was a kind of mania for festivals, beginning with the Festival of Federation held July 14, 1790 (the first Bastille

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FIGURE 2.4  Vendôme Column. A symbol of Napoleon Bonaparte’s military and political power, the Column is on the Right Bank. It was destroyed by Communards in 1871, but rebuilt. © Casey Harison.

Day) at the Champ de Mars. Here as in other “fêtes,” a point of all the spectacle was transference of “sacrality” from king to nation. In a sense, festivals were a sign of the demise of the Old Regime and the birth of the New Regime. The organizers of festivals replaced Catholic worship with the idealization of civic virtues like Reason and the Christian god with a non-denominational Supreme Being. Nature, not the Bible, was now venerated. “Liberty trees” were planted to symbolize the growth of restored virtue. Intellectual heroes like Voltaire and Rousseau replaced the worship of Catholic saints. The substitution of the Old Regime’s white Bourbon flag with the Revolutionary tricolor flag in 1789, the enacting of the Revolutionary Calendar (observed 1793–1805), and the building of the Panthéon in Paris to house the secular heroes of France’s past were corollaries of the fascination with festivals.

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Revolutionary festivals in Paris continued through the Directory. They came to an end after Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état of November 1799. But the flair and style of the era did not—the trappings surrounding Napoleon, particularly after the Empire was declared in 1804, tended toward the garish: bright gold and red were the unofficial hues, showing up repeatedly, for instance, in portraits of the Emperor. Napoleon’s selfcrowning as Emperor at Notre-Dame Cathedral (December 2, 1804), captured in the huge oil canvass by David, is representative of this imperial style. Napoleon wanted large public testimonials to his rule done in the vein of Imperial Rome rather than Revolutionary Paris (Figure 2.4). He wanted to produce something that would last through the ages, and these came in the form of large monuments, many of them familiar landmarks in today’s Paris. The Arc de Triomphe (the centerpiece of the Place l’Etoile) was a monument to Napoleon’s military victories. Its construction was slated for the western end of the Champs-Élysées as part of a plan to define Paris along west-east and north-south axes; begun in 1806, it was not completed until 1836. Neoclassical form was used to do more work on the Madeleine church (originally started in the 1760s) and the Bourse (the Parisian stock exchange), and a column modeled on Trajan’s in Rome was placed at the Place Vendôme. The Vendôme Column supplanted another of Louis XIV and was made of metal from 1,200 Austrian cannons captured at the Battle of Austerlitz (1805); predictably, it was crowned with a statue of Napoleon himself. Later in the century, the Vendôme Column would become a detested symbol for opponents of Bonapartism. Today, the Column and the surrounding Place Vendôme host the world-famous Ritz Hotel and shops for the wealthy (Figure 2.5).

Conclusion Paris became the Capital of Revolution after 1789 for the Atlantic World that included Europe, the Americas, and Caribbean. (In the twentieth century, the mantle of revolutionary “Capital” would pass to the Soviet Union.) The emergence of new forms of popular politics and the politicization of ordinary Parisians was part of this process. Paris blazed the trail for patterns of modern revolution in the nineteenth century and beyond; scholars still devote a great deal of attention to Paris and the Revolution for the script of modern change that was written between 1789 and 1815. The Revolutionary Wars that began in 1792 intensified the fervor of the age. The Revolution saw the French monarchy come back to Paris for the first time since the seventeenth century, and yet the relationship between king and Parisians remained fraught. Louis XVI and his family showed their dislike of the Revolution and of Parisians by trying to flee the city in 1791. A popular insurrection in August 1792 overthrew the monarchy and brought the country a step closer to being a modern republic. Thousands

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of Parisians witnessed the public execution of the king in early 1793. For good or ill, Paris was the heart of the great French Revolution of 1789–94. This was where policies were debated, memorable personalities clashed, and the insurrectionary journées played out, determining the course of history for Paris, France, and all those corners of Europe and the world where the events of 1789–94 would set a pattern. It was in Paris where demagogues and profound thinkers navigated the unpredictable terrain; it was the setting where radical, popular movements like Dechristianization and the People’s Armies took shape; and it was the birthplace of the fleeting, but prescient phenomenon of the sans-culottes. Men were given the right to vote, Jews and slaves in the French colonies emancipated, but the promise of citizenship for women was left unfulfilled. Paris was also the main setting of the Terror of 1793–94. It is not incorrect to argue that Paris was the birthplace of the “modern” at the end of the eighteenth century. And yet the Terror did come to an end and the revolutionary journées subsided. Paris under Napoleon Bonaparte, who came to power in a coup d’état in 1799, was politically quiet compared to the early 1790s. Perhaps Parisians had had enough of revolution, at least for the moment. Napoleon made Paris the capital of his growing European empire, and yet he kept the city at a distance. Paris was the imperial capital under Napoleon, but no longer a cosmopolitan place, cut off by war from rest of Europe. Paris would not really become a familiar part of Europe again until the Empire ended with the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815.

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3 Paris during the Restoration, 1815–1830

Chronology 1815 Napoleon’s “100 Days”—second Restoration of Bourbons 1820 Assassination of Duc de Berri 1822 Execution of “Three Sergeants of La Rochelle” 1824 Death of Louis XVIII and accession of Charles X 1830 “Three Glorious Days” and Revolution of 1830

Introduction The early summer of 1815 saw the final defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte at the battle of Waterloo, bringing to an end the long era of revolution and war that began in 1789. Parisians, French, and Europeans were exhausted by the struggle. The nations opposed to the Revolution and Napoleon—Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia—had won. The Congress of Vienna (1814–15) presided over the defeat of France and attempted to restore what was left of the Old Regime. Tsar Alexander I of Russia fashioned a “Holy Alliance” to protect against the chance of anymore Robespierres or Bonapartes. In fact, the years since 1789 had seen too many changes that could not really be undone. The French Revolution and what it stood for seemed to be gone in 1815, but before the end of the century a republic would return, and in a form that would allow it to remain for the long term. France, of course, is a republic (the Fifth) today. The Bourbon monarchy had come to an end with an insurrection in Paris in August 1792, and this was followed by the public execution of Louis XVI

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in January 1793. But now the Bourbons were restored to power, twice in fact, by the military victories of France’s opponents: first in the spring of 1814, and a second time following the “100 Days,” when Napoleon returned from his first exile and briefly resuscitated a government and army. In the summer of 1815, Louis XVIII, a younger brother of Louis XVI who had lived in exile for many years, was back on the throne. Where France had been treated with magnanimity after the defeat of 1814, a year later the victorious Allies were less forgiving. France was not allowed to return to the fold of European nations until the 1820s. Meanwhile, Louis XVIII attempted to manage the difficult restoration of the Old Regime. In fact, he probably knew that the old days could not be brought back. Not so his brother, Charles X, who succeeded to the throne after Louis XVIII’s death in 1824. Charles X was more stubborn and backward-looking—so much so that he inadvertently laid the groundwork for a Parisian revolution that would overthrow him and the Bourbons (for good) in 1830. The years after 1815 opened up a period of rediscovery of Paris for the rest of the world. Foreigners, who had been kept away from the French capital during the years of upheaval and war, now could visit Paris. Returning, too, were political exiles, sometimes to claim property and exact political revenge. The Restoration saw a renewal in the relationship between Paris and the outside world and a generation of Parisians displaced by Revolution and war. The rediscovery of Paris coincided with an artistic reaction against the Classicism that had dominated during the Revolution. “Romanticism” in painting, music, and theater celebrated “genius” and “spirit.” The passions that found expression in politics and war between 1789 and 1815 now shifted to other human arenas, and Paris remained a center of this ferment.

POLITICS 1 1815: Restoration of Bourbon monarchy The year 1815 was a year of great transition for Paris, France, and Europe. Following the French defeat at Waterloo and the end of the 100 Days (June 1815), Napoleon was exiled under British guard to the small island of Saint Helena in the Atlantic Ocean. It seemed like the Old Regime would be back in control as Louis XVIII and his entourage returned to Paris for a second time. Unlike 1814, in the summer of 1815 there was no threat of siege or final battles at the city walls. Many Parisians, especially those from the upper classes, were ready to see the Napoleonic adventure come to an end, even if genuine enthusiasm for the Bourbons was mixed with trepidation about the intentions of former émigrés returning home. Among the foreign troops and dignitaries entering Paris in the spring of 1814 were the Russian Tsar Alexander I and his army; this was a world turned upside down from 1812, when Napoleon had led his army into Moscow and

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departed as it burned. In 1815, Paris was no longer the capital of a European empire, but of an occupied country. Accordingly, Louis XVIII took care not to appear too much “in the baggage” of the foreign powers. He considered the possibility of returning France’s national government to Versailles, but in the end kept it at Paris, making the Tuileries his residence. The restored Bourbon king was astute enough to know that it would serve no great purpose to make Paris pay for the overthrow of the monarchy in 1792 and the executions of his brother and Marie-Antoinette in 1793. The year 1815 did see a White Terror in parts of France, especially the south, but Paris accepted the transition from emperor to restored king much as the city had accepted the transition from republic to consulate to empire: quietly. Louis XVIII did replace the tricolor flag of the Revolution and Napoleon with the Bourbon white flag. The Tuileries became the center of Restoration-era culture and art. Louis XVIII was not the only émigré to return after 1815. Others who left Paris during the Revolution or under Napoleon now came back, some of them becoming politicians in the new legislature created by the Charter. The Charter was not exactly a constitution, though it did retain some of the reforms of 1789–1815. France now had a limited monarchy working with a legislature itself the product of a small voting electorate determined by wealth. In granting the Charter of his own volition, Louis XVIII rejected the idea of popular sovereignty. With the Bourbon Restoration of 1815 came an effort to bring back the power and prestige of the Catholic Church in Paris—damaged during the Revolution, though there had been some recovery when Napoleon signed a Concordat with the Pope in 1801. There was also a popular religious revival in some sections of Parisian society, with renewed interest in Catholic festivals and rituals. A handful of new churches were built, notably in the well-off areas of western Paris, including Notre-Dame-de-Lorette (1822) in the ninth arrondissement. The Catholic restoration mostly happened for upper-class Parisians.

2 Reaction King Louis XVIII had spent many years in exile contemplating the fate of his executed brother and the Bourbon dynasty. He came back to Paris in 1815 with a realistic turn of mind, prepared to accept much that the Revolution and Napoleon had done to change France and the world. Others—former émigrés or those who had stayed in France but managed to keep a low profile—were less prepared to be magnanimous, some of whom were now elected to the Chamber of Deputies or the Chamber of Peers in the new bicameral legislature created by the Charter. In elections of October 1815, the Chamber of Deputies was dominated by Ultras, who were reactionary royalists—persons determined to undo what the Revolution had accomplished, which included the desire to restore more powers to the king. This was more than Louis XVIII had expected from a legislature that was labeled “chambre introuvable”

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(unimaginable chamber). Opposing the Ultras was a group of comparatively moderate deputies called Doctrinaires, who were supported by prominent thinkers including Madame de Staël and Benjamin Constant. Politically, the fifteen years of the Bourbon Restoration saw a debate over which institutions and practices to keep and which to jettison from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era. Ultra and Doctrinaire legislatures alternated. The assassination of the Duc de Berri in February 1820 gave the Ultras an opportunity to pass a conservative agenda. De Berri was the presumptive heir to the Bourbon throne. Born at Versailles in 1778, Berri left in 1789, and later served in the émigré army that planned to invade France during the Revolution. On the evening of February 13, 1820, during Carnival season, the Duc and Duchesse attended a performance at the opera on the Rue de Richelieu near the Palais-Royal. As the performance ended and Berri was helping his wife into the carriage, a man emerged and stabbed him with a dagger. The wound would prove fatal, though the Duc lingered for some hours as friends and family arrived, including his father (the future Charles X) and his uncle, Louis XVIII. It was a scene worthy of the opera Berri had just attended. The assassin was Louis Louvel (1776–1820), an ardent nationalist and Bonapartist who carried out the deed because he hated the Bourbons. Over the next few weeks, Paris was in turmoil as Ultras and their supporters raged about a “conspiracy” to end the dynasty. Louis XVIII appointed a new Ultra ministry and Berri was buried with great pomp, the funeral procession from the Louvre to Saint-Denis drawing crowds of royalists and opponents alike. Louvel was guillotined at the Place de Grève in June. As it turned out, the Duchesse de Berri was pregnant. A son—the future Comte de Chambord— was born in September 1820. Miraculously, the Bourbon dynasty was secure. In the future, political events like the assassination of Berri would inspire annual commemorations in Paris on the part of both political Right and Left. Meantime, the triumph of the Ultras was short-lived. Louis XVIII died of natural causes in 1824 and was succeeded by his brother, the reactionary Charles X, whose stubbornness would put the monarchy on the road to its overthrow in July 1830.

3 Protest For students, opposition politicians, journalists, and Napoleonic veterans in Restoration-era Paris, the Old Regime could never really be brought back: The Bourbons seemed like relics even as they governed. Still, public protest and crowd activity in Paris against the regime were mostly muted. The sans-culottes had come and gone. Even when protests happened in the 1820s, there was nothing like the Parisian journées of the 1790s. Government restrictions pushed the opposition in Paris into taking the form of mostly middle-class secret societies during these years. The Carbonari was a network of politically dispossessed former military officers and students who modeled themselves after the insurrectionary and nationalist Italian

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Carbonari. Created in Paris in 1821, the French Carbonari became a national organization determined to overthrow the Bourbon monarchy. They were not democrats seeking to re-create the Republic of 1792, but middle-class liberals who wanted to establish somewhat more inclusive government. The Carbonari had followers in the military. Simultaneous risings in three provincial towns in 1822, all of them subsequently squashed, and led by young officers, frightened the government. Four sergeants belonging to the Carbonari were arrested at the port city of La Rochelle, tried, convicted of conspiracy, and guillotined at the Place de Grève in September 1822. The four sergeants of La Rochelle became martyrs for the opposition to the Bourbons. A plaque to their memory is still located near the Panthéon. Another group Aide-toi, le ciel t’aidera (God helps those who help themselves) emerged as Carbonarism faded after the execution of the four sergeants. Aidetoi was not a secret society like the Carbonari, but an organization that aimed to put public pressure on the Bourbon government. Because Aide-toi operated within the law, it could not be suppressed. Like the Carbonari, Aide-toi began in Paris and had branches throughout France. Many of its members were journalists or aspiring politicians linked to politically connected newspapers. The head of Aide-toi was François Guizot (1787–1874), who worked for the Globe newspaper in Paris, and who later became a prominent politician and government minister during the July Monarchy. The Carbonari and Aide-toi were formal organizations with specific grievances against the Bourbon regime. They did not operate by mobilizing crowds as, for instance, the Cordeliers had done in the early 1790s. Still, there was potential for collective action in Paris. “Half-pay officers” were veterans of Napoleon’s wars, now living on pension and harboring resentment toward the Bourbons. They and other Napoleonic veterans would join the crowds that brought down the regime in the “Three Glorious Days” that produced the Revolution of 1830. University students, too, sometimes showed signs of militancy. There were about 4,500 students in Paris in the early 1820s, attending schools of law and medicine at the Sorbonne. Their intellectual leader was the philosopher Victor Cousin, and their “hang outs” were on the Left Bank near the university and in the Latin Quarter—since the Middle Ages the traditional space of Parisian students. There were student demonstrations around the time of the assassination of the Duc de Berri, and students went to the barricades in disturbances of November 1827 occasioned by an election crisis. The modern tradition of student militancy in Paris began during the Restoration.

4 Charles X Louis XVIII, sixty years of age and in uncertain health when he assumed the throne in 1815, died in September 1824. He was succeeded by his younger brother, the Comte d’Artois, who now became Charles X (1757–1836). Where Louis XVIII’s approach had been relatively moderate, Charles X was a reactionary—that is, he actively hoped to undo many of the

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accomplishments of the Revolution and Napoleonic era. Charles X was pro-émigré and pro-Catholic Church. Some of his efforts to restore the past came in the form of symbolic gestures. Earlier, Louis XVIII had ordered improvements to the abbey of Saint-Denis—the burial place of French kings on the northern edge of Paris that had been vandalized during the Revolution. Charles X had his brother’s body interred there next to the remains of earlier monarchs. French kings were traditionally crowned at the Cathedral of Reims, a city just east of the capital. Louis XVIII had not bothered with a coronation, but his younger brother took up this seeming relic of the past with a full-blown ceremony in 1825 that included all the royal trappings—a revival of the curious tradition of the “king’s touch” along with commissioning the painting of a royal portrait by the Parisianborn artist Pierre-Narcisse Guérin. The ceremony at Reims pleased Charles X’s court and political allies but antagonized a large segment of the public who saw in the new ruler a willful and intransigent figure—a genuine representative of those qualities most disliked in the Bourbons. Politically, Charles X oversaw a series of laws designed to please the Ultras, including compensation to émigrés for property lost during the Revolution and passing censorship laws to silence opponents. The king hoped to restore the powers and prestige of the Catholic Church—this included a law making the desecration of church property a capital offense. Catholic influence in education was reasserted. The Jesuit order, banned in France since the 1760s, was allowed to reopen seminaries. Religious processions in Paris, in which the king took a prominent part, were resumed. Louis XVIII had been a religious skeptic, while Charles X was a fervent and public believer. Charles X’s reactionary policies produced a “reaction” of their own in Paris, where religious skepticism and a brand of politics more moderate than that of the king were endemic. Parliamentary elections in 1827 returned moderates, forcing the king to briefly amend his approach. When Charles X reviewed the Paris National Guard in April 1827, he was greeted with stony silence. Parisians lining the streets refused to take off their hats as he passed by. The king responded by disbanding the Guard. There were riots in the city in November, with barricades erected near the Hôtel de Ville. A handful of insurgents were killed and more than a hundred arrested. There would be more barricades—many more—amidst a full-scale revolution in July 1830.

SOCIETY 1 Population movement and growth Even as Paris’s physical dimensions remained basically unchanged, the population grew from approximately 650,000 at the start of the Revolution of 1789 to 785,000 by the time the Bourbon monarchy came to an end for good in 1830.

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Through the mid-nineteenth century, Paris—especially her central neighborhoods—became more densely populated. Most of the population growth was the result of workers or peasants moving permanently to the capital from the North, Northeast, and Center of France. Others were seasonal migrants who worked and lived in the city for months at a time, though these persons rarely showed up in the handful of population surveys done in the first eight decades of the century. Deaths exceeded births in the first half of the nineteenth century, so most of the growth came from new arrivals. To help accommodate population growth and the movement of people across the city, Napoleon Bonaparte had three bridges built over the Seine River; seven others were constructed between 1827 and 1834. In 1829, the Rue de Paix was the first street in Paris to be lit by gas. While there were no thorough censuses of Paris until the end of the nineteenth century, it is possible to get a profile of the city’s population via the Recherches statistiques sur la ville de Paris et le département de la Seine produced between 1821 and 1844. These surveys examined the city’s twelve arrondissements and forty-eight quartiers—administrative divisions decreed by the Directory in 1795. The distribution of the city’s social classes between 1815 and 1830 had not changed much since 1789. There was a vertical orientation in central neighborhoods, with shopkeepers, rentiers (persons living off the returns of rented property), and other members of the petit bourgeoisie typically residing on the lower floors, while workers, their families, and the less well-off lived in the upper stories. This was the familiar Parisian social geography (mixité) that shows up, for instance, in Honoré de Balzac’s Le Père Goriot (1835). Unmarried working-class males or those who worked seasonal jobs tended to reside in small furnished rooms (garnis) or boarding houses where four or five persons shared beds (chambrées communes). Hôtels garnis were abundant in the densely crowded Right Bank center of the city and in Left Bank neighborhoods close to the Seine. The eastern faubourgs remained, as in 1789, thickly populated. Indigent Parisians were most numerous in the centrally located first, second, third, and tenth arrondissements. In 1817, the most populous arrondissement was the tenth with over 80,000 people; the least populous the third, with about 45,000 people. In 1817, the most populous quartier was Saint-Jacques in the twelfth arrondissement with 26,500 inhabitants. We can get another sense of population density by looking at the number of inhabitants per building. In 1826, the highest figure was fifty-two persons per building in the first arrondissement; the lowest, twenty-six persons per building in the twelfth. A bewildering diversity of artisanal skills were practiced in Paris. One way of determining which trades were most numerous in the first half of the nineteenth century is to look at military recruit records, which show tailors, furniture-makers, locksmiths, stonemasons, and stonecutters as especially abundant. Judging by death records, many persons were employed as day laborers, which was the lowest rung of the working class (Figure 3.1).

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FIGURE 3.1  Bread seller. Goods and skills were announced (“cried”) on the streets of Paris until the early twentieth century. The classic long, crusty loaf became known as the “baguette.” Photo by Classic Image / Alamy Stock Photo. (Alamy BY6J9F)

2 Foreigners Paris attracted a large foreign-born population: visitors, tourists, or those coming to the city to make it their home. Following the long stretch of turmoil and war during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era, there seemed to be a kind of pent-up desire by Europeans to visit Paris. French observers were struck by the number of foreigners who arrived in the capital during the Restoration. This was especially true of the British, who flocked to the city after an absence of nearly a generation. Just a year after Napoleon was sent into exile at Saint Helena under British guard, there were almost 30,000 Britons living in

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Paris. British visitors were by far the largest group of foreigners staying in hotels monitored by the authorities. Most travelers were well-off artists or young men looking for fun and adventure. Germans, Spanish, Russians, Italians, North Americans, and Latin Americans—like the British, mostly males with expendable cash and from the upper-middle and upper classes— also made their way to Paris. Upper-class Poles would come to Paris as political refugees following a rebellion against Russia in the early 1830s. Numerous travel guides written for British, German, and American tourists wanting to know how to navigate the winding streets and negotiate the local customs were published during the Restoration. Paris had been capital to Napoleon’s continental empire, and yet in some ways had been isolated from the world; now after 1815, it again became a cosmopolitan place.1 Among the famous figures living in Paris during the Restoration were the German geographer Alexander von Humboldt, the British writer Francis Trollope, the American writer James Fenimore Cooper, and the Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt. Though less numerous than Europeans or Americans, there were temporary and permanent visitors from other places. Even before the Restoration, Paris had hosted a small Arabic-speaking population originating from Ottoman-controlled Egypt and Syria. The Middle Eastern floating population in Paris consisted of intellectuals and persons with ties to wealthy Parisians. During the Restoration, this small Arabic-speaking colony served as translators and contributors to the growing body of scholarship and art on the Near East that began with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798.2 There were also skilled and unskilled working-class foreigners in Paris looking for jobs: German and Swiss furniture makers and tailors, for instance, as well as building workers from the Catholic regions of the Netherlands (Belgium after 1830).

3 Vidocq’s underworld Restoration-era Paris saw the beginning of a way of thinking about the city’s lower classes that categorized them into “laboring and dangerous classes.” The phrase dates from a book of 1840 by Honoré Frégier, but became a famous part of the historiography of the city with the work of the twentieth-century historian and demographer Louis Chevalier: Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (English translation 1973).3 For Chevalier, Parisians below the bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie could be divided into “honest,” mostly skilled workers or artisans, and everyone else: the indigent, criminals, gamins, and general ne’er do wells. “Lumpenproletariat” was the term used by Karl Marx (whose analysis was partly based upon his experience living in Paris) to designate the “dangerous classes.” As early as the 1820s, guidebooks

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were describing different spaces of the city for different social classes; at the same time, the city’s upper classes began to withdraw from popular spaces and from popular culture. The Revolution of 1830 intensified the sense of social separateness.4 Chevalier’s analysis of Paris was challenged by other scholars investigating Paris’s long history of criminal organization and culture. When Louis XVIII returned to Paris for the second time in 1815, he appointed Joseph Fouché (1759–1820) head of the police. Fouché had a notorious reputation as a “Terrorist” during the Revolution, as one of the conspirators of Thermidor, and as Napoleon’s ruthless and efficient Minister of Police. Fouché fine-tuned the use of spies (mouches) and agent-provocateurs to keep tabs on both political opponents and ordinary criminals. The Parisian police became well-known for their use of spies. The most famous crime-solver—before that, he was himself a criminal—of the day was François Eugène Vidocq (1775–1857). Born in northern France, Vidocq’s early life was marked by violence, petty crime, and desertion from the army. He spent years in and out of jail, including time on a bagne, the hulk of a ship used as a prison. Vidocq was cut from the same unsavory, opportunistic cloth as Fouché, but unlike the well-off Fouché, Vidocq was a creature of the murky underworld of Paris, where violent crime was not uncommon and argot (street slang) the lingua franca. After he became a mouche for the Paris police, Vidocq rose through the ranks. He was so good at tracking criminals that Louis XVIII made him head of the Sûreté, the city’s criminal investigation unit (which still exists). After retiring, Vidocq opened his own private detective agency and wrote a best-selling memoir and books that provided tips for hunting down criminals. Vidocq’s professional evolution was remarkable. For many, even when he headed the Sûreté, the former bagnard was considered an outlaw. For others, like the writers Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, and the American Edgar Allan Poe, Vidocq perfectly represented the shady quality of life in the Other Paris of the Restoration. Indeed, these authors sketched elements of his story into some of their own famous literary creations: “Jean Valjean,” the hero of Hugo’s Les Misérables; the chameleon-like “Vautrin” of Balzac’s Human Comedy; and Poe’s modern detective “Dupin” from “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” all of which were set in Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century, and all of which drew upon the legend of Vidocq.

4 Generation of 1820 At the other end of the social and cultural spectrum from the “dangerous classes” was a generation of Parisian men and women, born in the era of revolution and war, who were now coming of age during the Restoration and the emerging New Regime of industry and capitalism. Some hailed

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from the remnants of the aristocracy, but most belonged to the middle and upper bourgeoisie. Some were born in Paris, others elsewhere, but all spent formative years in the city. Culturally, this “generation of 1820” helped introduce “Romanticism” into art, literature, and music.5 Germaine de Staël (1766–1817), born in Paris (her father was Jacques Necker, the Swiss financial adviser to Louis XVI), was in and out of the capital during the Revolution and during her long intellectual duel with Napoleon. An elegant writer, Staël is most remembered for being Napoleon’s severest critic and for the salons she maintained in Paris and then in Switzerland during her exile. Her fiction-writing helped pave the way for Romanticism. Benjamin Constant (1767–1830), like many a Parisian, was born elsewhere (Switzerland in his case). He was a philosopher, and after 1815 a politician in Louis XVIII’s Chamber of Deputies. Constant was perhaps the first modern “liberal,” which meant he was a political moderate who favored neither a dictatorship like that of Bonaparte nor the unpredictability and excesses of a republic like that of 1793. Rather he argued that a monarchy governing through a constitution and a limited electorate was what France needed after a generation of turmoil. Constant was a “founding father” of the constitutional monarchy that governed France until 1848. The philosopher Victor Cousin (1792–1867) was another person of ideas. Cousin was born in Paris to a family of modest means. Intellectually precocious, he graduated from the Lycée Charlemagne, where he was influenced by the work of Scottish and German philosophers, whose ideas he integrated into French thought and into primary education when he served as an administrator during the July Monarchy that followed the Bourbon Restoration. Victor Hugo (1802–85) was the great novelist whose career spanned much of the nineteenth century. He also became an important political personality. He began his precocious career during the Restoration and it went on through the start of the Third Republic. Born in the eastern city of Besançon, Hugo made Paris his home and spent most of his life there. Many of his famous novels, including Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Misérables, are mostly set in Paris. Hugo’s former residence at the Place des Vosges has been turned into a museum of his life. A person of different temperament from Cousin and the others was LouisAuguste Blanqui (1805–81), who became the iconic European insurrectionist of the nineteenth century. Blanqui and his brother—the influential economist Jérôme-Adolphe (1798–1854)—were born in southern France and came to Paris during the Restoration as law students. Jérôme-Adolphe moved on to become a respected scholar and professor, while his brother became deeply politicized by participating in an émeute (riot) in Paris in 1827. During the July Monarchy, Louis-Auguste Blanqui became a full-time, professional revolutionary, helping to organize (failed) insurrections in 1834 and 1839.

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He spent most of his life in prison; when out of prison, he was planning for the next big revolution, which he believed would take place, like 1789, in Paris.

ECONOMY 1 New Regime of laissez-faire Laissez-faire thinking and practices had been part of the Parisian economy before the Revolution, and after 1789 they were incorporated into laws, constitutions, and the Napoleonic Code of 1804. This New Regime would dominate Parisian economic practices in the nineteenth century, bringing with it both opportunities for wealth and periodic, sometimes severe, economic downturns. Paris’s nineteenth-century economy was marked by ups and downs in many industries. This was true of the Restoration, which saw robust growth from 1820 to 1826, particularly in the construction of new apartment buildings in the western arrondissements. Fortunes were made by New Men speculating in the construction of residences for wealthy Parisians, even as affordable housing for the lower classes remained scarce. Throughout the century, there was little money to be made building housing for the poor. The historian of Paris Adeline Daumard identified New Men-types as part of the city’s “new aristocracy” in the first half of the nineteenth century.6 The economic boom of 1820–26 was followed by a “bust” that was accompanied by political turmoil, which saw, for the first time (1827) in the nineteenth century, the building of barricades in Parisian streets. Wages remained stagnant in most industries in the 1820s. Paris and France never fully adopted the English model of industry and modernization. Nonetheless, changes were happening in industry and technology that were a sign of the future. In the production of clothing, for instance, individual tailoring was being replaced by confection, which was the mass production of clothes. Clothing produced by confection would show up in the new Parisian grands magasins (department stores) by mid-century. Financiers played a big part in the boom of the 1820s. The Paris Bourse (stock exchange) dated from 1724. Ever since the Restoration it has been housed at the Palace Brongniart in the second arrondissement. The Bank of France was created in 1800 by Napoleon and is at the Hôtel de Toulouse in the first arrondissement. Paris’s financial elite drew much of their wealth from banking. Jacques Lafitte, Casimir Périer, and James de Rothschild were the most famous of the wealthy cohort during the Restoration. They stood for laissez-faire economics: making money, financing building projects, and, through the newspapers they supported, influencing politics. They lived in the neighborhoods of western Paris where the wealthy congregated.

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Casimir Périer (1777–1832) was born in Grenoble to a wealthy merchant family. He and a brother set up a bank in Paris under Napoleon and became the principal financers of the large Anzin Coal Company in northern France along with an iron foundry and workshops in the suburban Chaillot section of Paris. With his contributions to the development of coal and iron, Périer played a role in setting off the French version of the Industrial Revolution. Politically, Périer, like most of his fellow financiers, was a liberal. During the July Monarchy, he served as a minister in the government of the “bourgeois” king Louis-Philippe until succumbing to cholera during the epidemic of 1832. Most victims in 1832 were poor; Périer was an exception.

Les cris de Paris

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“

treet criers” were long a customary feature of urban life in Europe. They were the “hawkers,” the sellers of all sorts of goods or skills that they advertised by walking through streets and yelling out the name of the product or trade. It was a loud, verbal, ambulatory, eventually archaic, but for a long time utterly necessary form of advertising. These street vendors, peddlers, and itinerant sellers were numerous in the Early Modern era. London and Rome had well-known street criers, and so did Paris. Les crieurs were part of the Other Paris of teeming, twisting streets; of le peuple, the Zone and the “informal economy.” Les crieurs were both men and women. Some carried their trade on their back: the décolleur shined shoes, the rémouleur sharpened knives, the vitrier repaired glass windows, and the étameur was a tinsmith. Some sold things: the marchand de coco sold chocolate, the marchand de parapluies sold umbrellas, the porteur d’eau sold clean water, and the porteuse de pain sold bread. There were other criers who announced court decisions at public squares and at the crossroads of major streets. Commissionaires hired themselves to haul luggage or move furniture. The street criers were essential to the Parisian economy until the advent of modern forms of advertising, which did not take hold until the second half of the nineteenth century. Shop owners sometimes protested against the competition in the streets, and ordinances attempting to control the informal trade were occasionally adopted by municipal officers. As early as the thirteenth century, rules were laid down for crieurs indicating where they could and could not advertise their wares. In 1800, there were still about a hundred trades announcing their skills and goods in the streets of Paris, but a century later only about twenty remained. As les crieurs began to disappear, there was a wave of interest

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among writers and observers hoping to capture the voices and lexicon of this vanishing part of urban society. One of the best-known compilations was Victor Fournel’s Les Cris de Paris (1887). Fournel, a dedicated flâneur, was distraught at the destruction of the Old Paris brought on by Haussmannization, and so took it upon himself to document this dying breed of peddlers. Les cris de Paris was a familiar, even beloved element of Paris street life from the Middle Ages until the mid-twentieth century. Finally, the last of the street criers, whose voices could no longer be heard over the din of automobile traffic, gave in to the cacophony and omnipresent modern advertising of the twentieth century.

2 Political economy Even though Paris and France did not see an industrial “take-off” like that in Great Britain, Paris was an important setting for what was emerging in the first half of the nineteenth century as a great debate about the promises and perils of capitalism. Prominent political economists made the case that capitalism would “lift all boats,” while critics feared that unrestrained laissez-faire would sharpen class divisions, impoverishing one segment of society as another accumulated unseemly wealth. Both sides of the great debate on capitalism were part of the intellectual ferment in Restoration-era Paris. The most influential proponent of capitalism in Paris at this time was Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832). Say was born in Lyon, but spent most of his life in Paris, where he wrote influential works on economics. Say had spent time in England as a young man and helped introduce Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) to France. Say was also a contemporary and correspondent of the influential British political economists David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus. A supporter of free trade and believer in the promise of laissezfaire, Say’s ideas would have impact around the Atlantic World. Where Ricardo and Malthus worried that capitalism would inevitably be afflicted by crises, Say argued that laissez-faire possessed a natural, self-correcting mechanism: the “law” that production creates its own demand. “Say’s Law” was influential for more than a century, becoming a bulwark principle of classical economic liberalism until the Great Depression of the 1930s undermined assumptions about this and other economic laws (though French economists already had begun to distance themselves from liberal economics). Say was a modern thinker who had no regrets about the passing of the guilds of the Old Regime, and who thought capitalism promised an increase in productivity and a sharing of new wealth. But there were others

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in Paris during the Restoration who, while economic modernists in the broad sense, were worried that capitalism was undermined by fundamental contradictions. Jean-Charles Sismondi (1773–1842)—born in Geneva, but who spent time in Paris during the Napoleonic years and early Restoration— did not accept Say’s idea of economic equilibrium. Rather, Sismondi thought capitalism would bring cyclical ups and downs. Sismondi thought economic systems—capitalism or any other—had to be managed with humane interests in mind. Most of the Parisian critics of capitalism were “socialists” or “communists”—terms coined around the turn of the nineteenth century and both with roots in Paris. Some Restoration-era thinkers more or less subscribed, like Say, to the notion that natural laws should govern the economy; among these were the technocratic thinker Henri de Saint-Simon and the “organizer of humanity” Charles Fourier. A few years later, Karl Marx—capitalism’s foremost critic, who spent decisive years in Paris in the early 1840s—believed he could understand the economy with almost scientific precision.

3 Hospitals and cemeteries Paris’s oldest hospital is the Hôtel-Dieu, which is located close to NotreDame Cathedral. Dating from the ninth century and dedicated to serving the sick and poor, it may be the longest operating hospital in the world. Bourbon kings had constructed several hospitals during the seventeenth century, though these were not the sort of institutions we are familiar with today—indeed, some were hardly distinguishable from prisons. Bicêtre was built as an orphanage in 1642 just outside the city’s southern wall, but by the 1820s, it had become a hospital for elderly men. On the Left Bank, Val-de-Grâce (1645) was and remains a military hospital. And Salpêtrière, founded in 1656 on the Left Bank in today’s thirteenth arrondissement, was for a long time Paris’s largest hospital and a celebrated teaching institution that at various times also housed women prisoners and the mentally ill. The Revolution of 1789 brought important changes to hospital care in Paris. Although the revolutionaries did not consider health care a natural right, they helped introduce modern assumptions about the potential to improve human life through medical science, as well as the responsibility of society to look after citizens who were infirm, young, old, mentally ill, deaf, or blind. This way of thinking took hold in Paris before it did in other places across the world. At the same time, the Revolution had made the point that “citizen-patients” had a duty to look after their own health and hygiene.7 It was not until the nineteenth century that modern hospitals caring for the ill and employing trained doctors and surgeons began to operate in Paris. Napoleon set up the first central bureaucracy for Parisian hospitals. Through mid-nineteenth century, Paris was a model of modern health care,

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FIGURE 3.2  Père Lachaise Cemetery. Located in the northeast of Paris and opened in 1804, it is the most beloved of Paris cemeteries. Today, visitors can stroll through its avenues to escape the noise and bustle of the city. © Casey Harison.

renowned for its doctors and medical learning. Philippe Pinel (1745–1826) and his student Jean-Étienne Esquirol (1772–1840), both at Salpêtrière, were the foremost practitioners of psychiatry in their day. Students came from across Europe and the Americas to study with them and at the city’s medical schools. During the Restoration, students especially arrived from England, Scotland, and the United States. Paris’s modern approach to health care promised improved lives for ordinary Parisians, but it also created a bureaucracy that could be unfathomable, even inhumane, as Michel Foucault would later write. In 1776, Paris’s cemeteries were full and so burials were forbidden within the city walls. The Revolution of 1789 brought changes in thinking about the burial of the dead. After 1789, Jews and Protestants were no longer buried separately from Catholic Parisians. The quartier of Picpus became

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the burying ground for many victims of the guillotine during the Revolution. Père Lachaise (1804), in the northeast of Paris, was one of three cemeteries built just outside the city walls around the turn of the century. The name comes from a Jesuit priest and confessor to Louis XIV who had lived at a former estate on the site. Over time, Père Lachaise was enlarged and then was incorporated into the twentieth arrondissement when the area was annexed to the city in 1860. Père Lachaise has become the most beloved of Parisian cemeteries, holding the remains of famous figures (French and foreign) and hosting annual political memorials to the Commune of 1871. Today, it is the city’s largest cemetery, and also a peaceful spot where people can stroll the avenues of the dead for relief from the hustle and bustle of the city (Fig. 3.2). Later in the century, suburban cemeteries were added in SaintOuen (1872) and Pantin (1886).

4 Notables Wealthy individuals and families played prominent roles in Paris’s economy, politics, and culture during the Restoration. Some of this wealth dated from before the Revolution; some of it was part of the nouveau riche created by the New Regime of capitalism. The banker James de Rothschild (1792–1868) was Jewish, which in the past would have placed legal discriminations in his path. But one of the human rights established during the French Revolution was Jewish emancipation, and so Rothschild was able to become a leading financial figure of the Restoration. Born in Germany and a member of the Rothschild family that had branches throughout Europe, he lived most of his life in Paris. As a banker, Rothschild played an important role in financing railroads and mining, and like his counterpart Casimir Périer was instrumental in bringing some modern industry to Paris. Rothschild was also an important patron of the arts during the Restoration and July Monarchy. Another prominent banker in Restoration-era Paris, and sometimes the rival of Rothschild, was Jacques Lafitte (1766–1844). Briefly a convert to Bonapartism in 1815, following the return of Louis XVIII, Lafitte was elected to the Chamber of Deputies. Later, he was director of the Bank of France. Lafitte was a political liberal who opposed the reactionary policies of Charles X and supported Louis-Philippe in the Revolution of 1830. Rothschild and Lafitte might encounter each other at one of the many salons operating in Paris during the Restoration. As under the Old Regime, upper-class women often established and hosted gatherings attended by writers, artists, foreign diplomats, and politicians. Politics was an important topic of conversation, and here as before 1789, salons helped inform a public sphere. One prominent salon was hosted by Madame de Montcalm at her hôtel on the Rue de l’Université. Montcalm was the sister of one of the king’s ministers, the Duc de Richelieu. Both had been émigrés during

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the Revolution and then returned to Paris and to prominence with the Restoration. Montcalm would become a victim of cholera in 1832. Madame de Montcalm’s hôtel was located in the Latin Quarter on the Left Bank, but many of Paris’s notables lived in newer western and northwestern Right Bank neighborhoods. The Chaussée d’Antin in the ninth arrondissement was the heart of this wealthy and fashionable area, attracting wealthy persons who built expensive apartments and strolled the nearby boulevards. Artists and writers followed the well-to-do to western Paris. Some of the wealth and political power of the Old Regime returned to Paris with the Bourbon Restoration; some of the old symbols came back, too. Under Louis XVIII and Charles X—younger brothers of “Louis Capet” (Louis XVI), who had been executed in 1793—statues of French kings destroyed during the Revolution were replaced (temporarily, as it turned out): the well-known bronze equestrian of Henri IV was returned to the Pont Neuf in 1818, the statue of Louis XIV to the Place des Victoires in 1822, and that of Louis XIII to the Place des Vosges in 1829. The Panthéon was re-christened a Catholic church in 1828.

CULTURE 1 Romanticism in painting In art, including literature, music, and painting, the Restoration saw a reaction against the Neoclassical mood of the Revolutionary era. Feeling and sensibility, the idea of “genius,” but also “progress,” now took over from the formal structures and didactic element in art of the late eighteenth century. The Restoration saw the emergence of Romanticism, though Romanticism had roots in an earlier era. The religious revival encouraged by the Bourbons saw Christian themes return as a subject matter in painting. Paris, supported by royal and aristocratic patronage, the academies and salons, was becoming the center of French—and in some ways of European— art in the eighteenth century, and this prominent position would be enhanced in the nineteenth century. This was notably true of painting. Jacques-Louis David, the most famous French painter of the era, had been a prominent revolutionary (while serving in the National Convention, he voted for the execution of Louis XVI), who opted for exile in Brussels when Louis XVIII returned to Paris in 1815. David’s influence in Paris persisted through the work of two students. One of these was Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867). Born in southern France, Ingres spent most of his life in Paris and Italy. Ingres was a devoted practitioner and defender of Neoclassicism, and a prominent portrait painter. Another student of David was Antoine-Jean Gros (1771–1835). Gros was a native Parisian best known for his paintings of Napoleon and military battles of the Empire. Though both of them

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were die-hard Bonapartists, Ingres and Gros prospered under the restored Bourbons. Meantime, Louis XVIII and Charles X commissioned works of art designed to celebrate the monarchy and Old Regime, as well as religious paintings that harkened back to earlier devotional styles. François Gerard (1770–1837) was among the favored painters of the Restoration. Gerard’s 1817 painting Entry of Henri IV into Paris in 1594 was commissioned by Louis XVIII as a message of post-Revolution reconciliation. Best representing the Romantic mood in art in Paris during the Restoration—and arguably the most influential painter of the genre—was Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863). Delacroix was born at Charenton on the outskirts of Paris and received early training at Paris’s Lycée Louis-Le Grand. Delacroix was much influenced by the reaction against the work of a contemporary painter, Théodore Géricault (1791–1824), whose Raft of the Medusa was a sensation at the Salon of 1819. In Massacre at Chios (1824), Delacroix chose as his topic the Greek War of Independence, then being waged against the Ottomans. Here, as in later works, Delacroix created an exotic setting of great pathos illustrated with movement and color; these elements would mark many of his works. Delacroix showed his paintings at the Paris Salons, which had been held in the capital since the seventeenth century and now became the most influential art exhibit in nineteenth-century Europe. Careers in art were made and lost at Paris’s Salons, which were held every two years at the Louvre.

2 Literature As in painting, the first half of the nineteenth century saw a great age of literature in Paris. There were Chateaubriand, Stendhal, and Balzac among novelists; Saint-Simon among the “utopian” thinkers; and Lamartine among poets. All began their careers during the Restoration. (I have already cited Hugo, Cousin, and de Staël.) At another level of society—much less recognized in its day and still not as well-known as it could be—working-class Parisians were creating their own “proletarian” literature. One of the reasons for the surge of literature after 1815 was the return of salon culture in Paris. As in the eighteenth century, these were mostly hosted by women. The salon of Madame de Montcalm was one of several where artists mingled with politicians and intellectuals to inform a public sphere. Paris’s salon culture was grist for the mill for sensitive, astute writers. François René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848), an émigré during the Revolution who did not make Paris his home until after 1815, was one of the founding figures of French literary Romanticism. His Genius of Christianity (1802) helped launch the Catholic revival that upheld the perceived virtues of the Middle Age, while René (1802) was a celebration of the natural world that was at the same time inward-looking and fatalistic. Chateaubriand charted his own course as a writer, and then briefly as a politician.

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Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was especially a figure of the July Monarchy, but his formative years and early writings began in Paris during the Restoration. Balzac’s keen eye for social types made the novels in his La Comédie Humaine a virtual sociology of nineteenth-century Parisian life: later he was a favorite of the Russian revolutionary Lenin because of the author’s insight into the middle class and petty bourgeoisie. Balzac’s grave at Père Lachaise remains one of the cemetery’s most visited. Stendhal, a pseudonym for Marie-Henri Beyle (1783–1842), was born in Grenoble and died in Paris, which became his home. Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (1830), set in both the provinces and Paris during the Restoration, was a scathing, deeply insightful analysis of the era. Older than the other writers cited here, Stendhal did not belong to the Romantic movement of writers like Hugo and Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869). With the publication of Méditations in 1820, Lamartine became a popular poet. He was also an historian of the Girondins of the French Revolution, and then used his renown in the literary world to become a less-than-successful politician in 1848. Also belonging to an earlier generation was Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), the descendant of famous aristocrats and like Stendhal and Chateaubriand, a person with much experience in the world. Born in Paris, Saint-Simon was a founding figure of what Karl Marx referred to as the “utopians”—thinkers and planners who rejected existing forms of society, politics, and economics to forecast alternative ways of living. Saint-Simon thought that modern technology and industry could be used to make a better world. More “technocratic” than democratic, his ideas would have considerable influence, indeed producing a “Saint-Simonian” movement after his death.

3 Music Romanticism took hold not only in literature and painting, but also in music and opera. There were trends and fads in music, as there were trends and fads in other areas of Parisian cultural life. During the Restoration, the capital had an active music press, drawing on intriguing stories of performances, personalities, affairs, cliques, and rivalries. Louis XVIII and Charles X both personally enjoyed music and opera, and as an institution the monarchy understood the propagandistic power of these art forms. Under the Bourbons, there was regulation—essentially, censorship—of music, opera, and theater. The government maintained five royal theaters in Paris (Théâtre Français, Théâtre Italien, Académie de Musique, OpéraComique, and Théâtre de l’Odéon), with boxes to host the king, family, and friends. The original Paris Opera had been founded under Louis XIV, and then underwent reorganization during the Revolution and Napoleon. Re-established by the Bourbons in 1816, the opera fell under the authority

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of the government’s Académie des Beaux-Arts. A new royal opera house was opened at the Opéra le Peletier near the Boulevard des Italiens in 1821, not far from where the Duc de Berri had been assassinated. (Later, during the Second Empire, Charles Garnier’s famous opera house would be built in central Paris, and today Paris has a modern opera house at the Place de la Bastille.) Paris became a magnet for composers in the nineteenth century. Hector Berlioz (1803–69), born in Grenoble, arrived in Paris as an eighteen-yearold medical student. He abandoned medicine, absorbing the Romantic-era influences of his surroundings, attending music performances, opera, and theater, and using libraries to learn the works of Beethoven and Gluck. Berlioz also attended, and sometimes performed in the popular vaudeville theaters along the Boulevard du Temple. His Romantic-era masterwork, the Symphonie fantastique, was completed in 1830, a year of revolution in Paris. Foreign composers were drawn to the French capital, too. The German opera composer Giacomo Meyerbeer and the Italian Gioachino Rossini both arrived in Paris around 1832 (Rossini is buried at Père Lachaise). Beginning with the Restoration, Paris became a European music center almost on a level to rival Vienna. In theater, the great sensation of the Restoration came at the end of the era with Victor Hugo’s Romantic drama Hernani, a work that signaled the young artist’s political shift from royalism to liberalism. Hernani was a love triangle set in the great age of sixteenth-century imperial Spain, but its seditious element came from challenging classical norms and elevating passion and social progress—by 1830, essential qualities of Romanticism— to the foreground. The play provoked a reaction among elites at the Académie Française, though Charles X let the performance proceed. Soon after, this last Bourbon king would be vanquished from Paris, while the young Hugo would go on to ever greater accomplishments and fame.

4 Lycées, academies, and grandes écoles During the Restoration, Catholic influence over education was briefly brought back to France. The eighteenth century had been a period of rising secularism, and in Paris the Revolution and Directory had attacked the institution and wealth of the church. Napoleon made amends by signing a Concordat with the Papacy in 1801, but after 1815 the Ultras were determined to return religion to state and society as it had been before 1789. Hugues-Félicité de Lamennais (1782–1854), originally from Brittany but who spent most of his career in Paris (he is buried at Père Lachaise), was probably the most influential religious writer and thinker of the Restoration, arguing passionately for the return of Catholic Christian values to society and for allegiance to the Pope—a break with the Gallican tradition which held that the French church should be separate from Rome. When he

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became king in 1824, Charles X hoped to increase the number of young men entering the priesthood, which had been depleted since the Revolution. The universities rooted out unbelievers among the Parisian professoriate. But the Catholic Church’s close association with the Bourbons meant that its influence declined when the Bourbon regime ended in 1830. Beginning with the July Monarchy, education in Paris and throughout France was more and more impacted by secular thinking. Anti-clericalism was the norm for Parisian and French republicans for the rest of the century. Secondary school was expensive and time-consuming, and so most Parisians did not attend. For the sons of the privileged, there was the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, among the oldest secondary schools in Paris, dating from the mid-sixteenth century when it was established by the Jesuit order. (It was renamed in honor of Louis XIV in 1674.) Remarkably, the school remained open during the Revolution, and then was re-christened a “lycée” with educational reforms adopted under Napoleon. Among its many famous graduates were Victor Hugo and Eugène Delacroix. Through the present, Louis-le-Grand remains one of the best schools in Paris and France. Among the institutions of higher learning in Paris, most of the famous “grandes écoles” date from the era of the Convention and Directory. They were created to centralize and modernize higher education and have become elite institutions—similar to Ivy League universities in the United States— producing engineers, scientists, and political leaders. In 1799, the Institut de France (founded 1661) was given supervision over a variety of institutions. The Institut, situated on a quay of the Left Bank, is still an architectural landmark along the Seine. The École Normale (1794), Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers (1794), and École Polytechnique (1795) all date from this period. The capital’s long-standing history as a city of great universities was re-enforced and updated with the Revolution. The Académie Française was originally founded in 1635 by the Duc de Richelieu as an institution to reward, and presumably control, writers and literature. Meeting at the Institut, the Académie bestows awards and prizes, manages its membership of forty intellectuals (sometimes referred to as the “immortals”), and keeps a close eye on the French language by periodically issuing a new dictionary. The raison d’être of the Académie, including the question of who is or is not invited to join, has been an endless source of controversy. Among the illustrious writers who were not members of the Académie were Pascal, Molière, Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Gide, Proust, and Sartre.

Conclusion For Parisians, perhaps the most important things “restored” to the city during the Restoration were the monarchy, its role as capital of France, and its position in Europe as a place to visit. During the long era of war and

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empire that began with the Revolution and carried on through the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte, Paris had in many ways been cut off from the rest of Europe: an imperial capital that, ironically, had become isolated and less cosmopolitan than it had been before the Revolution. But other Europeans and Americans, as well as some Africans and Asians, wanted to see Paris, and for the rest of the nineteenth century and through the twentieth, the city beckoned visitors, tourists, exiles, refugees, and expatriates. Also returning to Paris was the dynasty overthrown in 1792—the Bourbons—and their royal administration. The tensions that had existed between French kings and Parisians dating from at least the Fronde of the mid-seventeenth century, and which at that time had seen the monarchy abandon Paris for Versailles, were never fully overcome. Louis XVIII, whose brother Louis XVI had been publicly guillotined in Paris during the Revolution, made the decision to restore the capital to Paris at the same time that his regime tried to reestablish the powers of the Catholic Church and the upper classes, whose roles in Parisian and French society likewise had been diminished since the Revolution. Those Parisians who had never really welcomed the Revolution or Napoleon sided with the Restoration. But it is likely that for most Parisians of all classes and stations in life, the Old Regime could never be brought back—too much had happened since 1789. Physically, Paris did not change very much between 1815 and 1830— the great transformations to the city’s landscape associated with urban renewal and industrialization were to take place later in the century. But the mentalité of Parisians from Old Regime to New Regime had been redone, and by 1830 the Bourbons—a vestige of the past—would be gone for good.

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4 Paris during the July Monarchy and Revolution of 1848

Chronology 1830

“Three Glorious Days” and Revolution of 1830

1832

Cholera epidemic and Rebellion of June

1834

Attempted republican insurrection—“Massacre of the Rue Transnonain”

1835

Fieschi attempt on Louis-Philippe

1837

First railroad launched in Paris

1839

“Society of the Seasons” insurrection

1841–45 “Thiers Wall” built 1846

Gare du Nord opens

1848

February Revolution—Second Republic declared—June Days—election of Louis-Napoleon as president

Introduction France’s “July Monarchy” (1830–48) took its name from the month in which the revolution that brought it to power took place, and the form of government that won out in that revolution. But the Bourbons were gone, this time for good, with the new king drawn from the Orléans branch of the dynasty. The Restoration was over, too, and King Louis-Philippe and other European rulers mostly seemed to recognize this. The new Orléanist regime was suitably modern

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for its day: middle class (“bourgeois”), moderate (but not democratic or republican), and interested in promoting industry. And yet the July Monarchy, like so many other governments across Europe and the Americas, seemed unable to grasp some of the essential changes effecting the Atlantic World. These were the years of two contrasting, yet complimentary residents of Paris: Balzac (who described bourgeois society) and Marx (who forecast its downfall); of both laissez-faire capitalism and its new rival, socialism; and of the “Social Question”—a widely used phrase across the Atlantic World that referred to the gap between the fundamental promises of the Atlantic Revolutions (citizenship and improved standard of living) and the very different reality of how most people lived their everyday lives. The Social Question was formulated across the Atlantic during these years, arguably more in Paris than anywhere else. The July Monarchy coincided with the peak years of the Industrial Revolution. British industry, dominated by textile production and railroads, was the global model, but France, Belgium (born from revolution in 1831), the German lands, and the northeastern United States were catching up. In France, the 1840s were, as the historian David Pinkney described, “decisive years” economically and socially, setting the nation on the course it would follow through the end of the nineteenth century and beyond. One sign of the impact of industry and modernization was the great growth in the size of cities across the Atlantic World as rural populations migrated to work in factories and with the hope, often unrewarded, of a better life. Another sign was the growth of the colonial empires that could serve as sources of raw materials and markets for finished products. The acquisition of Algeria, which would become France’s most important overseas possession, started in 1830. But the past, both recent and distant, did not just vanish, and certainly not in Paris where the French Revolution and Napoleon’s military victories and empire were just a generation gone. Historians were now beginning to understand and write the history of the Revolution. During the July Monarchy, a romanticizing of Napoleon also took hold, culminating in the return and internment of his remains with great ceremony in Paris in 1840. The Revolution of 1789 served as a harbinger, a model, a warning for many parts of Europe in 1830, and for even more nations—including France itself—in 1848. Events in Paris in the spring of 1848, once again, served as the catalyst for political and social upheaval during the July Monarchy, as Paris cemented its reputation as Capital of Revolution.

POLITICS 1 Revolution of 1830 Charles X and the Bourbon regime were overthrown by a revolution in Paris in July 1830. The “Three Glorious Days” of July 27–29, 1830, were marked by street-fighting between mostly working-class rebels and soldiers. This

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would be the first of many rebellions and revolutions to occur in the French capital in the nineteenth century. Aside from the Commune, which controlled the city for almost three months in the spring of 1871, the Revolution of 1830 and the February Revolution of 1848 were the only insurrections to win out; all the others ended in defeat for the rebels. The winners of 1830 and February, 1848, were rewarded with pensions and medals; the defeated of June 1832, April 1834, May 1839, June 1848, December 1851, and May 1871 faced arrest, and then imprisonment or deportation. In all the episodes, there were wounded and killed—in some of them, notably June 1848 and the Commune, a great many. Why was the Bourbon monarchy overthrown in 1830? Partly because Charles X had squandered much of the political capital he inherited after coming to the throne in 1824 and had antagonized Parisians of all ranks. Adopting reactionary policies and alienating all but the staunchest royalists, he had few supporters and a growing collection of opponents. Students, drawn to liberal ideals or beginning to look back on the Napoleonic years with fondness, were becoming politicized. It was at this time that LouisAuguste Blanqui came to Paris as a law student, and then after being wounded on a barricade in 1827, became the most unyielding insurrectionist of the century. Parisian workers, already complaining about wages, hours, and marchandage, would go to the barricades in far greater numbers than students in 1830. A vocal opposition came from journalists and politicians in a liberal camp that favored a more open press and defended the legislative prerogatives of the Charter. This opposition was led by the historian and politician François Guizot, and the Parisian banker Casimir Périer. The spark to the dry tinder of revolution came in the summer of 1830 when the government of Charles X issued a set of ordinances designed to silence the Parisian press and re-draw election laws so that they would favor the government. Opposing journalists and politicians—mostly from the bourgeoisie—saw these actions as an attempted coup and protested with meetings and angry articles in their newspapers. The brewing rebellion quickly spread beyond their control, and by July 27 workers were building barricades in the streets of Paris. Troops were called out followed by three days of street-fighting between the mostly working-class rebels and soldiers who were not fully supportive of the regime they were defending. Charles X, no doubt recalling the fate of his older brother Louis XVI, fled to England. A new monarchy was quickly established. Louis-Philippe of the Orléans family was picked by liberal kingmakers that included the elderly Lafayette. Later, a compensatory commission established that the “Three Glorious Days” of July 1830 had seen 1,894 Parisians killed or wounded; today, the names of the dead may be seen on the July Column erected as a memorial to them at the Place de la Bastille. It was Parisian workers—not students or liberal politicians—who rushed to the barricades in July 1830. Workers would make up the great majority in all the subsequent Paris rebellions of the century—both those that won and those that failed.

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2 Louis-Philippe and public order Louis-Phillipe, whose political power derived from a popular revolution, promised calm and moderation after coming to power following the “Three Glorious Days.” The new “citizen-king” conceded that sovereignty belonged to the nation rather than the monarchy and had the popular tricolor flag of the Revolution and Napoleon replace the white Bourbon flag. Economically, Louis-Philippe stood for laissez-faire. At the same time, Parisian workers, who had played the decisive role in overthrowing the Bourbons, were excluded from politics. They were also unhappy with the New Regime of capitalism that had not improved their lives. These were the paradoxes at the heart of the “July Monarchy,” which in a few years would end the same way it began: with popular revolution in Paris. The new government was set up similarly to that of Louis XVIII: a constitutional monarchy with a two-house legislature and limited electoral base, since only those paying a certain amount of taxes could vote. Daily affairs were managed by government ministers, the two most important of whom were Thiers and Guizot. Both began as journalists for liberal Parisian newspapers during the Restoration, and both were accomplished historians. As Minister of Interior, Thiers oversaw construction of a fortified wall around the capital in the early 1840s. Later, he would play a crucial role in instigating and then repressing the Commune of 1871. Guizot was rare among French politicians in coming from a Protestant background. His ideal world was bourgeois, moderate, capitalist; it was he who coined the phrase juste milieu and whose advice to those wanting to join the wealthy electorate was to “Enrichissez-vous!” (“Make yourself wealthy”). Both Thiers and Guizot stressed the preservation of public order in Paris. They were determined that Louis-Philippe not meet the fate of Charles X. Public order entailed passing laws to curb the press and limit public gatherings. Secret societies bent on revolution responded by organizing in Paris. Some of these were dominated by republicans (the “Society of the Rights of Man”) and others by professional revolutionaries (Blanqui’s “Society of the Seasons”); when the moment for revolution came, all depended upon workers rushing to the barricades. As revolutionaries planned collective action, individual opponents of the regime tried to assassinate the king. There was a remarkable number of attempts on the life of Louis-Philippe during the July Monarchy. The most violent occurred in 1835, when Giuseppe Fieschi aimed an “infernal machine” (several guns strapped together) at the king during a procession. Louis-Philippe survived the blast, but several others were killed. Public unrest was sometimes directed at the Catholic Church: the Paris archbishopric was sacked by crowds in 1830 and again in 1831, after which the space was turned into a public square and the archbishopric moved to the Rue de Grenelle. To maintain public order, Louis-Philippe also relied upon the military and a Paris police force that was becoming larger and more professional.

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In 1829, 600 “sergents de ville,” Paris’s first uniformed officers, were introduced (their numbers would increase to 3,500 by 1856). The king had other armed bodies to supplement regular police. A Municipal Guard consisting of 1,500 infantry and cavalry (by the early 1840s, it had grown to over 3,000 troops) was created in August 1830. Unlike the sergents de ville, whom Parisians regarded as ordinary cops on the beat, the Municipal Guard was an elite military unit that could be called out to handle civil disturbances. The Guard was under the authority of the Ministry of Interior and so served as something like the capital’s gendarmes; Parisians commonly referred to them as such. Tens of thousands of regular soldiers and National Guard could also be called upon to put down riot or rebellion.

3 February Revolution of 1848 The July Monarchy ended as it began: with a popular revolution in Paris. In 1848, there were popular uprisings across central and western Europe in this “Springtime of Revolutions.” In broad historical terms, the 1848 revolutions were a response to the Social Question, which had roots in Paris and had gained currency across the Atlantic World. The Social Question was a perceived gap between the promises of citizenship and improved standard of living made by the “dual revolutions” of 1789 and industrialization, and the reality of everyday life, in which persons below the middle classes were neither active citizens nor enjoyed good living conditions. One “answer” to the Social Question was revolution. There had already been hints in July Monarchy Paris of the connection between the Social Question and revolution. A short-lived, but nonetheless alarming rebellion occurred in June 1832 as cholera was disturbing the city. (A last stand by rebels on a barricade in 1832 later served as the climactic scene in Hugo’s Les Misérables.) Louis-Auguste Blanqui’s and Armand Barbès’s ill-fated Society of Seasons insurrection in May 1839 was another sign of the Social Question. Dissatisfaction with the juste milieu and a desire to address the Social Question came not just from disenfranchised workers and their “déclassé” bourgeois allies, but also from the liberal and professional classes. During a “Banquet Campaign” of late 1847 and early 1848, opponents of the regime skirted laws against “association” by hosting banquets where electoral reform was discussed. This national campaign culminated in Paris, where it aroused popular support. On the evening of February 23, troops fired at a crowd on the Boulevard des Capucines and several people were killed. The bodies were carted around the city, and over the next two days hundreds of barricades erupted in the narrow streets of central and eastern Paris. There was fighting between rebels and soldiers, and Louis-Philippe, like Charles X before him, quickly decided to flee for England (Figure 4.1).

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FIGURE 4.1  Soldiers firing on rebels at the Palais-Royal during the February Revolution, 1848. Photo by Lebrecht Music & Arts / Alamy Stock Photo. (Alamy ERFT9K—RM)

The February Revolution in Paris overthrew the last French king and put in place a Provisional Government headed by notables, including the poet Alphonse de Lamartine. France was declared a republic. This Second Republic oversaw several reforms ostensibly designed to alleviate the Social Question. The vote was expanded and public works initiated in Paris to provide jobs. Parisian workers began to organize by trade, sect of compagnonnage, and political clubs (similar to 1789–94) and showed their support for the new government with marches and friendly petitions. But the happy mood evaporated. The workplace reforms were not enforced, and the ineffectiveness of a labor commission headed by the socialist Louis Blanc that met at the Luxembourg Palace raised suspicions among the upper classes. Radicals campaigned to postpone the vote for nationwide elections for a National Assembly because they feared it would return a conservative majority, but the vote went ahead anyway. A divide between Paris and France materialized. The National Workshops provided jobs for thousands of young, unemployed Parisians, but never had much support or direction. The harmony of February and March gave way to rising tensions in April and May, reaching a culmination with an invasion of the national legislature by radicals. The two sides in Paris’s social conflict faced off against each other in late spring 1848.

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4 June Days An invasion of the newly seated National Assembly on May 15 by radicals, including Blanqui, was the prelude to Paris’s “June Days” rebellion. A month after the May event, the government announced that the National Workshops would be shut down and unmarried workers sent away to drain swampy land. By this point, the two sides—the “Party of Order” and a radicalized portion of the Parisian working class—had staked out virtually irreconcilable positions. From the twenty-third through the twenty-fifth of June 1848, a portion of Paris’s working class rose against society, the government, and its armed forces. The rebellion, though predisposed by certain conditions, took the form of a largely spontaneous uprising. In response and learning from the fall of the monarchy in February, the National Assembly marshaled tremendous armed force and then used it ruthlessly to put down the rebels. Judging from the more than 11,000 arrests that followed and the 100,000 guns seized, the uprising must have been participated in directly by a sizeable minority of Paris’s working-class population. More than 1,000 barricades were built. Most insurgents fought in their own neighborhoods and could move around and keep themselves supplied. The rebellion soon assumed the form of innumerable small, ferocious neighborhood combats. Unlike July 1830 and the previous February, the June Days rising was not implicitly consented to by most middle- and upper-class Parisians. Nor were its participants able to take advantage of a government handicapped by indecision. Utilizing a vast armed force, including the working-class recruits of the Garde Mobile, General Eugène Cavaignac defeated the uprising. As the last rebel barricades were isolated and subdued on the twenty-sixth, there began the removal of the dead, the caring for wounded, and the arrest of thousands. The exact number of persons killed and wounded in the June Days rebellion is unknown. A contemporary document from the prefect of police lists a total (rebel and soldier) of 1,035 dead and 1,703 wounded. These figures are corroborated by most scholars. However, it is likely that there were also many summary executions. Another 11,616 persons were arrested, a little more than half of whom were released after an initial inquiry. The great majority of those arrested were males between the ages of 18 and 45. About a quarter were originally from Paris, while the rest were mostly born in the provinces. Seasonal migrants made up a significant minority of the casualties—killed, wounded, or arrested. Construction and metal workers were the most likely trades to have been arrested, with the former making up almost 18 percent of all arrests. Most of the fighting occurred in the central and eastern quartiers, the usual settings of Paris rebellion. Here is one example of a perhaps typical June rebel (it is drawn from Jean Maitron’s massive collection of working-class Parisian biographies5): Pierre Lefort was born in 1808 in Creuse, and like so many from that part of central France became a stonemason working seasonally in Paris. He had been

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arrested in Paris in 1832 for “rioting” during the cholera epidemic. He lived in the capital permanently after 1845, was active in the demonstrations of spring 1848, and was employed in the National Workshops until they were shut down. Lefort was arrested following the June Days, convicted, transported to an overseas penal colony (probably Algeria), and then pardoned along with other June rebels in 1849; his subsequent story is unknown.

SOCIETY 1 The “Other Paris” Alongside the “City of Light”—the Paris of salons, painting, literature, opera, and the hôtels of the wealthy and influential—there was the “Other Paris.” This was the Paris described by nineteenth-century authors like Eugène Sue, Victor Hugo, and Honoré Frégier, as well as more recent writers and historians including Louis Chevalier, Luc Sante, and Eric Hazan. For both sets of writers, the Other Paris was the city of “argot” (the popular language of the streets) ragpickers, prostitutes, and pockets of poverty. Louis-Philippe, who followed Charles X as king after the Revolution of 1830, ushered in the “juste milieu”: an era of seeming contentment, middle-class prosperity, and political moderation. The bourgeoisie—petit and grande—thrived under this bourgeois king, while those in social classes below did not. Paris of the July Monarchy had a growing and densely packed working-class population competing for jobs and mostly struggling in the New Regime of capitalism. At the bottom of Paris’s social scale, the denizens of the Other Paris were poor, sometimes desperately so, and politically dispossessed. “Canaille,” from the Latin for “dog,” was a derogatory term conjured to describe this social section hovering between “laboring” and “dangerous” classes. The lower end of the social scale, no less than the upper end, had its culture, traditions, and vocations. Chiffoniers were “ragpickers” who collected discarded clothing, shoes, metal, and other articles from the streets, usually at night and in bands of several persons. The refuse was sold to manufacturers to be re-processed into cheap textiles or used as stuffing in mattresses. Chiffoniers were poor, unskilled workers whose appearance triggered revulsion or fear, but whose likelihood served an important function. There were about 1,800 male and female chiffoniers in Paris at the start of the July Monarchy, and more than 15,000 by the end of the century. Monitored closely by the police, they lived on the urban margins. In 1832, as Paris frantically responded to the arrival of cholera, the chiffoniers were forbidden by the authorities from plying their trade in the belief that collecting refuse stirred “miasmas” that helped spread the disease. At the same time, rumors spread that city wells were being poisoned. The chiffoniers

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rioted in the spring of 1832, just months ahead of the big rebellion of June that is the climax of Hugo’s Les Misérables. Eighteen-thirty-two was a year to remember, the last time a “fear” (peur) swept across France, the year of cholera and rebellion in Paris. Some observers warned about the city’s distress. Economists and public health advocates noted the changes taking place in Paris in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The hygienist Louis-René Villermé (1782–1863), who was born and died in Paris, spent years visiting the poor in the central city. He concluded that squalor and dense habitation were to blame for the high rates of cholera in these neighborhoods. Villermé also pointed to the Bièvre, a small Parisian river flowing into the Seine, that was virtually an open sewer. Another Parisian-born reformer and social critic was Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet (1790–1836), whose Prostitution in the City of Paris (1836) was a pioneering work. For Villermé and ParentDuchâtelet, there were deep problems afflicting the Other Paris during the juste milieu that, for both moral and political reasons, could no longer be overlooked.

2 Rue Transnonain The early years of the July Monarchy in Paris were tense politically and socially. The success of the July Revolution in bringing to power a moderate, ostensibly progressive king at first created a buoyant mood, and with it high expectations that the political rights and economic status of everyone, including the working classes, would be improved. In fact, this did not happen. Opposition quickly emerged, King Louis-Philippe became an object of scorn, and the rebellious spirit in Paris grew. The authorities responded with a crackdown on civil liberties that was even more severe than that under Charles X. The troubling political and social conditions in Paris, and the regime’s draconian response merged in an event that was to become a part of city lore: the “Massacre of the Rue Transnonain.” The Rue Transnonain was a narrow street on the Right Bank in central Paris. It was a place—like so many in the Other Paris—of poverty and little hope, the kind of setting that incubated characters like the “Thénardiers” in Hugo’s Les Misérables. Following a failed uprising of Republicans in April, 1834, police, looking for rebels, invaded a home at 12 Rue Transnonain and killed all the members of a family living there. The incident was widely reported in the newspapers and a lithograph of the awful scene was produced by the caricaturist Honoré Daumier. Daumier’s Massacre of the Rue Transnonain would become one of the best-known images of the century. The police killing was a stain on relations between government and working-class Parisians. When Paris was rebuilt during the Second Empire, the “stain” would be removed by destroying the street. The Rue Transnonain no longer exists, but its memory persists because of the drawing by Daumier (Figure 4.2).

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FIGURE 4.2  Honoré Daumier’s Massacre of Rue Transnonain, 1834. During the era of Haussmannization, the street was built over and no longer exists. Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images.

Honoré Daumier’s other depictions of the July Monarchy were mocking, sometimes representing the king as a pear (“poire”), while skewering the pretensions of the juste milieu. Lawyers and upstanding bourgeois were frequent targets of Daumier’s incisive drawings. Indeed, Louis-Philippe had many critics: caricaturists, journalists, writers, and political theorists. The July Monarchy in Paris proved remarkably fertile for a generation of modern thinkers whose impact would be felt in the revolutionary spring of 1848, when Louis-Philippe, just like his predecessor Charles X, was driven from power by an uprising of Parisians. Under Louis-Philippe, the Paris bourgeoisie thrived by investing in banking, construction, and the railroad industry, the latter of which had a hub at Paris and, which “took off” (in the language of economic historians) during the July Monarchy. Bourgeois style and taste about dress, deportment, art, and money-making—which sometimes had been at variance with the values of the restored Bourbons—held sway. Two new social classes were emerging in July Monarchy Paris: a confident and ascendant bourgeoisie, and a politically and economically dispossessed proletariat. In 1840, the political economist Honoré Frégier, himself from the bourgeoisie, wrote with dread about the growing distinction in a book on the “dangerous classes” (which inspired Louis Chevalier’s book of similar title a century later).

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3 Parisian proletariat The German Karl Marx (1818–83) lived in Paris with his wife from 1843 to 1845. Marx is a crucial figure in world history for making an argument—widely accepted in the twentieth century—that modern industry, the struggle of one social class against another and the inherent contradictions of capitalism would usher in a new, more equitable and productive world. His years in Paris were crucial for him intellectually, resulting in one of his early signature works: Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Later, after Marx had moved to London, the rebellions and revolutions in Paris from 1848 through 1871 were instrumental in his understanding of how societies move from capitalism through the “dictatorship of the proletariat” (a phrase probably drawn from the Parisian insurrectionist Louis-Auguste Blanqui) and then to the final stage of communism. The new social class that Marx wrote would make and inherit this transformed world was the industrial working class—the proletariat, a term from Roman Antiquity that was revived in Paris and London in the 1820s. Did Marx see “prolétaires” around him when he was living on the Rue Vaneau of Paris’s Left Bank? Hardly, at least not an industrial proletariat. Paris had a few modern factories on the outskirts of the city during the July Monarchy. The construction of railroad lines and terminals (“gares”) was just beginning. But most Parisian production during the July Monarchy remained as it long had been: in traditional construction and artisanal goods, much of the latter directed at the luxury market, and still employing age-old skills and techniques. But just because Paris did not manufacture in the way of London or Manchester did not mean it was not productive or a part of the growing capitalist world system. Indeed, by some measures Paris was more productive than London, even as it was creating traditional goods using traditional means.1 At the same time, the Parisian working class may have been only marginally less “immiserated” than factory workers in Manchester’s cotton mills. There are abundant signs of the immiseration of Parisian workers during the July Monarchy in the reports of police and public health officials, the observations of writers and journalists, and the words of increasingly literate workers. The “utopian” thinker Henri de Saint-Simon had already described the advent of modern industry and capitalism, and with it the arrival of a modern proletariat. Parisian workers saw the industrial future, too. The first half of the nineteenth century gave birth to Parisian “worker poets” describing both their miseries and aspirations. Supported by benefactors including the Saint-Simonians, the novelist George Sand and the social activist Flora Tristan, Parisian working-class poets such as the locksmith Jérôme-Pierre Gilland and the wood carver Charles Colmance published their writings and developed followings. Their poetry attacked materialism and “egoism,” while sometimes romanticizing the innate value

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of labor. Another working-class “sage” was Louis-Gabriel Gauny, a joiner, whose writings were collected and published in the twentieth century by the philosopher Jacques Rancière.2 These workers offered an alternative narrative to what they saw as the false promise of the juste milieu. There were also a handful of Parisian newspapers published by workers or with the support of bourgeois patrons during the July Monarchy. The print worker Adolphe Boyer, who was the author of The Status of the Working Class and Its Improvement through an Organization of Work (1840), edited the working-class newspaper L’Atelier (workshop). Boyer’s vision of the fate of the working class under capitalism was not hopeful, and soon after publishing The Status of the Working Class he committed suicide.

4 Garnis and Place de Grève The Paris police were charged with keeping an eye on the combustible social and political mix, and defusing riot or rebellion before they happened. Working closely with police were commissaires de police—neighborhood officials whose tasks included both administration and investigation. There were forty-eight commissaires, one for each quartier. They were in daily contact with ordinary Parisians, and so their records have been an important primary source for historians. Police, mouchards, and commissaires monitored “marginal” places and persons: cabarets, cafés, theaters, boardinghouses, and faubourgs; migrant workers, prostitutes, members of compagnonnage, peddlers, beggars, and vagabonds. Hôtels garnis were boardinghouses used by travelers and migrant workers. Most were clustered in the city center, with others on the Left Bank near the Rue Mouffetard. They were classified by police into five categories. The first three categories included single-room dwellings designed for middle-class residents and travelers and were costlier than those of the lower ranks; the respectable, if slightly shabby, setting of Balzac’s Père Goriot was such a place. Migrant workers crowded into the chambrées communes (communal rooms) of fourth-class buildings. Fifth-class garnis were for the down-and-out. There were also hundreds of hôtels clandestins that were not registered with the police. There was a seasonal pulse at the garnis that corresponded to the rhythm of migratory labor, with rooms crowded and all beds taken from March to December. The number of garnis grew along with the city’s population. At the time of the Revolution of 1789, there were about 20,000 persons living in them; by 1831, Paris had 3,106 garnis holding a population of nearly 32,000. The later years of the July Monarchy saw a great influx of migrant workers, so that by 1844 the city had about 72,000 lodgers “en garni.” Many garnis were clustered in the streets around the Hôtel de Ville and the Place de Grève, the open square facing the building on the west. Police kept close tabs on this area because of the hôtels garnis, but also because the Place de Grève had a history associated with violence—it

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was for a long time the setting of public executions—and because it was where workers gathered for a daily hiring fair. During the July Monarchy, most of the workers looking for jobs at the Place were migrant building workers, especially stonemasons, stonecutters, and carpenters from the Limousin region of central France. Most lived in the garnis that were a short walk from the Place; and most went away from the morning hiring fair without a job. For this reason, police and authorities worried these people were a potential source of trouble. Indeed, during the many rebellions of the nineteenth century, migrant stonemasons, living in garnis and using the Place de Grève hiring fair, would become prominent among the “casualties”—killed, injured, or arrested—and even though this may have been as much a case of false assumption as real participation. Migrant workers in Paris endured the prejudices of the authorities and sedentary Parisians for a long time. This is one of the themes to be found in the recollections of Martin Nadaud, a migrant stonemason from the department of Creuse who worked in Paris for many years, and whose published memoir offers the rare perspective of a member of the “laboring classes.”

ECONOMY 1 “Decisive Years” “Decisive Years” is the assessment about the July Monarchy from the American historian David Pinkney, whose research focused on Paris between 1830 and 1871.3 They were “decisive” especially in the economic realm. For Pinkney and some economic historians, the July Monarchy witnessed a “take off” in Parisian industry, though the style and timing of this French Industrial Revolution was perhaps unique. Textile production and coal mining mostly happened in the northern part of the country and in cities of central France like Saint-Etienne. There was some heavy industry on the outskirts of Paris, mostly related to the construction of railroads. Initially, there was not much support in Paris for the building of railroads, which the politician Adolphe Thiers considered a British “toy.” But in the early 1840s, the government of Louis-Philippe began to work with the Paris Chamber of Commerce and private companies to finance the building of locomotives and the laying of track connecting the capital to other parts of France: first to Rouen and Orléans, then to the Belgian border and eventually to other locations. Railroads and telegraph lines, like roads, now began to emanate across the nation from the Paris hub. A rail line circumnavigating the city would be built between 1851 and 1869. Train stations (gares) became landmark creations of the July Monarchy: the Gare Saint Lazare (1837–40), Gare du Nord (1843), and Gare de l’Est (1847–50) on the Right Bank; the Gare d’Austerlitz (1838–40), Gare de

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Lyon (1847–53), and Gare Montparnasse (1848–49) on the Left Bank. Periodically renovated, they all still stand and operate. New joint-stock companies based in Paris blossomed to handle the expansion. The growth of railroads led to an industrial “boom” in Paris in the mid-1840s, though this was followed by a “bust” that helped contribute to revolution in 1848. Iron, which was crucial to the railroad industry, was also used in the construction of buildings. A notable use of iron building in Paris during the July Monarchy was the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (begun 1843, completed 1850), designed by the influential architect Henri Labrouste (1801–75), a native Parisian and graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts. Subsequently, iron would be used in many other Parisian landmarks: the National Library, the Grand and Petit Palais, and the Eiffel Tower. (Steel was introduced into construction in the 1860s and would eventually supplant the use of iron.) The city’s economy began to modernize in the 1830s and 1840s, but we should not exaggerate: Paris was not an industrial center with modern factories, new technology, and heavy machinery like Manchester or Birmingham in England. Artisanal production of high-quality, luxury goods, created by skilled workers in shops scattered across dozens of neighborhoods remained critical to the city’s economy; moreover, this kind of production remained lucrative. A demand for articles de Paris persisted across Europe and the Atlantic and remained crucial to the city’s economy. Paris and France showed that there was more than one “path” toward modernization.

2 Rambuteau, urban planning, and a new wall There were signs of economic modernization in Paris during the July Monarchy, even as the “look” and layout of the city remained in the eyes of many “medieval.” Aside from the newer districts in the west around the Champs-Élysées, most of the city—particularly the central quartiers—had changed little over the centuries. Some Parisians, like the writers Balzac and Hugo, appreciated the antiquated feel of the city. But to others, it seemed obvious that the capital needed updating and improving. Even “Mother Nature” seemed to promote the change: the Île Louviers melded with the Right Bank in 1847, so that the Seine in Paris now had two, rather than three small islands. An impetus to “urban renewal” was the cholera epidemic of 1832, as well as the rebellions and revolutions which seemed to erupt every few years. Rebuilding the city, the thinking went, might spur the economy and serve as an antidote to contagion and unrest. And so, even before Baron Haussmann went all out to tackle Paris’s “diseased” and rebellious urban geography during the Second Empire, the Come de Rambuteau (1781–1869), Prefect of the Seine in 1833–48, got

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FIGURE 4.3  Galérie Vivienne. One of the covered arcades of Paris, most of which were built between 1815 and 1848; the Galérie Vivienne was opened in the second arrondissement in 1823. Most of the arcades were gone by the Second Empire, but a few remain today. The Galérie is lined with small shops and cafés. © Casey Harison.

a head start on the task. A “de-centralizer” at heart, Rambuteau’s plans began at the center of Paris—enlarging the Place de Grève and distancing it and the adjacent Hôtel de Ville from the nearby “riotous slums” and hôtels garnis. The building was doubled in size and adjoining streets were widened.

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Rambuteau thought, too, that the project would provide jobs to workers who otherwise might be inclined to go to the barricades. Near Notre-Dame, Rambuteau oversaw construction of the Square Jean XXII on the spot of the former archbishopric of Paris, pillaged by a crowd in 1831. Elsewhere, he directed improvements to the city’s sewer system, water supply, sidewalks, and street lighting. Trees were planted, and an overall effort was made to beautify the city. Many of the arcades that would captivate the writer Walter Benjamin a century later were constructed at this time. Rambuteau could not fulfill his entire vision because he never had the full backing of the regime, nor the massive financial resources available to Haussmann. Still, it was a start in transforming Paris from the medieval to the modern city we now know. Today, the Rue de Rambuteau, named after the prefect, is a lively street connecting the districts of Les Halles and Marais. There was an element of public works thinking in Rambuteau’s plans. The desire to draw unemployed workers away from politics and insurrection while helping the construction industry led Louis-Philippe to give public works ministerial status in 1840. The main task of the new ministry was to oversee the building of a new defensive wall around Paris. The last wall had been completed just before the Revolution of 1789 to tax goods going in and out of the city. The invasion of foreign armies in 1814, and preparations for a siege of Paris at that time, resurrected the idea of a new, truly defensive wall. The Minister of Interior, Adolphe Thiers, was the main proponent of the project. Workers appreciated the jobs, but many Parisians thought the purpose behind the wall was less to protect the capital from foreign armies than to protect the government from rebellion within the city. Work had already begun in 1830, and now was polished off in a burst between 1840 and 1844. The “Thiers Wall” included sixteen modern forts and became the formal boundary of Paris in 1860. It protected the city during the Prussian siege of 1870–71 and was torn down after the end of the Great War in 1918.

3 Hints of a labor movement During the July Monarchy, Parisian business and financial interests exerted much influence on the policy-making apparatus of Louis-Philippe. This was, after all, a government that sought a juste milieu—a society defined by bourgeois values and operating in the interest of the middle and upper classes. Louis-Philippe carried himself publicly and in temperament as a bourgeois ruler. Laissez-faire dominated economically, and political dissent was curtailed. In this kind of setting, Parisian workers had little political clout and few persons to represent their interests. There was, nonetheless, hints of what later became a Parisian “labor movement.” There were many things that divided Parisian workers during the July Monarchy: skilled versus unskilled; artisanal versus industrial; sedentary and native versus seasonal and provincial or foreign. Jobs, status, and pay were affected by gender and age. To be a young woman looking for work in

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Paris in the 1830s was to be in highly precarious position, much more so than a young man. Still, workers could sometimes come together, usually over issues related to the job, such as wages, length of the working day, workplace conditions, “piecework,” the failure of bosses to pay wages, and an abusive form of labor subcontracting known as “marchandage.” During the July Monarchy, workers retained the deferential habit of appealing for redress of grievance to the king or prefect through petitions and demonstrations. Especially in the early 1830s, there were numerous instances of Parisian workers from particular trades making these kinds of old-fashioned appeals. It was difficult for Parisian workers to organize in their interests because trade unions and strikes were illegal under the Napoleonic Code. Workers in some trades did create “mutual-aid societies.” These were worker-run organizations that collected dues and dispensed funds for injury, illness, old age, and accidental death. There were 232 mutual-aid societies with a total membership of over 16,000 in Paris in 1840. Some of these no doubt acted as surrogate trade unions. A genuine workers’ “brotherhood” operating in Paris during the July Monarchy was “compagnonnage.” Compagnonnage was the French tradition of journeyman in some trades moving from job to job on the “tour de France,” perfecting their skills and gaining experience. In Paris, the tradition was alive among carpenters, butchers, stonecutters, and roofers. Compagnons attempted to control production through enforcement of a tarif on prices, managing their workforce, and occasionally staging (illegal) strikes. Compagnonnage was also characterized by sometimes severe rites of passage and brawls (“rixes”) between rival sects. Compagnonnage reached a peak of influence during the July Monarchy. The subsequent start of a modern labor movement coincided with the fading of the tradition. Labor strikes were outlawed, but nonetheless they sometimes occurred in July Monarchy Paris. Compagnon carpenters, along with tailors and stonemasons unattached to compagnonnage, organized several strikes in the 1830s. Eighteen-forty was the “year of the strike” in Paris. Striking workers from several trades demanded higher wages, fewer working hours, curbing marchandage and confection, and ending the livret (internal passport). Some employers conceded, but otherwise the government responded with force and arrests. At the suburban Plain of Bondy in September 1840, a gathering of almost 7,000 construction workers was dispersed by soldiers and saber-wielding Municipal Guards. The long contest between “labor and capital” in Paris was just beginning.

4 Paris economy at mid-century At the end of the July Monarchy, just ahead of the February Revolution that would drive King Louis-Philippe and his government from power, the Paris Chamber of Commerce issued a lengthy report (Statistique de l’industrie à Paris [1848]) on the city’s economy. The original “chambers of commerce”

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Fieschi Attempt

T

here is a history of political assassinations and acts of terrorism in Paris that dates back at least to the killing of King Henri IV in 1610. We should be careful in using the term “terrorism” in its contemporary sense, which mostly describes the actions of radicals using indiscriminate violence in the name of religious or political goals. The Terror of the French Revolution (1793–4) was a period of punitive rule under a democratically elected government (the National Convention) meant to deal with a set of genuine crises: foreign war, civil war, food shortage, and conspiracy. Terrorism in 1793 could describe the fully legal actions taken by French Representatives-on-Mission to win the war against Austria or Prussia. Many French kings and presidents have survived assassination attempts over the centuries. One of the best-known, certainly the most destructive in terms of victims (but also probably the clumsiest), was the “Fieschi Attempt” of July 1835. The target was King Louis-Philippe, a member of the Orléanist family, who came to power in the Revolution of 1830. LouisPhilippe promised moderation, yet his government quickly cracked down on opponents, generating a wave of popular unrest in Paris. Secret societies and individuals with political grievances took up their own response to the king: assassination attempts. During his reign (1830–48), there would be multiple attempts on the life of Louis-Philippe. Among the would-be assassins was the Corsican Giuseppe Fieschi (1790–1836). Corsica is the Mediterranean island where Napoleon was born and raised. Corsica had a culture associated with acts of violence and retribution (“vendetta”) that may have contributed to Fieschi’s preparation to become an assassin. Fieschi was also a disgruntled Napoleonic veteran who had survived the traumatic invasion of Russia in 1812. He had a criminal history and, after moving to Paris in the early 1830s, struck up a relationship with others of like mind who were also fervent republicans. Fieschi’s “infernal machine”—this is what the newspapers labeled it—was a weapon consisting of twenty-five muskets lashed together and timed to fire simultaneously. As the king’s cortège passed by on the Rue du Temple, Fieschi ignited the device from a third-story apartment window. The terrible fusillade killed eighteen and wounded twenty-two people, along with many horses. Miraculously, LouisPhilippe suffered just a scratch. Fieschi himself was wounded horribly by the concussion of the blast. He was tried, found guilty of murder and attempted regicide, and guillotined with two co-conspirators. A year later, there were two more attempts on Louis-Philippe, both by young men— Louis Alibaud, age 26, and François Meunier, age 23. Alibaud had been inspired by the example of Fieschi and went to the guillotine proclaiming his fidelity to the republican cause. Meunier, a sympathetic figure, was pardoned but deported. He died in exile in New Orleans.4

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In the 1960s, there would be numerous attempts on the life of President Charles de Gaulle, most of them by OAS (Organisation armée sécrète) terrorists angry about de Gaulle’s plans for Algerian independence. Aside from Henri IV, the only French head of state to be assassinated was Sadi Carnot, president of the Third Republic, who was stabbed by an Italian anarchist while visiting Lyon in 1894.

were created by Napoleon Bonaparte to help organize production and curb the economic “anarchy” that resulted from the abolition of the guilds during the Revolution. The Paris Chamber initially met at the Hôtel de Ville and then in 1826 transferred to the Place de la Bourse. Its report for the years 1847 and 1848 was the first detailed, comprehensive survey of all aspects of the city’s economy. Though it was in some ways a politicized document, the survey remains an important primary source for understanding the economic condition of Paris at mid-century. The Chamber report indicated a population in Paris of 1,053,897, of whom 342,530 were workers employed in 325 industries. This did not include seasonal migrant workers, who would have constituted a significant addition to the total. Within the working-class population, about 205,000 were males, 113,000 females, and 25,000 children. They worked for 30,000 employers, most of whom (around 25,000) employed two to ten persons another 32,583 were self-employed enterprises employed just one worker. The Chamber report noted a distinctive feature of Parisian society and economy: the arrival of New Men (“hommes habiles et experimentes”), described by the report as ambitious, not bound by convention, working more for the market than for clients, with personal success often the product of an acumen for subcontracting or speculation. These New Men were petit entrepreneurs who thrived in all areas of Parisian production. Indeed, petit entrepreneurship defined most Parisian production at midcentury. For instance, less than one-quarter of the city’s 4,601 building firms (employing a total of 45,664 workers, not including seasonal migrants) had ten or more workers, while a little more than half employed two to ten workers. Construction, like many industries in the capital, hired extra workers only when needed. Certain kinds of production dominated in certain neighborhoods. Construction generated a lot of revenue and jobs in the first, fifth, eighth, ninth, eleventh, and twelfth arrondissements. Tailoring “boutiques” dominated in the second, third, and fourth arrondissements, where there were 90,064 clothing workers working for 29,216 employers. More women than men worked in the clothing trades. Most production in July Monarchy Paris remained as it had long been: operating on a comparatively small scale, with workers exercising traditional skills. In terms of overall revenue, clothing and food production

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dominated, followed by construction, furniture-making, luxury goods, and heavy metals. Modern chemical production was concentrated mostly on the city’s outskirts and was just beginning to adopt the new technology and production methods that would make it prosperous in the second half of the century. The Right Bank had more industry and production than the Left Bank. According to the Chamber’s reporting, even compared to industrial centers like London, Paris at mid-century was a solidly “industrious” city.

CULTURE 1 The Social Question The Social Question came to the fore in Paris not only in rebellions like the June Days and the discoveries about poverty by public health reformers Villermé and Parent-Duchâtelet, but also in the literature, art, and political theory of the July Monarchy. Political cartoonists of the era found professional homes at the journals La Caricature and Le Charivari launched by Charles Philipon. Honoré Daumier poked fun at Louis-Philippe and Paris’s professional classes of politicians and lawyers. Daumier also turned a discerning eye toward the poverty and desperation of the poor, and then to the cholera epidemic when it struck the city in 1832. Daumier’s Massacre of the Rue Transnonain (1834) was one of the emblematic images of the age. Ahead of Louis-Napoleon’s election as president in 1848, Daumier warned about the enticements of a political charlatan with his take on the character “Robert Macaire.” In the 1830s and 1840s, the novels and short stories of Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo dug at the tensions beneath the surface of Parisian society. Some of the novels of Balzac’s The Human Comedy were set in Paris, meticulously detailing the lives of the petit bourgeoisie, lower classes, and wealthy. His best-known Parisian story is probably Le Père Goriot (1835), which introduced classic types like the social climber “Rastignac” and the criminal “Vautrin.” During the July Monarchy, Hugo began outlining the narrative and characters for his epic Les Misérables, which culminates with the rebellion of 1832, and which drew upon an earlier short story, “Claude Gueux” (1834), about the tragic fate of a Parisian criminal. The vision of social justice at the heart of Hugo’s Les Misérables was formulated in Paris of the July Monarchy. This period produced in Paris an abundance of social and political commentators writing on the Social Question, most of them from the middle classes, but usually sympathetic to the plight of workers. Louis Blanc (1811–82) was a political theorist, historian, and politician whose idea of an “answer” to the Social Question was the “organization of labor.” By this, he meant that laissez-faire, having produced “anarchy” in the economy and among the working class, the government must take a hand in re-creating

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order. Blanc did not mean bringing back the guilds of the Old Regime but argued instead that new working-class organizations should cooperate with the government to create jobs and modernize production. Blanc tentatively tested these ideas when he headed the Luxembourg Commission in the spring of 1848. His History of Ten Years (1841) is a thorough commentary on the first decade of the July Monarchy. Louis Blanc’s ideas were of a republican and socialist order. Indeed, socialism became the prominent alternative to the juste milieu of LouisPhilippe and Guizot. Etienne Cabet’s (1788–1856) Voyage to Icaria (1840) described a socialist utopia, and Cabet attracted a mass following in Paris and across France. The first “Icarians” departed from the port of Le Havre just weeks ahead of the February Revolution to set up an (ill-fated) communal society in Texas. The Icarians’ “answer” to the Social Question was to start afresh in the New World.

2 Bourgeoisie and bohemians The prevailing “mode” of Paris during the July Monarchy was bourgeois. What did bourgeois mean to contemporaries? It meant moderation in politics—a rejection of both neo-Jacobin revolution and the reactionary return to the Bourbon Old Regime of the “Legitimists.” It meant favoring economic laissez-faire and rejecting the many varieties of socialism coming from the Parisian intelligentsia and working class. And it meant a sober style of dress and comportment. Louis-Philippe, the “citizen-king,” epitomized the triumph of bourgeois style in July Monarchy Paris. Bourgeois style generated a great deal of commentary, much of it critical, by Parisians and observers of Parisian life. One of the important novelists of the century, Gustave Flaubert (1821–80), created an emblematic bourgeois literary character—“Frédéric Moreau”—as the moral centerpiece of his novel Sentimental Education (1869), which is set in Paris around the Revolution of 1848. Earlier, the English writer Francis Trollope detailed the triumph of bourgeois image and values in Paris and the Parisians (1836). An interesting perspective on bourgeois Paris comes from Rifaa a Rafi al-Tahtawi, an Egyptian cleric who lived in the city in the late 1820s and early 1830s. What especially caught his eye as an outsider were the endless new clothing fashions, the fact that much wine was consumed yet few persons appeared drunk, the large banks and department stores, and the degree to which Parisians spent money on personal possessions.6 This was a description of a bourgeois social order by an outsider. Among the bourgeois past-times that took shape during the July Monarchy was boating on the Seine (swimming and fishing had long been popular with the working classes). Another past-time was “flânerie,” which simply meant walking and observing, and through the ambulatory experience acquiring the kind of “sentimental education” that Flaubert was among the first to describe. The male flâneur was to become a fixed literary trope of the Parisian novel

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and a familiar public figure on the streets of the capital. The flâneur mostly belonged to the bourgeoisie, but perhaps to a less prim and proper section than the “classic” bourgeois. Indeed, one seeming by-product of the triumph of the bourgeoisie during the July Monarchy in Paris was the emergence of “bohemia.” The term comes from the French word referring to the Roma. Bohemians were typically the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie— students, artists, aspiring writers—who temporarily abandoned, if not entirely rejected, the values and lifestyles of their middle-class parents; bohemians were often déclassé bourgeois. Henri Murger, author of Scenes of Bohemian Life (1847), wrote that bohemia was born in Paris about 1840. Bohemians took advantage of the wealth and entertainments afforded by bourgeois Paris, but disparaged the king and his style for being dull. By 1848, much of Paris seemed to have grown bored with its bourgeois king. Not only the bourgeoisie, but all social classes frequented Paris’s theaters, most of which were situated on the boulevards. Cheap seats could be found in the balcony, nicknamed the “paradise” or “poulailler” (chicken coup).7 The “café-concert” featuring pantomimes and sketch-acting was popular along the Champs-Élysées by the end of the 1830s. The famous actor Frédérick Lemaître and the high-kicking dance the “chahut” (predecessor of the “cancan”) came out of July Monarchy Paris. In the first half of the nineteenth century, melodrama was the favored genre for theater, though political-themed plays in the late 1840s contributed to the mood of change anticipating the Revolution of 1848. The Théâtre de la Gâité on the “Boulevard du Crime” (the nickname given to the Boulevard du Temple because of all the melodramatic plays performed there) was a popular venue, though this did not save it from demolition during the urban renovation of the 1860s.

3 Arcades and photography A distinctive architectural and commercial development in Paris during the Restoration and July Monarchy was the arcade (“passage” or “galérie”). Arcades were covered, narrow passageways, generally a few hundred feet in length lined with shops and cafés. They offered protection from the weather and a break from the loud, busy streets for flâneurs, shoppers, mothers out with their children, and young men looking for a place to peruse the newspapers. The first arcade was built in 1786, but most—approximately 80 percent—went up during the Restoration and July Monarchy. Arcades were designed to appeal to bourgeois tastes and sensibilities. Usually built of iron, with glass ceilings and gas lighting, arcades were a wholly modern architectural development. Though other arcades would open in Brussels and even Saint Petersburg in Russia, they were essentially a Parisian invention. In Paris, the arcades had individual names and “personalities,” like the Galéries Colbert and Vivienne located near the Bourse. The first arcade had been constructed in the 1780s at the PalaisRoyal, when that setting was a social and political hot spot, and then more

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(including the well-known Passage Feydeau [1790]) within a few years. Most of the arcades were constructed between 1822 and 1848 on the Right Bank. Altogether, there were perhaps 150 of them before the demolitions of the Second Empire. The building of large department stores like the Bon Marché after mid-century drew traffic away from the arcades. After they started to disappear, a nostalgia about the arcades emerged among writers and artists. In the early twentieth century, the German writer Walter Benjamin (1892– 1940) was fascinated by the remaining arcades, writing at length and with great affection about them in The Arcades Project (1927–40).8 Arcades were a new form of architecture befitting the modern world. Something else new that came out of Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century was photography. Paris was not the only home of photography, but it was an important one. The earliest form of photography was the “daguerreotype” developed by Louis Daguerre (1787–1851). A black-and-white daguerreotype of the Boulevard du Temple in 1838 shows tremendous detail. Another early object of photography was the ancient Obelisk of Luxor, a gift from the Egyptian Pasha Muhammed Ali that was set up in 1836 at the Place de la Concorde (where it is still an eye-catching monument). In 1839, Daguerre displayed his work at the École des Beaux-Arts and subsequently the government of LouisPhilippe purchased the rights to the photo-making process. Probably the most famous Parisian photographer of the century was Félix Nadar (1820–1910). A native Parisian, as a young man Nadar belonged to the city’s first generation of bohemians, earning money as a caricaturist and writer before turning to photography, after which his studio became the city’s most famous. Many of the most memorable images we have of nineteenth-century Parisians come from Nadar, who hired a balloon to take aerial, “bird’s eye view,” photographs of the city—an innovation soon copied in other parts of the world. A little later, the photographer Charles Marville (1813–79) documented many of the streets of Paris before they were rebuilt under Haussmann.

4 City of exiles, expats, and artists Paris of the July Monarchy was for some a refuge. Exiles, expats, and artists found the city a place with a special intellectual and cultural energy. Paris welcomed outcasts. Paris was the Capital of Revolution in the nineteenth century, but it was not the only place to experience revolution or rebellion. During the century, Paris attracted revolutionary exiles and disaffected members of the intelligentsia from across Europe and the Americas, as it would attract political exiles from Africa and Asia in the twentieth century. Between 1830 and 1848, the foreign intellectuals who made Paris their permanent or temporary home included many well-known Germans: Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Moses Hess, Richard Wagner, Wilhelm Weitling, and Giacomo Meyerbeer. Among the many Russians were Mikhail Bakunin, Ivan Turgenev, Alexander Herzen, and Vissarion Belinsky. Others came from

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different places in Europe and America: James Fenimore Cooper, Francis Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray, Adam Mickiewicz, Franz Liszt, and Giuseppe Mazzini. The flow of famous artists, writers, and intellectuals would continue in the twentieth century. Why Paris? The city had long been a destination for émigré intellectuals, and because of the mystique of the French Revolution and Napoleon—which grew with the passage of time—it seemed that Paris had once more become the “Capital of Europe.” Even before arriving, foreigners knew a lot about Paris. The city’s reputation for gaiety, art, theater, salons, crime, decadence, and haute couture—the gamut of human appetites and talents—were attractions. British visitors may have been put off by the habit of male Parisians urinating in the open, but in general Parisians had a reputation for welcoming outsiders and visitors. Foreign-language newspapers and magazines were available, and many exiles used Paris as a base from which to publish works directed at readers back home. The foreign intellectuals, writers, artists, and political exiles mostly came from the middle and upper classes, but Paris of the July Monarchy attracted thousands of foreign workers, too—mostly Belgian, German, Italian, and British laboring in construction or the new factories. Altogether, there were 47,000 foreigners in Paris in 1830 and 174,000 by 1847. (We know the numbers because police kept close watch on them [Figure 4.3].) One of the attractions of nineteenth-century Paris was its art, the artists who made the city their home, and the general ambiance that spurred what the Romantics called “genius.” During the July Monarchy, Honoré Daumier drew hundreds of images depicting political and cultural life in the city. The painter Gustave Courbet (1819–77) spent years in and out of the capital. Courbet was one of the original members of the Parisian bohemia, and during the Commune of 1871 became the city’s artistic impresario. At his Parisian atelier, Courbet maintained a corps of models who posed for his paintings. Women and young men made careers as models in the ateliers of Parisian artists. A kind of reputation about female models evolved during the July Monarchy: unmarried, young, originally from the provinces, and promiscuous. Some models moved on to the theater or vaudeville to become singers or actors. The typical nineteenth-century “lorette” (courtesan) of the 1840s might have come to Paris from the French countryside and worked as a model in the atelier of an artist before moving on in life. The bohemian world of art produced not only great paintings, but also an “underworld” that included the exploitation of young women working as models in the ateliers of famous artists.9

Conclusion The Other Paris—the Paris that helped give birth to the nineteenth century’s Social Question—was in many ways the Paris of the July Monarchy. Born in revolution in 1830 and ended by revolution in 1848, this was the Paris that was grist for the literary mills of Balzac, Hugo, and Eugène Sue—a sometimes

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grimy place, divided by social caste, hovering expectantly (as the words of these writers reveal) on the frontier between old and new. Paris between 1830 and 1848 drew visitors, but it was not the tourist mecca it became by the end of the century and through the present. It was rather a city of rebellion and occasional crime; of distinct social classes living increasingly separate existences; of Medieval-era streets and unhealthy neighborhoods that seemed to be breeding grounds of frightening and unfamiliar diseases like cholera. The beginnings of modern industry, especially railroads, promised wealth and convenience for Parisians, and yet it was clear to all that modernity came with troubling side-effects. Paris may have been more socially disunited during the July Monarchy than any other period of the nineteenth century; the recurrent rebellions, and the revolutions that bookmarked the era, are evidence of this division. The anxieties of modernity arrived both in the proletarian cafés and the bourgeois salons of July Monarchy Paris. In many ways, the great project of urban renewal (Haussmannization) of the Second Empire was a direct reaction against the combination of narrow, unclean streets and working-class agitation that marked Paris in the 1830s and 1840s. The last Bourbon ruler—Charles X—seemed unable or unwilling to change or adapt, and although his successor—Louis-Philippe—was accommodating to bourgeois Parisians, his regime, too, ultimately could not meet the test of modernity. The grumblings against the bourgeoisie, against the monarchy, against capitalism that were to mark the rest of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth came from Paris during the July Monarchy.

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5 Paris during the Second Empire, 1852–1870

Chronology 1851

Louis-Napoleon’s coup d’état—rebellion in Paris is put down

1852 Declaration of Second Empire—Louis-Napoleon becomes Napoleon III—Bon Marché department store opens—Crédit Mobilier launched 1853 Baron Haussmann appointed prefect—Haussmannization begins—conseils des prudhommes re-established 1855

First Paris World Exposition—Parisian Gas Company created

1860

Annexation of suburbs—construction of National Library begins

1864

Labor strikes legalized

1867

Second Paris World Exposition

1868

Passage of law allowing popular meetings

1870

Franco-Prussian War begins

1870–71 Siege of Paris during Franco-Prussian War

Introduction Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte who became Napoleon III in France’s Second Empire, did not elicit much respect from certain prominent nineteenth-century figures (whose own reputations indeed probably outlived that of Louis-Napoleon): in the Second Brumaire of LouisNapoleon, which described the seizure of power in the coup d’état of 1851,

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Karl Marx ridiculed the new French leader as a comical shadow of his great uncle; and the famous French novelist Victor Hugo, who was driven to exile in 1851, relentlessly mocked the Emperor as “Napoleon the Little.” In some ways, the Bonapartist legend never quite recovered from the Second Empire. Unlike the previous French regimes of the Restoration and July Monarchy, Napoleon III’s Second Empire demonstrated an adventurous, sometimes misguided (as it turned out) spirit in foreign affairs and war. In the 1850s, France sent armies to fight alongside Great Britain and other allies against Russia in the Crimean Peninsula, and then against Austria in support of Italian unification. Another French army was dispatched to Mexico to aid the adventure of the Habsburg archduke Maximilian. Napoleon III also solidified the French hold on Algeria. But the foreign wars were not close to the magnitude nor the success of the original Napoleon, and the episode that brought the Second Empire to an end was Napoleon III’s fateful decision to send France to fight yet another war—this one against the large and modern Prussian military. The Second Empire mimicked the First Empire in other ways, too, and in a manner foreshadowing the twentieth century. Plebiscites and other ruling devices were employed by Napoleon III to create the illusion that all France supported the seizure of power of 1851 and the imperial state that followed. This “sham democracy” was grist for the criticisms of Marx and Hugo. Twentieth-century scholars looking back at the Second Empire would see it as a curiosity for its time, perhaps even a “proto-fascist” hint of the future. But unlike the fascist states of the twentieth century, the Second Empire seemed to be evolving toward a “Liberal” phase in its latter years. Had France not gone to war against Prussia and her German allies, maybe the Empire would have survived. Or maybe not: even without her foreign policy miscues, the Second Empire seemed to be sliding toward its nadir. The novelist Emile Zola’s portraits of the Empire’s last days in his story of the Parisian prostitute Nana—the title character seeming to represent the Empire itself—captured the decadence and end-of-days mood of the last years. With France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, a unified Germany would replace France as the great power on the European Continent. Napoleon III’ greatest and most enduring accomplishment was domestic: the rebuilding of Paris, a project he turned over to the departmental prefect Baron Haussmann. Haussmann, who seemed to have an obsession with the straight line (l’axe), oversaw the destruction of entire Parisian neighborhoods. But the “Haussmannization” of the 1850s and 1860s would also turn Paris into the Capital of the Nineteenth Century that we still treasure today.

POLITICS 1 Republic to Empire The Second Empire (1852–70) emerged from the overthrow of the Second Republic (1848–51) that was accomplished by Louis-Napoleon and his supporters. Following the repression of the June Days rebellion, the National

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Assembly temporarily turned over control of government to a general—the Parisian-born Eugène Cavaignac (1802–57), who led the military forces that defeated the June rebels. A national election for president was held in December 1848, and Louis-Napoleon—a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte with a circumspect personal history—easily defeated a set of candidates, including Cavaignac, to be elected president of the republic. Louis-Napoleon’s support came mostly from conservatives supporting a restoration of “order” and the peasant countryside. The name “Bonaparte” played a role in the election results by conjuring notions of glory and efficient rule. But Louis-Napoleon’s presidency was troubled almost from the start. Those on the political Left opposed him and began to organize against the government. In Paris, a June 1849 demonstration prepared by representatives of the National Assembly was put down. Under Louis-Napoleon and a conservative majority in the National Assembly, the republic allied with the Catholic Church, reduced the voting franchise, and intimidated the press. As radicals strategized in Paris and across France, Louis-Napoleon’s government organized a seizure of power that was launched on December 2, 1851—a symbolic day, since it was the anniversary of Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup of Brumaire 1799 and the Battle of Austerlitz (1805). There was resistance to the coup in the countryside and in some cities, including Paris, where about seventy barricades went up in the eastern quartiers and north of the Hôtel de Ville. About 30,000 troops were called in to put down the resistance. There was fighting in the streets of the capital from the third to the fifth, with about eighty soldiers and as many as 800 insurgents killed. The capital was placed under a state of siege, arrests were made (about 3,000 altogether), and opponents of Louis-Napoleon—soon to proclaim himself Napoleon III—fled the city. Among the exiles created by the coup d’état of December 1851 was Victor Hugo, who had been elected to the National Assembly in 1848. Hugo fled to Brussels and then to the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey, from which he carried on a relentless, vituperative critique of France’s new Emperor: “Napoleon the Little,” in Hugo’s eyes. Rejecting an offer of amnesty, Hugo would not return to Paris until the Second Empire ended during the FrancoPrussian War of 1870–71. The final act of what Hugo saw as the tragedy of the Second Republic was completed when Louis-Napoleon confirmed the coup and the transformation of the republic into empire through a national plebiscite that ostensibly endorsed the events of December 1851. The Second Empire would be formally proclaimed under Napoleon III in Paris in January 1852.

2 Workers and paternalist state Napoleon III attempted to soothe bitter feelings with actions directed at the Parisian working class. The effort was partly designed to distract workers from politics, but some of the impetus came from a book the Emperor had written when he was younger: Napoleonic Ideas (1839),

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which drew upon both the legacy of his famous uncle and Saint-Simonian principles to advocate a paternalistic, state-centered approach. Napoleon III would use enticements—a limited vote, some increase in the availability of credit, and the creation of cooperatives—to politically disarm the portion of the Parisian working class that might engage in insurgency. The Empire offered support for working-class “cooperatives” or “associations.” The idea of cooperation or association among Parisian workers and their supporters dated from the 1820s. The anarchist ideas of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65) served as the foundation for some of these. In 1848, the National Assembly had seeded several Parisian worker associations, though most of these were shut down ahead of the coup d’état. However, beginning in 1853, the imperial government allowed a modest reopening of “coops,” and by 1866 there were about fifty state-endorsed worker cooperatives operating in the capital. There were hints of growing internationalism among Parisian workers during the Second Empire. There was some precedent for this. The fate of Poland, which was controlled by reactionary Russia, had mobilized working-class crowds in Paris in the early 1830s. A Workers’ Commission endorsed by the government held elections in 1862 among approximately 200,000 Parisian workers representing fifty trades, and elected 200 delegates to attend a conference in London with British workers and their representatives. This meeting in turn led to the founding of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) headed by Karl Marx and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. A small Parisian IWA bureau, serving mostly as a reading room for workers, was set up at the Rue Gravilliers on the Right Bank. Another effort by the imperial government to address working-class grievances, even as it kept a close watch on them, was the re-launching in 1853 of the conseils des prudhommes, which were joint worker-employer councils originally created under Napoleon Bonaparte. A significant step in recognizing the rights of workers came with a law of May 1864, during the Liberal phase of the Second Empire that, with some restrictions, ended the legal prohibition against labor strikes. In fact, as the years went by, Napoleon III’s initiatives actually seemed to encourage militancy among Parisian workers. The “Manifesto of the Sixty” put together by working-class leaders in 1864 was the “first declaration of the French labor movement” and called for “free institutions … liberty, credit and solidarity.”1 After 1864, strikes became more numerous. A law of June 1868 allowing for freedom of assembly was part of a “public meeting” movement in Paris that, like labor militancy, led to considerable social and intellectual ferment. In hindsight, a book by the Parisian worker—Denis Poulot’s (1832–1905) The Sublime (1870)—captured the streams of dissent that contributed to the fall of the Empire and the eruption of the Commune (the book also helped inspire Emile Zola’s novel L’Assommoir). The new ability of workers to organize and protest was part of the militancy that emerged in Paris during the Siege of 1870 and Commune of 1871.

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3 Administering Paris As with all French rulers, the condition of Paris for Napoleon III was paramount. In a sense, the Haussmannization of the capital was the real-life application of this mindset. The Emperor and his family resided in Paris, as French rulers had done since the Revolution. He maintained a keen interest in the city, but the daily affairs of the capital and surrounding suburbs were administered by a departmental prefect—Baron GeorgesEugène Haussmann. Paris had been part of the department of the Seine since 1790. The city would not start to govern itself until it was allowed a council during the Third Republic (Paris would not have its own elected mayor until 1977). The departmental prefect worked with a prefect of police, both of whom were appointed by the Emperor. In 1860, the suburban communes including Montmartre and Belleville were annexed, increasing the size of the city by about 1,000 hectares and the population by about one-half million. Paris now was made up of twenty arrondissements situated, numerically, in clockwise fashion beginning in the center with the first arrondissement. Green spaces—parks and walkways—were an important element of Haussmannization. For the prefect and emperor, greenspace equaled good health and an improved quality of life. The desire to show off the city was another ingredient. The head of the Service des Promenades et Plantations was Jean-Charles Alphand, who oversaw the renovation of older parks and the creation of new ones. Several small neighborhood parks were built, and older ones like Montsouris on the Left Bank refurbished. A major project was the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, which opened in 1867 in the new nineteenth arrondissement. Spacious parks with lots of trees and entertainments were at the Bois de Boulogne on the western side of Paris and the Bois de Vincennes in the southeast. Both new and refurbished parks now became firmly fixed in the habits of Parisians, not only flâneurs, but also young couples and mothers with children strolling and picnicking during the day. Napoleon III had come to power in 1851 by overthrowing the Second Republic and making himself Emperor. He ruled France through carefully managed referenda, by appointing loyal departmental prefects, and via a compliant two-house legislature (Senate and Chamber of Deputies [Corps Législatif]). But by the end of the decade, the emperor was loosening some of the authoritarian grip. This allowed critics to emerge in the Parisian legislature and press. A counter-culture took shape in Left Bank cafés that would produce the firebrands of 1871. Economic conditions also undercut the regime: a free trade treaty with Britain in 1860 hurt Parisian manufacturing, and the bankruptcy of the Pereire brothers’ Crédit Mobilier was an unhappy conclusion to the economic expansion of the Haussmann era. Legislative elections in 1863 returned political opponents. The Empire responded with indecision and a turn toward foreign distractions that eventually led to its demise. The Liberal Empire of the 1860s may have

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hinted at a “Good Napoleon” and an evolution in the regime, but it was not enough to counter the problems.

4 Undercurrents of discontent Like the July Monarchy before it, the Second Empire hemorrhaged support as it moved into its second decade. Undercurrents of discontent in Paris emerged from workers, radical popular assemblies, politicians, and journalists. The Emperor undermined the regime with foreign policy missteps in Mexico, and then with a fateful, losing war against Prussia and her German allies. Several individuals and individual events in Paris went against the Empire. Émile Ollivier (1825–1913), originally from Marseille, was elected to the Chamber of Deputies from the department of the Seine in 1857. Ollivier and like-minded reformers pushed for policies that led to the Liberal phase of the Second Empire. Later, Ollivier became the Emperor’s prime minister. Elections in 1869 confirmed the shift from authoritarianism to a more open political system. A plebiscite in May 1870, just ahead of the start of the Franco-Prussian War, showed overwhelming support for political change and, ostensibly, for the Emperor, too, at least to the extent that he seemed to accommodate the new political mood. But troubling, periodic crises showed fissures. A young Italian radical, Felice Orsini (1819–58), who believed Napoleon III was blocking attempts at Italian unification (even though, as a young man, the Emperor had been an enthusiastic supporter of a unified Italy), tried to assassinate the Emperor in 1858. The attempt happened at the old Opera as the Emperor and Empress Eugénie were preparing to see Rossini’s “William Tell.” Three bombs were thrown at the entourage, and several people and animals were killed. The Emperor was shaken, but not hurt. Orsini was arrested, tried, and executed. Interestingly, the Orsini Attempt seemed to lead to French intervention in Italy on the side of Italian independence, and from there to the Liberal phase of the Empire. In the 1860s, laws scaling back restrictions on strikes, the press, and popular assemblies were passed by the legislature. The republican Henri de Rochefort (1831–1913) launched attacks on the Emperor in his Parisian newspapers La Marseillaise and La Lanterne. In January 1870, the contest between individuals supporting the regime and those opposing it produced another crisis when Prince Pierre Bonaparte, a cousin of the Emperor, shot and killed the republican journalist Victor Noir in a duel. A huge crowd gathered for Noir’s funeral at Père Lachaise cemetery was really a Parisian demonstration against the regime. Pierre Bonaparte was acquitted, and Noir became a republican martyr. In retrospect, the sordid affair seemed a foretelling of the end of the Empire. Politically, the main opposition in Paris to the Second Empire came from persons who saw themselves as republicans. A law of June 1868 allowing for some freedom of assembly energized the opposition. Labor strikes and

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popular assemblies in Paris of the late 1860s were a precursor to the urban militias, clubs, and demonstrations of the Siege and Commune of 1870–71.

SOCIETY 1 Haussmannization Paris was rebuilt during the Second Empire to become the city we are familiar with today. The great project was accomplished under the leadership of Emperor Napoleon III and the person he appointed as Prefect of the department of the Seine: Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann (1809–92). A controversial figure whose later memoir served to justify actions that others criticized, Haussmann was an urban de-centralizer and modernizer with an eye for aesthetics, and with little sentimentality about ridding Paris of everything that seemed “old.” Haussmann and the Emperor enlisted the support of wealthy Parisians—bourgeoisie, entrepreneurs, the financial elite—to undertake one of the most ambitious urban reform projects ever attempted. Their goals were to improve commerce, make Paris more hygienic and healthy, and insulate the city against rebellion. From the start, critics lamented the “creative destruction” of so much that made Paris unique. The occasionally shady financial dealings accompanying the project plagued it, while political opponents were certain that the plowing over of narrow, winding streets and their replacement with wide boulevards was done for strategic reasons: barricades and rebels, the argument went, had little chance of winning out in broad, straight thoroughfares. Indeed, this would become evident during Bloody Week of May 1871 and the final street battles of the Commune. Nonetheless, the massive rebuilding went on between 1853 and 1869. The project created jobs with good wages, and so drew an enormous number of workers, many of them stonemasons and stonecutters from the department of Creuse, whose seasonal movements were now aided by the building of rail lines from the capital to other parts of France. Between 35,000 and 40,000 migrant building workers from central France labored in Paris during the Second Empire, making the Creusois one of the city’s largest provincial populations. Haussmannization produced jobs and population growth, even more so after the suburban periphery was annexed in 1860, bringing the city’s total population close to 1.7 million and increasing the number of arrondissements from twelve to twenty (Map 2). Haussmannization also introduced straight, wide axes: north-south (the Boulevards Saint-Michel, Sébastopol, and Strasbourg) and east-west (the Rue de Rivoli and Champs-Élysées). Altogether at least ninety miles of news streets were laid, illuminated by gas lighting and surfaced with macadam (much harder to build barricades with than stone). Two new, big parks (Montsouris and Buttes de Chaumont) were laid out, and two others (Bois de Vincennes and Bois de Boulogne) enlarged and beautified;

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MAP 2  Paris before and after the annexation of 1860.

the Longchamps racing course and two lakes were added to the Bois de Boulogne. The old central market of Les Halles was torn down and replaced with a modern iron and glass structure designed by the architect Victor Baltard (1805–74). Napoleon III took a personal interest in Charles Garnier’s design of a new opera house, though the building would not formally open until 1875, five years after the Second Empire had come to an end. Socially, the most significant result of Haussmannization was to transform and shift Paris’s population. The center of the city, formally a place where social classes mixed, now became mostly bourgeois, while working-class populations were pushed to the urban margin. Suburban Belleville and Montmartre, rather than the neighborhoods around the Place de Grève and Les Halles, now became working-class hubs. This social re-distribution—middle and upper classes in the central arrondissements and working-class populations to the banlieue—characterizes Paris through the present (Figure 5.1).

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FIGURE 5.1  Auvergnat Ball. Immigrant communities in Paris maintained regional identity through cultural activities and newspapers. Photo by Artokoloro Quint Lox Limited / Alamy Stock Photo. (Alamy DDME6T—RM)

2 Migrant stonemasons of Creuse Haussmann’s rebuilding drew thousands of workers from across France and Europe to work in Paris’s construction and associated industries. Building workers arrived from northern departments and Belgium, but especially from the departments of Creuse, Corrèze, and Haute-Vienne in central France (these were the Old Regime provinces of Marche and Limousin). Migrant stonemasons, stonecutters, and carpenters had been working in Paris seasonally, March through December, for hundreds of years, but the numbers increased significantly in the nineteenth century. Most of these workers had never belonged to the guilds, and during the Old Regime had been taken on for specific jobs at daily hiring fairs by moonlighting journeymen or, in the nineteenth century, by subcontractors (tâcherons). The best-known hiring fair for Creusois stonemasons was at the Place de Grève just in front the Hôtel de Ville. Most of these migrants resided in garnis in buildings along streets like the Rue de Mortellerie close to the Place. They mostly led hardworking, unassuming lives, moving between countryside and capital with the seasons, and saving money for retirement back home. Sometimes a stonemason would

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open a restaurant or boardinghouse and move the family permanently to Paris; this became more common at the end of the nineteenth century. One stonemason became fairly well-known. This was Martin Nadaud (1815–98), who was from a village in the southwestern part of Creuse. Nadaud began migrating to and working in Paris in 1830 at age fifteen. He was interested in education and politics, and despite his humble origin became a politician before writing the memoir (Les Mémoires de Léonard, un garçon maçon) that would make him a familiar source for historians exploring workingclass life in nineteenth-century Paris. The police and authorities kept close tabs on the stonemasons because they (wrongly) suspected they were prone to crime or insurrection. Indeed, during times of rebellion and revolution, the stonemasons from Creuse suffered high rates of arrest. The migrant Creusois were familiar to Parisians during the Second Empire because they were numerous, labored in “plein air” at building sites across the city, and were marked by a rustic appearance and accent (patois). Victor Hugo took note of them, as did the writers of contemporary travel books. A sympathetic account by a notable, himself originally from Creuse, is by Louis Bandy de Nalèche (1828–79). His The Stonemasons of Creuse (1859) was partly designed to address what the author considered the unfair gap between the image and the reality represented in the lives

FIGURE 5.2  Stonemasons at the daily hiring fair at the Place de Grève, 1869. Most were seasonal migrants who lived in furnished rooms (garnis) a short distance from the Place de Grève. Photo by Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images.

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of these migrant workers. The book was arranged as a description of the origins and rhythms of the seasonal migration, and the stonemasons’ lives and working habits, but with a subtext clearly intended to illustrate the human side of this anonymous group caught partway between city and countryside. Throughout, the author emphasized the essential simplicity and stability of his subjects’ lives. Yet his inability to communicate this message may be judged by the fact that in the roundup of rebels following the Commune of 1871 more Creusois were arrested than almost any other provincial population living in the city (Figure 5.2).

3 Belleville and Goutte d’Or Seasonal workers in Paris lived in garnis and hôtels clandestins for most of the nineteenth century. Before the Second Empire, these residences were clustered in the central Right Bank quartiers and in neighborhoods of the Left Bank near the Rue Mouffetard. But with Haussmannization, the working-class population of Paris—seasonal migrants and sedentary families alike—was scattered, mostly to the “urban margins.” Paris’s suburban population expanded from 75,000 in 1831 to 173,000 in 1856. In order to control this emerging “zone” and the revenue it generated, Paris annexed it in 1860. This was also the petit banlieue that began to develop around the Thiers Wall by the time the latter was completed in the 1840s. Property prices were cheaper here than in Paris proper and merchants were not subject to the octroi (a tax), so goods could be sold less expensively. The Parisian marché aux puces (flea markets) began at the periphery where chiffoniers (ragpickers) sold their wares. Chemical factories and tanneries moved to the suburbs to avoid regulations in the inner quartiers designed to protect public health. There were open spaces used by picnickers, as well as cabarets and guinguettes selling inexpensive alcohol. After being paid on Friday or Saturday, some workers headed to the taverns of the banlieue. This contributed to the habit of “Saint-Lundi” (Saint Monday), when workers effected by drinking too much alcohol missed the start of the work week. One of the emerging working-class hubs of Second Empire Paris was Belleville. Located in the northeast of the city, Belleville had originally been a place of quarries for stone used in construction, as well as for the market gardens producing grapes to make the inexpensive wine sold at the guinguettes. When Belleville became part of the new twentieth arrondissement in 1860, its economy and population were just beginning to modernize. In Belleville and the rest of the urban periphery industry, the leisure trades, and inexpensive housing became defining characteristics. As central Paris was re-built under Haussmann, working-class families headed toward the cheaper living spaces of Belleville, La Villette, La Chapelle, and Montmartre. These areas also became strongholds for Leftist and socialist politics. Many of their residents became Communards in 1871. It was in

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Belleville that the last, desperate fighting of Bloody Week occurred. Belleville became the “buckle” on Paris’s “Red Belt.” A famous literary description of desperation in the Parisian banlieue is Emile Zola’s L’Assommoir (1877), which is set in the Goutte d’Or section of northern Paris. Like Belleville, Goutte d’Or had been for most of its history rural and peripheral: in the eighteenth century, it was noted for vineyards and for the mines used in the extraction of saltpeter. Goutte d’Or was annexed in 1860 to be part of the new eighteenth arrondissement. It became, wrote Zola, a place of poverty and degradation, where boys grew up to become unhappy workers stuck in a culture of alcoholism, and girls grew up to work at low-paying factory jobs, and from there perhaps to prostitution. “Nana,” the daughter of the doomed “Gervaise” in L’Assommoir, became a prostitute in the Zola novel of the same name (Nana, 1880). This, for Zola and many Parisians, was the world of Goutte d’Or. In the twentieth century, Belleville and Goutte d’Or would beckon immigrants from North Africa and Asia. The areas retain their working-class and transient flavor to this day.

4 Paris bourgeoisie during the Second Empire The Paris bourgeoisie had had a champion in King Louis-Philippe. After he was overthrown with their support or indifference, the bourgeoisie continued to thrive under Napoleon III. In many ways, the middle classes won out in Paris during the Second Empire; aesthetically, demographically, and in other ways that trend mostly continues through the present. The June Days had been a working-class rebellion against the Second Republic, and the election in late 1848 of Louis-Napoleon as president was part of a conservative reaction that joined the interests of urban bourgeois and rural voters. The Paris bourgeoisie had seemed to tire of Louis-Philippe late in the July Monarchy, initially supported the Provisional Government and the Second Republic of 1848, and then was frightened by the deterioration of relations between social classes that was capped by the rebellion of June. Thereafter, the bourgeoisie lent its support to Louis-Napoleon in exchange for the maintenance of order. After the coup of 1851, bourgeois elites in Paris worked with the Emperor and Haussmann to rebuild the city in an image matching their tastes. During the Second Empire, the Parisian bourgeoisie accumulated and displayed its wealth in unprecedented fashion. Where the bourgeois style under Louis-Philippe had been understated, conservative, even a little severe, under Napoleon III it grew ostentatious and, in the eyes of some, decadent. The most dramatic sign of the triumph of the Parisian bourgeoisie during the Second Empire was Haussmannization. Urban renewal meant pushing workers and their families to the periphery, partly by building new residences—apartments, especially—in the city center that only the well-off could afford, along with the shops, cafés, and department stores catering to

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their tastes and wealth. Café life, which would become so characteristic of the Parisian bohemian milieu in the twentieth century, had its origins in the Second Empire. The Café de la Paix (opened 1863) at the Place de l’Opéra was a setting for shop owners and restaurateurs directed at bourgeois lifestyle. Housing for the bourgeoisie was a priority under Haussmann, while on the other end of the social scale housing for the poor would be a persistent, intractable problem during the Second Empire and well into the next century. Haussmannization widened streets, dressed up the boulevards, and added more gas lighting for bourgeois flâneurs. Paris, the City of Light, was a gas-lit, bourgeois city. Emile Zola (1840–1902), who was born in Paris, was the great chronicler of the Parisian bourgeoisie during the Second Empire. Zola was especially a figure of the Third Republic, but many of his novels, including the twenty volumes of the Rougon-Macquart series (1871–93), were set during the Second Empire. These were written in a Realist style that detailed the “natural” history of a family during the Second Empire. Some of the novels, like Au Bonheur des Dames (1883), provide important insights into the world of the Paris bourgeoisie, in this case the intricacies of a department store modeled on the Bon Marché viewed through the eyes of the bourgeois owner and a young woman, fresh from the provinces, working as a clerk.

Bois de Boulogne

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ike other modern city dwellers, Parisians sometimes need a break from the noise, traffic, stone, and steel of the daily grind of urban life. Parks are where Parisians can go to escape. In the seventeenth century under Louis XIV, the old outer walls were torn down and boulevards added, creating a few wide streets with quiet stretches and trees. However, the kind of urban “green spaces” we are familiar with today are a fairly recent development. For most of Paris’s history, if one wanted to escape the narrow streets and debris of city life, one had to walk beyond the walls where countryside persisted until the banlieue began to industrialize in the nineteenth century. It was not until the second half of the century under Napoleon III and urban planner Prefect Georges-Eugène Haussmann and his parks superintendent Alphonse Alphand that Paris got the assortment of big and little parks that remain so firmly a part of its contemporary landscape. The biggest of Paris’s parks is the Bois de Boulogne on the city’s western edge (today, part of the sixteenth arrondissement). Originally part of the Forest of Rouvray, “Boulogne” comes from the name of a church (now gone) built in the Middle Ages. For a long time, the Bois was the haunt

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of robbers and a place Parisians dreaded to pass through. But over time the city and monarchy built roads and secured the woods. The Bois was tamed, and in the eighteenth century fine homes began to go up nearby. The Bois de Boulogne is not a manicured park with walkways and statues like, for instance, the centrally situated Luxembourg Garden. Rather, the Bois is a large piece of land with long stretches of woods and lakes. Its modern evolution was a product of Haussmann’s desire to clean up (literally) Paris, but with an eye toward the functional. Green space promised good health and improved quality of life. The aesthetic elements and a desire to show off the city were important, too. As other parks were added during the Second Empire, it was not long before Parisians began to assert a kind of proprietary right over them. Mothers—bourgeois at first, and then from all social classes—became habitués of Parisian green space. At the Bois de Boulogne during the Second Empire, superintendent Alphand oversaw extensive improvement to the rough landscape he inherited: two lakes were added, walking paths laid out, and the Longchamp horse racing track completed. There were small rivers and even a waterfall. The right kind of trees (chestnut, elm, plane, lime)— 400,000 of them!—were selected; waterfowl (ducks, especially) protected; fishing, bicycling, ice-skating, cricket (adopted from the British), and music-making introduced and regulated. Paris’s smaller neighborhood parks were managed differently from the bigger parks like Montsouris and Buttes des Chaumont. But the Bois de Boulogne was a special place, a setting where the bourgeois tour des lacs became a weekly ritual. Park guards were often retired military personnel and concession stands were manned by cantonniers who might spend their entire working lives there. Parisians living near the parks felt a special attachment to the green space: riverains had residences close to the parks and habitants lived in adjoining neighborhoods. The parks themselves seemed to democratize the city and its population: public spaces where different social classes, visitors, and native Parisians all mixed. Today at the Bois de Boulogne, one can see joggers in the morning, while at night it is sometimes a space where the sex trade is openly practiced.

ECONOMY 1 Financing Haussmannization The plan by Napoleon III and Haussmann to rebuild Paris was tremendously ambitious as well as financially risky. Both persons believed the rebuilding

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would essentially pay for itself through increased property values and rents from new constructions. But the path from plan to result was laid with risks. In the end, Paris was rebuilt, but at the cost of a reputation for Haussmann and the suspicion among Parisians that corrupt speculators had profited. Haussmannization spurred the capital’s economy, generating jobs in construction, building materials, and transportation, and opening the city to much new development. It also helped make Paris the tourist destination it remains through today. To pay for the great project, the imperial government created a fund— the Caisse des Travaux de Paris—for Haussmann to draw upon, but otherwise mostly relied upon private enterprise to finance the work. To inspire private investment, the government encouraged a banking family— the Pereire brothers (Emile and Isaac)—to open a new bank, the Crédit Mobilier, which became an engine of economic expansion during the Second Empire. In the past, small businessmen and entrepreneurs had had difficulty securing loans, and so the Crédit Mobilier was designed partly to democratize entrepreneurship. Both small and large businesses would participate in the rebuilding of the capital. Part of the inspiration for the Crédit Mobilier was that as young men Louis-Napoleon and the Pereire brothers had been interested in technocratic, Saint-Simonian ideas; this background encouraged them to join their business acumen with what they saw as a social, even “scientific” good—the modernizing of the French capital. The Crédit Mobilier opened its doors in 1852, Haussmann was appointed prefect of the Seine a year later, and the rebuilding of Paris was launched. The imperial government enforced laws dating from the era of Rambuteau that allowed for the expropriation and purchase of properties designated to be rebuilt or torn down for new or enlarged streets. Older, decrepit buildings in the Center were replaced with expensive apartments generating high rents. As always, it was much harder to convince developers to build inexpensive housing for the poor. There were fewer regulations and little oversight from the government. During the late 1860s, in the Liberal phase of the Empire, the Parisian newspaper Le Temps published stories about corruption and shoddy construction. Jules Ferry, who would become a prominent political figure of the Third Republic, made a name for himself as a critic of Haussmann in his (Ferry’s) articles detailing Comptes fantastiques (unbelievable accounting). The prefect was never charged with financial crimes, but his reputation became so damaged that he was dismissed from office early in 1870, just months ahead of the fall of the Empire during the Franco-Prussian War. But the great project of urban renewal had been accomplished. When Paris was put under siege by the Prussian military in the fall of 1870, their artillery shells would fall not on Le Vieux Paris (Old Paris), but on Haussmann’s City of Light.

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2 Railroads, manufacturing, and sewers The Second Empire saw an increase in industry in Paris compared with the July Monarchy. The remaking of the capital under Haussmann contributed to industrial and technological modernization. Railway traffic across France took off during the Second Empire, with Paris the industry’s hub. Haussmann’s plans for urban renewal incorporated the expansion of rail lines, enlarging gares (train stations), and improving street access to the latter. The most extensive refurbishing took place at the Gare du Nord on the northern edge of Paris, where the architect Jean-Jacques Hittorff incorporated iron and glass into his rebuilding of the original structure. Haussmann’s engineers assisted by increasing the size of streets near the station; similar work improved access to the Gare du Montparnasse on the Left Bank and the Gare de l’Est on the Right Bank. Between 1851 and 1869, a rail line circling the capital (the chemin de fer de ceinture) was completed. Designed to connect the city’s six gares, and transporting both passengers and goods, by 1875 the line had twenty-five stations. The increase in rail lines through the city and those connecting Paris with the rest of France and Europe, along with the east-west and north-south street axes that were key to the urban plan of Haussmann, meant that Paris had become a modern transportation center. Parisian industry and manufacturing had traditionally focused on luxury goods and articles de Paris: handcrafted buttons, umbrellas, fans, and more. In 1860, the city still had 5,142 producers of articles de Paris, employing over 26,000 workers. But the city’s economy began to change during the Second Empire, particularly in the banlieue, where the kinds of goods typical of the Second Industrial Revolution—chemicals, steel, and large-scale production—now expanded, and with it an urban, industrial workforce close to the definition of Marx’s proletariat. The Parisian Gas Company (Compagnie parisienne de l’éclairage et du chauffage par le gaz) was born in 1855 and went on to become one of France’s greatest industries, supplying as much as half the total coal gas consumed in France during the 1870s.2 Haussmannization implied better public health, and this meant improving Parisians’ access to clean water and more efficient waste disposal. Aqueducts were built to bring water from the rivers of nearby departments to the city. The Emperor was particularly proud of the expansion of the capital’s sewer system, the mileage of which increased by a factor of five. Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, which included a graphic section set in the grimy tunnels of the capital’s sewers, was published in 1862, but in fact by this time the sewers had been improved enough that visitors could even take a tour of one section. Paris’s sewers, like those of ancient Rome, now became one of the wonders of the city. During the city’s World Exposition of 1867, Napoleon III himself conducted the visiting Russian Tsar Alexander II on a tour of

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the underground marvel. A tour of a short section of the sewer departing from near the Pont de l’Alma on the Left Bank remains a popular attraction through today.

3 Les Halles Ever since the 1850s, Haussmann has had critics. The “Alsatian Attila” (the prefect was born and raised in Paris, but his family was originally from Alsace in Eastern France) seemed too ready to destroy buildings and streets, too ready to alter the character of Old Paris.3 But for supporters of urban renewal, the Old Paris was dirty, unhealthy, and dangerous—cholera epidemics in 1832 and 1849 made this abundantly clear. Improvement of public health also had an economic side to it as a cleaner city would attract a wealthier residential population and more tourists. A notable development of the Second Empire was the destruction of the old Les Halles and its replacement with a new, modern structure. Les Halles was the capital’s venerable central market; Zola in one of his novels called it the “Belly of Paris.” Les Halles dated from the twelfth century when French kings designated a space just northwest of the Place de Grève (today, the site is bordered on the east by the Boulevard Sébastopol) to sell vegetables, fish, flowers, cheese, and meat, with stalls put up to protect vendors from the elements. Later, more stalls were added for the sale of clothing, leather, textiles, and implements of all sorts. A large halle aux blés (grain hall) was added in the 1760s. Some guilds shifted their headquarters to adjacent neighborhoods, so that by the sixteenth century Les Halles was the capital’s commercial center. At the same time, a unique society evolved around Les Halles: les forts—dockworkers—transported goods unloaded at the river to the market, while many stalls were managed by women known as poissardes. In some ways, Les Halles became a “female space.”4 Les Halles continued as Paris’s central market, even as the city’s borders expanded and as it became apparent by the early nineteenth century that there was a need for improvement in supplying food to the city. Napoleon Bonaparte, sensitive from his experience of the Revolution for the necessity of a regular, inexpensive supply of bread, refurbished Les Halles and other smaller neighborhood markets. His nephew Napoleon III, likewise affected by Paris’s revolutionary history, wanted a full remaking of Les Halles to be part of the urban renewal. The project’s architect, Victor Baltard, a native Parisian, used iron and glass to construct ten new pavilions. A century later, food distribution for the capital was transferred to suburban Rungis. After its destruction in 1970 under Charles de Gaulle, the site of the original Les Halles was refurbished yet again to become an underground shopping mall and the hub of the Parisian Métro (subway). Because of its central location, the new Les Halles remains a dynamic setting in Paris, undergoing yet more changes in recent years.

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4 City of Light and modernity During the Second Empire, Paris took on the moniker of City of Light because gas lighting became widespread on its streets. Gas lighting had been used in a handful of private businesses as early as 1816, and some public lighting was introduced near the Place Vendôme at the end of the Restoration. Gas lighting was set up on the Rue de Paix in 1823. In 1855, the Parisian Gas Company was created. As streets were lit by gas, more and more residences and businesses also adopted it for interior lighting and cooking: The Gas Company’s network to supply gas grew from 500 kilometers at mid-nineteenth century to nearly 1,700 kilometers by 1900. The Parisian Gas Company was a modern enterprise, and representative of the sort of dynamic capitalism emerging across the Atlantic World that would transform French and European economies before the start of the Great War in 1914. Gas lighting of streets also had important aesthetic and social impacts by transforming the appearance of the city and opening it up to night-time business and cultural activities. Because they were lit, Parisian streets now seemed safer than before. There were other Haussmann-era innovations that made Paris a model for urban development. Along with the gas lighting of streets, Paris became known during the Second Empire for the use of macadam in paving. Macadam was stone broken into small pieces that solidified when pressed down by traffic. Macadam produced a lot of dust, and so in Paris (and other cities) tar was spread over the surface. Macadamizing had been introduced to the city by the Scot John McAdam around 1820, but it was not until Paris was rebuilt under Haussmann that the method was widely applied. Macadam also served a political/strategic purpose in the French capital, since paving stones had been used in the construction of barricades. Macadam took away a literal building block of rebellion. Another modern aspect to Haussmannization was the increased use of iron and glass in construction, particularly for large structures like department stores and government buildings. A notable example in the use of the material was the National Library. A French national library had roots in royal libraries from the fifteenth century. Louis XIV built a library on the Rue de Richelieu, and that structure was opened to the public during the Revolution. The Second Empire added an elaborate, enormous reading room designed by the Parisian architect Henri Labrouste, as it also enlarged the collections. Subsequent generations of students and scholars would use the facility at the Rue de Richelieu, and still do, though much of the collection was moved to a new National Library situated in southeastern Paris near the end of the twentieth century. These and other innovations were on display at the World Expositions of 1855 and 1867. The Expositions were pet projects of Napoleon III, who had been impressed with the Crystal Palace when he visited London’s Great

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Exposition in 1851. The 1867 affair was staged at the Champ de Mars. It was a tremendous success, attracting 7 million visitors who came to see exhibits showcasing new technology and industry. By 1867, Napoleon III was eager to show off the new Paris.

CULTURE 1 Bohemians and Second Empire The Haussmannization of Paris during the Second Empire forever changed the look, landscape, and social geography of the city. It produced important cultural changes, too. Flânerie—strolling the city—which had a history predating Haussmann, now became an even more favored pastime in Paris’s wide boulevards and enlarged parks. The sounds of the city changed, too. The famous cris de Paris by which peddlers announced and sold their goods and services on the streets—there were sellers of sausages and umbrellas, catchers of rats, and many other goods and trades—had been around since the early Middle Ages. The cris de Paris were as much a part of Paris as Notre-Dame or the Louvre. At the start of the nineteenth century, there were still about 100 itinerant trades “crying” their wares, but by the turn of the next century only about 20 remained. The widened boulevards allowed for loud traffic (automobiles after 1900) that drowned out the criers, and Haussmann, who was not fond of the peddlers, oversaw the writing of regulations that restricted the sale of goods on the streets. Indoors, there was popular music and dance: Jacques Offenbach (1819–80) was producing operettas that could be played at the new El Dorado Music Hall, which opened in 1858 on the Boulevard de Strasbourg or the Folies-Bergère (opened 1869). Writers seized upon the changes to Paris under Haussmann as grist for the literary mill. Emile Zola brought a Realist perspective to his RougonMacquart series, which traced the interconnected lives of its characters as they dealt with modernity during the Second Empire. The poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) was a lifelong Parisian. Born in the capital, a bohemian by temperament and avocation, he spent years in the Latin Quarter and neighborhoods of the Left Bank absorbing the sensations, strolling, and meeting other Parisians. His great works of poetry about Paris, Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) and Le Spleen de Paris (1869), were written during the Second Empire. Baudelaire was the quintessential flâneur. A character seemingly out of a Zola novel was Jean-Baptiste Troppmann (1848–70), whose criminal case became one of the most famous of nineteenth-century Paris. Troppmann was convicted of killing a mother and her children (either five or seven according to differing accounts) on the outskirts of Paris. He was executed by guillotine at La

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Roquette prison in January 1870 before an enormous crowd. Famous writers of the day including Maxime du Camp and the Russian émigré Ivan Turgenev were there to watch the crowds more than the actual execution. Denizens of Second Empire bohemia and the Left Bank were drawn to social and political topics. The “romantic socialist” Victor Considérant (1808–93) was a propagator of Fourierist ideas; his “answer” to the Social Question after the Revolution of 1848 had been to leave France for a utopian experiment in Texas. Returning during the Second Empire to a Paris that he had once considered virtually unlivable, Considérant became a resident sage of the Left Bank cafés that would produce some of the leading figures of the Commune of 1871.5 One of these latter was Raoul Rigault (1846–71). Rigault was a student and Left Bank “bomb thrower” whose radical politics and incendiary words led to his becoming, at the age of twenty-five, head of the police during the Commune.

2 Painting and photography There had been a performative side to the Troppmann murder trial of 1869 that was enhanced by the ornate buildings and interiors of the Palais de Justice in central Paris where the trial was conducted.6 The “cult of the self,” the inclination toward artistic narcissism and avant-garde provocation that would become so pronounced in the last two decades of the century, had origins in the Second Empire. Bohemians of the Left Bank like Henry Murger, Charles Baudelaire, Raoul Rigault, and Paul Verlaine led the counter-cultural revolt against Napoleon III and the bourgeoisie.7 The painter Gustave Courbet (1819–77) was an independent-minded artist who rejected the conventions of the Romantic school to paint ordinary people and make social statements. Like Zola in literature, Courbet adhered to the Realist movement of like Balzac, he was a largerthan-life figure with an array of appetites. Much of Courbet’s art depicted scenes from the French countryside, but he made a career and a reputation for himself in Paris, too. He would welcome the Commune and serve it as an advisor on arts. Edgar Degas (1834–1917) was a native Parisian who, like Courbet, began his painting career during the Second Empire with images of laundresses, the interiors of bistros, and theater life. Anti-social by temperament, Degas nonetheless found inspiration for his work in the crowded streets of Paris. In 1863, the native Parisian Édouard Manet (1832–83) was among those to exhibit paintings at the city’s Salon des Réfusés (salon of rejected paintings), which was a reaction by avant-garde artists against the official, government-sponsored Paris Salon. Manet’s “Luncheon on the Grass” (Le déjeuner sur l’herbe) was a provocative work that set the tone for a great deal of Parisian art to follow in the century.

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Photography became popular among amateurs and lucrative for professionals in Paris during the Second Empire. In 1848, there were 13 photographic studios in the capital, and by 1868 there were 364. Photography seemed emblematic of modernity, rendering other forms of “visual communication suddenly quaint, distorted, and inefficient.”8 Photographs of individuals, self-portraits, and nudes were among the favorite genres. Some photographers adopted principles from a Realist “Manifesto” announced by Courbet. Among these was the photographer and native Parisian Charles Marville, who set out to document the “creative destruction” of buildings and streets vanishing under Haussmann. Much of Marville’s work during the Second Empire was commissioned by the city. After May 1871, he photographed the buildings and streets still in ruin from the fighting of Bloody Week (Figure 5.3).

FIGURE 5.3 Photograph by Charles Marville of Rue des Vertus, 1866, before rebuilding of central Paris during the Second Empire. Prior to Haussmannization, many Parisian streets were dark and narrow. Photo by adoc-photos/Corbis via Getty Images.

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Montmartre, the hill on the northern edge of Paris, would become a cultural center and the city’s favorite bohemia during the first decades of the Third Republic. But the origins of this transformation began earlier. Already in the first half of the century, Parisians were venturing to Montmartre to drink at its guingettes and dance at its ballrooms. Artists were arriving, too: Géricault in the 1820s, Manet after 1850. Montmartre’s population grew from 8,000 in 1844 to over 36,000 in 1857. In 1860, Montmartre was annexed to become part of the city’s eighteenth arrondissement. The rebellion that launched the Commune began in Montmartre in March 1871.

3 Bon Marché Large, ornate department stores stocking a great variety of massproduced goods became a familiar part of urban and suburban life in the twentieth-century Atlantic World. They began in London, New York, and Paris in the nineteenth century. The first department store in Paris was the Bon Marché on the Left Bank’s Rue de Sèvres.9 The story of its founder is an authentic Parisian rags-to-riches tale. Aristide Boucicaut (1810–77) started out as a street peddler. He joined with partners in 1853 to open a store with new ideas: no admittance fee, no obligation to buy, goods on shelves that were regularly replaced, fixed prices, and no bargaining. The cash-only policy favored bourgeois customers. The number of employees increased from 12 at the start to almost 1,800 by the time of Boucicaut’s death. The Bon Marché was the first of many department stores to open in Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century. Most would be situated on the Right Bank: La Samaritaine (opened 1869) near the Louvre; Au Printemps (opened 1865) and the Galéries Lafayette (opened 1912), both on the Boulevard Haussmann (named after the prefect). Another well-known Parisian department store is the Bazaar de l’Hôtel de Ville (“BHV”), located in the center of the city just across from the city hall. The BHV started to go up as the rubble from the destruction of the Commune (which included the city hall) was being cleared away. Citizens of the Third Republic—Parisians and others visiting the capital—increasingly became consumers of massproduced goods, now easily available in the appealing department stores, and which were mostly directed at bourgeois tastes and a bourgeois clientele. Paris certainly did much to contribute to the making of the modern consumer and consumer culture. Émile Zola witnessed this in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as he was writing his Realist social history of the Second Empire—the Rougon-Macquart series. One of these novels was about a Parisian department store—Au Bonheur des Dames (1883), which is loosely modeled on the Bon Marché, and like the real Parisian department store describes some of the innovative practices, such as selling items via mail order, and the focus on bourgeois tastes and interests.

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4 The 1867 Exposition and modern tourism The first World Exposition was held in 1851 in London, where the famous Crystal Palace was showcased. After that, Paris took center stage. Altogether, Paris has hosted six world expositions: 1855 was the first. It was successful enough that another was quickly planned. The World Exposition of 1867 was centered at the Champ de Mars on the Left Bank, with other designated sites across the city, including the new Parc des Buttes Chaumont in the northeast, whose opening was timed to coincide with the Expo. The 1867 Exposition was a chance for Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann to show off the city and all the attributes of urban renewal: roads, sewers, gas lighting, and parks. The exhibits at the Champ de Mars emphasized technology, machinery, and the “elite” workers who would operate this industrializing new world. Prominent writers and Parisians were enlisted to compose a Paris Guide for the exposition. Victor Hugo (in exile), George Sand, and Maxime du Camp all contributed; even critics of the regime like Hugo could muster pride in the model city that Paris had become under “Napoleon the Little.” Part of the thinking behind the World Exposition was to show off what was new, and part of the thinking was to entice tourists to the city. Seven million visitors came to the 1867 Exposition, spending money and spreading the word. Paris had long been a destination, but under the Second Empire it started to become the tourist magnet it has remained ever since. The Exposition was a success, and Paris would host two more (1878 and 1889) before the end of the century, and another (1900) as the next century dawned. What enticed middle-class tourists to come to Paris from Europe and the Americas during the Second Empire that had not brought them before? For one thing, it was now easier to get to the city because of railroads, with Paris a rail hub for France and western Europe. To get around the city, there were over 5,000 horse-drawn cabs. The rail line circling the city begun in 1851 was finished in 1869. Bateaux-mouches were steamboats introduced to the Seine during the Exposition of 1867; tourists loved them for sightseeing along the river, and some Parisians used them for transportation. The bateaux-mouches have remained a fixture of tourism ever since. The World Exposition of 1867 was utopian in its visions of the Parisian present and future. But not everyone agreed that the city was in such a good place. The writer Maxime du Camp (1822–94) was personally conflicted about the new Paris that had gone up under Haussmann and Napoleon III. Du Camp had contributed to the Paris Guide, but he also disliked much about the industrial world highlighted by the Exposition. Conservative and backward-looking by nature, born and raised in the capital, he loved Paris, but possessed a foreboding soon to be confirmed by the violence

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and destruction of the Commune. For du Camp and others of similar sensibility, too much of the old Paris had been lost to Haussmannization; Parisians, too, he thought, were losing something undefinable in their character. Haussmannization created both a new Paris and a longing for the old city.

Conclusion The rebuilding of Paris undertaken by Baron Haussmann during the reign of Napoleon III was one of the greatest efforts at urban renewal in the modern era. Paris was transformed—sometimes the term is overused, but here it is appropriate—in less than two decades from a city of narrow, winding streets and neighborhoods that found it difficult to communicate with each other to the spacious, coherent, beautiful city we are still familiar with today. The Paris that became Capital of the World—one of several monikers the French capital has had over the last three centuries—is the historically new creation of Haussmann. The wide boulevards, scenic urban landscapes, large and small parks, and riverside quays that connect historic buildings and squares, and that come to mind today when we think of Paris, are the product of Haussmannization. This is the Paris that draws visitors and tourists from across the world. But in the process of urban renewal, much was inevitably lost: streets, buildings, squares, history. Some contemporaries and some of those looking back to the period never forgave the “creative destruction” of Paris during the Second Empire. But Haussmannization produced more than aesthetic changes. It also had a profound social and demographic impact by raising property prices and living expenses in the central part of the city. This meant that the bourgeoisie and upper classes now occupied the central quartiers, while working-class populations were pushed to less expensive areas on the peripheries—initially places like Belleville and Ménilmontant and then to areas outside the Thiers Wall, which became the banlieue. Working-class neighborhoods and the industries where the people of these neighborhoods labored began to take root in the banlieue during the Second Empire, while central Paris became the place of historic and government buildings, museums, the apartments of the bourgeoisie, expensive shops and restaurants, and department stores catering both to Parisian consumers and tourists. There were political implications to Haussmannization, too: some of the roots of the Commune of 1871 can be traced to the movement of populations and the social disruptions of the 1850s and 1860s. After the urban renewal of the Second Empire, Paris would become the world’s greatest draw for tourists, but it was central Paris, not the banlieue, that visitors flocked to. The characteristic division between central Paris and the banlieue created during the Second Empire remains true through the present, even as most Parisians—like the rest of the world—have come to accept the Paris bequeathed to us by Haussmann.

6 The Commune of 1871

Chronology 1870–71 Siege of Paris during Franco-Prussian War 1871

Montmartre rebellion and declaration of Commune (March)— Bloody Week (May)

Introduction “Commune” describes a municipal entity in France of any size, from village to city. The term was adopted by the Parisian government that came to power in an election in late March following the rebellion of March 18, 1871, and the ensuing evacuation of the city by the national government headed by Adolphe Thiers. Dedicated Communards were motivated in part by the desire to bring about social and economic reforms that could ameliorate aspects of the paternalist and capitalist system of the Second Empire recently defeated in the war with Prussia. The Haussmannization of Paris had unsettled the city’s social moorings. Also playing a role in fomenting rebellion was resentment by ordinary Parisians at the government for the military defeat of 1870–71, the desire to establish a federalist government for France that would allow more local autonomy, and, as the end of the Commune came into sight, the desire by neighbors and coworkers to defend neighborhoods against the “Versaillais,” the national army trying to retake the capital. The Commune was the longest-lived, but also the most tragic and violently repressed of all nineteenth-century European rebellions. During Bloody Week (May 1871), the Hôtel de Ville and Tuileries were burned; altogether about 200 buildings destroyed and Paris became a war zone. Much of the history of the Commune that we have since come to know has to do with

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the influence of Karl Marx, whose Civil War in France (1871) was crucial in this regard. The Commune was, wrote Marx in a well-known phrase, the “glorious harbinger of a new society.” Yet, there have been persistent disagreements about the meaning and legacy of the Commune. At the end of the nineteenth century, Revisionist Marxists all but rejected its legacy and even hinted that the Commune might not have been really “socialist.” Where the future Bolshevik Vladimir Lenin would see the Commune as the start of a modern revolutionary movement, others viewed it as the end of a generation of futile insurrection and defeat dating from the June Days rebellion of 1848. In one sense, the Commune was the Other Paris’s “answer” to the Social Question. Today, the Paris Commune still evokes shock when we contemplate the carnage and destruction that happened in the City of Light as France’s national army re-took the city from Communards. How could something so awful happen in a place so rich in culture and history, arguably the birthplace of the idea of human rights? Among the short-term origins of the Commune was the Siege of Paris by Prussia and her German allies from September 1870 to January 1871. Parisians suffered during the Siege but were also politicized, particularly after

FIGURE 6.1  Communard Barricade in Ménilmonant, eastern Paris, during Bloody Week. Paving stones were often used to build barricades. Photo by Photo12/UIG/ Getty Images.

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a Republic was declared following military defeat and the capture of Emperor Napoleon III during the war. The Siege, the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, and the Commune were all part of France’s anneé terrible (Figure 6.1).

POLITICS 1 Politics and Revolutionary Tradition A range of political groups and factions made up the commissions governing the Commune, though all fit within the spectrum of the nineteenth-century French Left. There were socialists in the tradition of Fourier and Cabet; neoJacobins looking back to 1793; adherents of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) created by Marx and Bakunin; Blanquists following the ideas of l’enfermé; veteran “forty-eighters”; and others. There was no dominant party or political idea, though all Communards seemed to agree with these basic tenets: political equality and opportunity, shared governance, the end of economic exploitation, and resistance against Versailles. The Blanquists were a young generation, some of them students, who followed the ideas and personal example of the elderly revolutionary LouisAugust Blanqui. Blanqui had been active in Paris during the Prussian Siege but was arrested on March 17 as regular troops moved to seize the cannon at Montmartre, and so he was not present in Paris during the Commune. Among his followers who served on governing commissions were Gustave Tridon, who looked to the Hébertistes of 1793–94 as a political model, and Théophile Ferré, like Blanqui an insurrectionist at heart. Blanquists believed in class war and were close to anarchists in wanting to dismantle the state— though not before a “dictatorship of the proletariat” (a phrase associated with Marx, which he probably took from Blanqui) had consolidated what a revolution had won. Some Communards wanted to see a “new ’93”—that is a kind of replay of the great Revolution of the late eighteenth century. In this sense, there was a “performative” aspect to the Commune. But other Communards feared a reprise of the Terror; though a Committee of Public Safety was created to guide the last days of the Commune, the death penalty was abolished amidst a general horror of the guillotine.1 The IWA was much written about across Europe, but in fact its adherents played a very limited role in the Commune. The IWA, created in 1864, traced its roots to the 1862 London meeting of French and British labor representatives. It was loosely overseen by the communist Marx and the anarchist Bakunin, whose ideas about revolution briefly came together in the belief that capitalism was doomed, but who in the end parted ways about how revolution should advance and what kind of world would follow the collapse of the bourgeois order. Eugène Varlin (1839–71) was a trade unionist and member of the IWA during the last years of the Second Empire. His politics were closer to Bakunin than to Marx. Elected to the Commune

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in late March 1871, Varlin served as financial commissioner and then helped defend the city against the Versaillais in May. He was captured and executed by Versaillais forces during Bloody Week. Varlin’s politics fit contemporary notions of anarchism and communism, but there were many other Communards whose politics derived directly from the French Revolutionary Tradition that began in 1789. A few Communard leaders were neo-Jacobins. Their model was the Committee of Public Safety of 1793–94, which had protected the Revolution and the Republic from its enemies. Robespierre was the political ideal for neo-Jacobins, who included the long-time revolutionary Charles Delescluze (1809–71). For Delescluze and like-minded Communards, it was the mystique of the Revolutionary Tradition, rather than specific political ideas, that was the spur to action. A veteran of July 1830 and June 1848, Delescluze martyred himself by climbing a barricade at the Place Chateau-d’Eau (now the Place de la République) during Bloody Week, where he was killed.

2 Politics during the Prussian Siege The Prussian Siege of Paris lasted from September 1870 through January 1871. The Government of National Defense situated in Paris was the center of national resistance against Prussian and German armies operating mostly in the northern half of France. Nonetheless, the French war effort was scattered and poorly coordinated. Paris was cut off from the rest of the country by Prussian forces—so much so the city had to use hot air balloons as a mail service (sixty-six balloons departed the city during the Siege). The Government of National Defense had the tasks of guiding the war effort, instituting republican political principles, and defending Paris against Prussian forces. When the general Jules Trochu was named Governor of Paris, it was a signal that the military effort came first. Arguments and tension between Trochu and the Central Committees of the twenty arrondissements and the National Guard marked Parisian politics during the Siege. Gambetta, the Minister of Interior in the Government of National Defense, left Paris in early October by balloon and assumed control of the national war effort from Tours.2 Trochu and his generals had 72,000 regular French soldiers and a growing National Guard that numbered 250,000 soldiers by the end of September. Against them were 147,000 Prussian and German soldiers investing a city with a circumference of fifty miles surrounded by thick walls and fortresses. Trochu launched periodic sorties against the besiegers, all of which failed. By November, the conditions in Paris had become grim, with growing shortages of food and firewood. Near the end, Parisians were eating rats and the animals at the zoo (the Jardin des Plantes). A hard winter made things worse. Enduring the Siege with the other Parisians was the old revolutionary Blanqui. This was the only occasion in a long life devoted to insurrection

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and revolution, much of it spent in prison or in hiding, when he played a public role. Blanqui was the titular chief of a National Guard battalion, published the newspaper La Patrie en danger and headed a political club that met at a café on the Rue Saint-Denis. Approximately thirty political clubs operated in Paris during the Siege, and it was here and in neighborhood Vigilance Committees that the call for a Commune was voiced. Initially, La Patrie en danger emphasized the war effort rather than social revolution. But in late October, following the fall of the eastern fortress of Metz to the Prussians and the failure of another Parisian military sortie in the suburb of Le Bourget, Blanqui joined an attempt by radicals to overthrow Trochu. The Hôtel de Ville was briefly occupied, but a popular uprising in Paris did not happen. In fact, by this time Blanqui was no longer especially well known among younger rebels outside his own followers. The police cracked down, Blanqui and the Blanquists went into hiding, and some of the more inflammatory newspapers were closed. There was another attempt at insurrection by rebels, again including young Blanquists, at the Hôtel de Ville on January 22, 1871. This time, Blanqui himself did not take part: he correctly thought that the affair would fail, and watched the fiasco from a nearby café. The old revolutionary would be arrested on March 17 in the events leading up to the proclamation of the Commune on March 28 and a second—this time French—siege of Paris.

3 Rebellion of March 1871 and the war against Versailles The Commune began on March 18 when crowds of Parisians prevented regular soldiers of the French army from removing cannon at a military park in Montmartre. The cannon had been assigned to the National Guard for use during the Prussian Siege, but with the conclusion of the fighting, the French government headed by Thiers ordered the cannon seized. Thiers almost certainly knew this would provoke Parisians, who were angry that the government had capitulated to Germany and offended by decisions to end pay for the National Guard and require that small businesses pay bills that had been suspended during the Prussian Siege. The fact that Versailles, rather than Paris, was the capital was taken as an insult. The order to seize the cannon thus provoked a reaction as regular soldiers made their way to Montmartre early on the morning of the 18th. Crowds of women (including Louise Michel), children, and men blocked the military column, seized the cannon, fraternized with the soldiers, and killed two generals. Thiers responded by ordering the remaining regular troops to leave the city and by establishing a military command at Versailles. Paris and Versailles were at war. Paris had been under siege by the Prussian army from September through January, and now it would be under siege by the French army from March through May. The forts, walls, and ramparts surrounding the city (the

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Thiers Wall) were manned, though irregularly: Versaillais forces would enter against undermanned defenses in the southwest during the evening of May 21, initiating the street battles of Bloody Week. Ahead of that, the National Guard was enlarged, paid a daily wage, and given training. The Commune had persons with military experience at its disposal, but initially the generals leading the Guard were political appointees, mostly Blanquists. Fighting between fédérés and Versaillais at the outskirts of the city began on April 2. Following the execution of a handful of fédérés by Versaillais, the Commune launched an impromptu military sortie against Versailles that included 30,000 to 40,000 fédérés. This was a military failure and subsequently the Commune appointed an experienced soldier as War Delegate: Gustave-Paul Cluseret (1823–1900), a long-time revolutionary who had considerable military experience, including with Union forces during the American Civil War. Cluseret decided upon a defensive war against Versailles. He worked to shore up logistics and instill discipline in the ranks of what was an essentially democratic and revolutionary army. But the military odds favored Versailles: by early May, the national army had 130,000 soldiers ranged against perhaps 50,000 Communard soldiers. Even with the leadership of Cluseret and other veteran officers, the Communard fédérés were in poor condition compared with the soldiers of Versailles; nor did they have the time or support to become an effective fighting force. In the end, Communards would fight more effectively as they defended their streets and homes during Bloody Week.

4 Governance Following the rebellion at Montmartre on March 18 and the subsequent evacuation of Paris by the regular army, the Central Committee of the National Guard called for election of the Commune’s government. The election was held on March 26: 227,000 voters elected ninety representatives. On March 28, the Commune was officially proclaimed with fanfare and celebration at the Hôtel de Ville. The new government saw itself as the virtual opposite of the Second Empire. Power was de-centralized, with no president or single executive officer. Rather, governance was dispersed across an Executive Commission and nine subordinate commissions: war, justice, education, public services, finance, police, labor, commerce, and foreign relations. An elected delegate headed each commission. The system was revised at the end of April so that the Executive Commission consisted of delegates from the nine commissions, and then on May 1 the Executive Commission was replaced by a five-person Committee of Public Safety—an act meant to invoke the legacy of “’93” as the Versaillais pressed in. The office of mayor in the twenty arrondissements was ended, though neighborhood city halls continued to be used for administrative purposes. The shifting organization and personnel of the

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Commune limited its effectiveness. The commissions were dominated by neo-Jacobins, a variety of socialists, anarchists (mostly followers of PierreJoseph Proudhon), and Blanquists. A handful belonged to the IWA, but few Communards were genuine communists or followers of Marx (who was better known among the European intelligentsia than the European working class). The political tendencies among the governing Communards were in the mainstream of Leftist thought in nineteenth-century France. Probably the most determined and notorious among the Commune’s delegates was Raoul Rigault (1846–71), who headed the police. Even before the Siege and the Commune, the youthful Rigault had established a reputation as a bohemian firebrand and opponent of the Second Empire. Now as head of the police, he turned its tools against foes, real and imagined. During Bloody Week, Rigault oversaw the execution of hostages; he himself was killed as Versaillais troops entered the city. Even before the official proclamation of the Commune, there had been efforts to negotiate with Versailles, but these failed and fighting soon began between fédérés and regular troops. The Commune seized hostages, including Archbishop Georges Darboy, with the idea that Versaillais soldiers could be prevented from executing captured Communards and that the Commune’s hostages could be exchanged for the imprisoned Blanqui. Under the Commune, the French capital defined itself as Paris ville libre (free city). The clearest statement of its principles and goals came on April 19 with a “Declaration to the French People” calling for national “regeneration,” a republic with municipal independence for all communes, free elections, personal liberty for all French, and a National Guard for each city. The Declaration said almost nothing about finances and economics and did not challenge ownership of property. Marx described the Paris Commune as “the political form, at last discovered,” by which he meant a workingclass government with socialist policies serving as precursor to the global proletarian revolution. In 1871, Marx seemed to think that the Commune was a hint of his new world, though in later writings he moderated this interpretation. At the end, Communard governance disintegrated, and its life was snuffed out barricade by barricade.

SOCIETY 1 Radicals and fédérés Communards were supporters of the Commune, most of whom, to judge by the records of those who joined its National Guard (fédérés) or were arrested in the wake of its defeat, were skilled workers in the building and metal trades. Unskilled workers, along with clerks, participated at somewhat lower rates. Many of the workers who signed on to the National Guard were migrants from the provinces, both seasonal workers and those who had

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moved permanently to the city. These were not exactly the industrial workers described by Marx as part of the modern proletariat. For many in the national government seated at Versailles (twenty miles to the southwest of the capital), and headed by the long-time politician Adolphe Thiers, practically anyone in Paris in the spring of 1871 could be considered culpable—though especially if from the working class. The National Guard had been substantially enlarged to defend the city during the Prussian siege. In April 1871, the Guard included over 214,000 persons. Just 60,000 of these were to become combatants, but active or not the large number shows that recruitment was not discriminate. Fédérés were paid a wage that drew many unemployed. Others were attracted by the promise of military adventure. Inevitably, the National Guard included individuals who may not have understood the nature of the conflict, yet believed they had no choice but to sign on. Communards were both male and female. Most were from the working class, but members of the bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie joined, too. Clerks who worked in offices were a significant portion of those arrested when the Commune was defeated in May. The authorities looked with great suspicion upon those, like clerks, who they assumed should have known better than to join the Commune. Soldiers or former soldiers joined, too. Some of these had served in the war against Prussia and had fighting experience. The Commune attracted foreign soldiers and officers, some with considerable military experience in Europe and the Americas. Members of the Executive Commission and the other Communard commissions governing the city were composed of a mix of social types: workers, bourgeois déclassés, and some from the radical intelligentsia who had long opposed the Second Empire. All were anti-Bonapartists. The Commune had support from all neighborhoods of the city, though the working-class arrondissements, including the old faubourgs of eastern Paris, those near the river on the Left Bank, Montmartre (where the rebellion began) and Belleville were strongholds. The fighting of Bloody Week ended at Père Lachaise cemetery in working-class Belleville. The wealthier sections of the city in the northwest and near the Champ de Mars were suspected by loyal Communards of harboring opponents.

2 Opposition and anti-clericalism The Commune indeed did have many opponents inside and outside of Paris. Outside of Paris, the main opposition was France’s national government, which was headquartered at Bordeaux during the war with Prussia but had moved to nearby Versailles in late winter 1871. France became a republic following the dissolution of the Second Empire and the military defeat to Prussia, with a National Assembly elected in a nationwide vote in February 1871. The new government had legal and political power to accept the treaty with a newly unified Germany that brought the war to an

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official conclusion. The government was dominated by conservatives and monarchists and was headed by Adolphe Thiers. A native of Marseilles and a political centrist, Thiers had a long personal history in Paris—a supporter of revolution in 1830, but an opponent to radical politics thereafter. During the Liberal phase of the Second Empire, he represented Paris in the legislature and was a critic of Napoleon III. As a longstanding opponent of rebellion, his attitude toward Parisian radicals in the weeks leading up to the Commune was uncompromising; indeed, his decisions in February and March seemed designed to instigate rebellion. Once the Commune was launched, Thiers was pitiless: no negotiation and complete defeat of the Communards. Defenders of the Commune have ever since loathed Thiers— that “monstrous gnome,” Marx labeled him. As the two sides of the conflict—Paris versus Versailles—took shape and as fighting commenced on the outskirts of the city, some bourgeois left the city. Others stayed, despising the Communards, keeping their heads low and awaiting deliverance from Versailles. Churches were not a place of refuge for anti-Communards. There was a pronounced anticlerical streak among the firebrands of the Commune very much in the tradition of opposition to organized religion dating from the Revolution of 1789–94. This anti-clericalism played out in official policy, but especially in Communards’ approach toward Catholic leaders remaining in Paris. Archbishop Georges Darboy (1813–71), the head of the Church in Paris, was arrested and designated a hostage, with the expectation that he might be exchanged for the insurrectionist Louis-Auguste Blanqui (who had been arrested and imprisoned at the start of the conflict by Versailles authorities). Darboy and other clerics were incarcerated at Mazas and La Roquette prisons. The exchange of hostages did not take place, and as Versaillais forces entered Paris in early May, Darboy and other clerics were executed by fédérés. Communards and anti-Communards alike were sickened by the deaths and the extent to which violence spiraled out of control. After the Commune, there would be a national subscription to erect a monument to “atone” for the actions (“sins” thought conservatives) of the Paris Commune. This produced the basilica of Sacré-Coeur, finished in 1875 and consecrated in 1919. It was built at the summit of Montmartre, where the Commune had been launched in March 1871. Constructed in a hodgepodge of architectural styles and eye-catching because of its prominent location and white stones, Sacré-Coeur has—like Notre-Dame and the Eiffel Tower—become one of the familiar emblems of contemporary Paris.

3 Women Women played a significant role in the Commune, even though they were not allowed to vote in its elections, hold political office, or officially

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join the National Guard. Women were prominent in the Montmartre crowds of March 18 that confronted regular troops attempting to remove cannon, and which led to the start of the Commune. Women participated in cooperative industries to supply fédérés fighting the Versaillais, and as ambulancières they cared for those wounded in the fighting. There were many important female activists who promoted the Commune’s progressive social and economic policies and urged on the struggle. After the Commune was crushed, some of these female Communards became closely associated, positively and negatively, in the public mind with the events of 1871. The nineteenth century’s “Woman Question” had to do with attaining political and economic rights for women. Though the Commune did not give women the right to vote, it offered unique opportunities for political participation. “Citoyennes” mobilized repeatedly during the spring of 1871 to press for reforms or to participate in collective action—if necessary, some argued, to march on Versailles as their forebears had done in October 1789. Women volunteered as ambulance workers, to run canteens supplying food to fédérés, and to work at factories producing military clothing. A handful served as unofficial soldiers of the Commune, fighting on the barricades during Bloody Week. Several individual women played prominent, self-consciously “unruly” roles during the Commune. Louise Michel (see below) was one. Others were André Léo, Elizabeth Dmitrieff, and Paula Minck. André Léo (given name Léodile Champseix [1824–1900]) was a writer who had been active in women’s groups during the Second Empire and the Prussian Siege. During the Commune, she was an editor for the newspaper La Sociale, where she advocated for women’s rights and free, secular education for both girls and boys. Léo insisted that women, workers, and peasants—the dispossessed, in her mind—must link their political interests. Elizabeth Dmitrieff (1851– 1910), of Russian heritage, was a dedicated socialist and an organizer of the Women United for the Defense of Paris, which helped defend the city against the Versaillais; she, too, advocated for political rights for women. Paule Minck (1839–1901) had participated in advocacy groups for women during the Liberal phase of the Second Empire and was further politicized during the Siege. During the Commune, Minck helped organize free schools and was one of the founders of the Women United. All three escaped to Switzerland as the Commune fell.3 With the fall of the Commune, scurrilous rumors about the role of female Communards in the violence and destruction of Bloody Week spread across France and Europe. Conspicuous among these was the image of pétroleuses: supposed female arsonists who set fires that destroyed the Tuileries, Hôtel de Ville, and other buildings of central Paris. There were fires during Bloody Week, but the rumors about the role of pétroleuses were wildly exaggerated. Still, the imagery persisted for a long time, delaying “answers” to the Woman Question.

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4 Dead and arrested The Commune was the deadliest European urban rebellion of the nineteenth century. There has been some dispute over the number of persons killed by the conclusion of Bloody Week (May 21–28, 1871). The historian John Merriman puts the figure at nearly 17,000, while others estimate either lower numbers or figures as high as 30,000. Many persons were summarily executed after being captured by Versaillais forces during Bloody Week. Mass graves were scattered across the City of Light in May 1871. After the killing of Bloody Week ended, a long period of arrests and trials began for suspected Communards. Around 4,500 Communards fled to nearby countries, mostly Belgium and Switzerland. A total of 38,578 persons—most of them former National Guards—were arrested, about two-thirds of whom were eventually released. The repression generated a mass of information that has been useful for scholars studying the Commune’s social and geographic make-up. Among the various trades, building workers were the most likely to be arrested (about one-quarter of the total), and among these were nearly 2,300 stonemasons (mostly the seasonal migrants from Creuse). Tailors, printers, shoemakers, and metalworkers were also arrested in large numbers. Arrest according to department of origin largely fits migration patterns to Paris that had changed little over the decades. Certain regions of France show up frequently in the arrest data: Paris and its environs, of course, as well as persons from departments in the northeast, north, and center. Arrest according to Parisian arrondissement of residence showed that many Communards lived in the southwest of the city (the sections first taken by Versaillais forces as they entered in early May), as well as the last holdouts of eastern Paris, including the working-class district of Belleville. In terms of age, persons between twenty-one and forty were most likely to be arrested. A little over 40 percent of convicted Communards were married. By early 1875, over 10,000 judicial decisions had been handed down, varying from execution to “simple surveillance.” Forty-five percent of the convicted were deported to overseas penal camps in Algeria or New Caledonia. It was not only workers who suffered: 1,796 clerks were found guilty, 789 of whom were deported. Here is the story of one, arguably representative, Communard. The stonemason Jacques Guillon was born in 1842 in a village in the department of Creuse. As a young man, he left for Paris, as so many young men from his area had done previously, to work in the construction industry, then going at full bore because of Haussmannization. Guillon resided, probably in a boardinghouse, in the fifth arrondissement, by then home to many migrants, and away from the central neighborhoods that were now being refurbished for bourgeois residents. When the Commune erupted, Guillon was twenty-nine years old and unmarried. He served in the National Guard and must have been enthusiastic about his duties or unable to convince the

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authorities otherwise because he was found guilty of rebellion and deported to New Caledonia. Guillon was amnestied along with other Communards in 1877 and returned to France. His sentence and his moment in history completed, Guillon vanishes from view.

Chif foniers and poubelles

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ow did Parisians of the past dispose of their trash? Not in a way that today we would consider hygienic. In the Medieval and Early Modern eras, a great deal of waste ended up at Montfaucon, a sinister spot on the edge of Paris that was used as landfill, dump and, infamously, as a place where until the eighteenth century criminals were executed— their bodies left in the open to decompose as a warning. In the city itself, human waste went into the gutters, where it was washed by rain to the sewers. Garbage ended up in piles on the street, and then sorted through by chiffoniers, which translates as “ragpickers”—a very old vocation in Paris and across Europe. Chiffoniers were mostly men, though there were also women, who collected trash and then repurposed and sold it to merchants, who in turn re-sold the used goods in their shops. Some chiffoniers set up flea markets (“marché aux puces”) in the suburbs. It was a trade of the poor for the poor. Chiffoniers collected discarded clothing, shoes, rabbit fur (from animals that had been butchered for food), paper, and just about everything else. According to a stereotype, they worked at night, carrying a lantern and large staff, digging through refuse in the streets, bent over with a heavy basket strapped to their back. In the early morning hours, they made their way back to the urban outskirts where they sorted through the night’s booty. Chiffoniers had a poor reputation among Parisians. Most seemed to live in shacks in the poverty-stricken streets near the fortifications. Parisians could see and hear them at night plying their trade; children were warned to keep their distance. Yet, chiffoniers performed a necessary trade and, moreover, held to a tradition and culture of which they were proud. There was a hierarchy among chiffoniers, with placiers having the right to sort through garbage first and driving the wagons that carted off the refuse. The authorities tended to view the chiffoniers with suspicion, suspecting them of working with criminals. Over the centuries, ordinances were passed attempting to control their movements and activities. In 1828, a law required that chiffoniers wear badges listing name and trade. In April 1832, as the city awaited the arrival of cholera (the epidemic was in Russia in late 1831 and moved westward across the Continent), the chiffoniers organized a demonstration at the Place de Grève against the city’s adoption of a new system of garbage collection and disposal—a

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policy designed to counter the spread of cholera, but which would have had the effect of ending the livelihood of the several thousand ragpickers.4 The demonstration got out of hand: some wagons were burned and a few barricades went up in the central city. But the riot also showed the extent to which ragpickers identified as a group and the length to which they would go to defend their livelihood. Trash collection in Paris began to modernize under Napoleon III, Haussmann, and especially under Eugène René Poubelle (1831–1907), who was departmental prefect from 1883 to 1896. Poubelle is mostly remembered for requiring that Parisians deposit their trash in containers— garbage cans—that were emptied by the city, with the refuse sent to municipal landfills. Ever since, garbage cans have been called “poubelles.” When Poubelle started his job, there were about 18,000 ragpickers in Paris, still scouring the streets and retreating to the suburban “Zone” to sort through the day’s work. They protested the new law, but to no avail. The chiffoniers began to disappear, the last of them gone by the 1960s. Today, garbage collection and recycling are handled by the city, whose employees, sweeping the streets and emptying poubelles, are dressed in distinctive bright green uniforms.

ECONOMY 1 Mobilization during the Prussian Siege The Second Empire came to an end in September 1870 as Napoleon III was captured by Prussian forces at the Battle of Sedan in northern France. On September 4, Parisians gathered at the Hôtel de Ville to demand the end of the Empire and creation of a republic. The politician Léon Gambetta (1838–82) took the lead at this moment, but the events of September 4 really had long-term roots in the opposition of the last years of the Empire, and short-term roots in the conspiracies of radical revolutionaries like the “Blanquists.” The Blanquists of 1870 were young Parisian followers of the long-time insurrectionist Louis-August Blanqui, now an older man (nicknamed “l’enfermé” [the sick one]), but still determined to turn the world upside down, starting with Paris. In mid-August, Blanquists launched what they hoped would be a popular uprising from the working-class La Villette. The effort failed and Blanqui went into hiding—as he had done so often in the past—though he was soon to re-emerge. The French military effort against Prussia and her German allies had gone badly since the start of the war. Sedan was a huge blow, and another French army was besieged at Metz. In Paris, a Government of National Defense was

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put in place to guide the war effort after the Empire was ended. The new government was headed by the general Jules Trochu, but Gambetta, who served as minister of war and interior, along with other political figures from the opposition during the Liberal Empire, was there, too. By late September, Paris was under siege by Prussian military forces, and would remain so until the armistice of late January 1871 brought the fighting to a conclusion. As Paris mobilized for defense, the city underwent a period of intense politicization. Blanqui came out of hiding and launched a newspaper, La Patrie en danger, that called for a levée en masse and establishment of a “radical Commune.” There were many other radical newspapers. Political clubs, as in the 1790s and 1848, sprouted. Each of the city’s twenty arrondissements elected a Vigilance Committee presided over by a Central Committee. The Vigilance Committees were ostensibly there to help the war effort, but in fact they mostly sought to ensure that the Government adhered to republican principles. The Committees were hotbeds of politics that would provide political instruction for future Communards like Louise Michel and Elizabeth Dmitrieff. Paris also mobilized militarily. There were 150,000 German soldiers at the gates equipped with siege cannon that lobbed shells into the city. The capital was protected by the walls and fortresses completed in the 1840s. There were approximately 72,000 regular soldiers in the city, and the National Guard was increased to 250,000. Paris thus had a large army to defend itself, but in fact the Guard was poorly trained and quickly lost motivation; the limitations became apparent in military sorties undertaken against the Prussians. A final sortie ended with a decisive defeat at Buzenval, west of the city on January 19, 1871. Within days, there was an armistice to end the fighting. A peace treaty between France and the new German Empire was signed the next month.

2 Initiatives of the Commune Some of the initiatives of the Commune had precedents in the Siege. Blanquists’ call for a radical Commune meant a self-governing Paris pursuing socialist, economic, and political policies in a new federal France. In the spring of 1871, provincial Communes briefly erupted in other French cities—Lyon, Narbonne, Saint-Etienne, Marseilles, Toulon, and Limoges— and Parisian Communards hoped the movement would sweep the nation. This idea proved wildly over-optimistic. By the end of this French Civil War, it seemed that Paris was pitted against the rest of France. The Commune was in power just three months and was preoccupied with the imperative of defending itself against the national government and the Versaillais army. This is worth emphasizing because at the time and ever since there was criticism of the Commune, even among its supporters— notably Karl Marx, whose The Civil War in France became a classic of

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“instant history”—for its seeming slowness in enacting reform. Nonetheless, the Commune, operating through an Executive Commission and nine subordinate commissions, did pursue a handful of progressive social and economic reforms. The Commune attempted to alleviate financial hardships for ordinary Parisians by extending an earlier moratorium on debts, providing pensions for the families of National Guard who were killed in the fighting, and decreeing easy terms for persons who had previously pawned their goods in municipal pawnshops. The Commune abolished night work in bakeries (an issue that bakers had complained about for years) and allowed women workers to organize and have a monopoly on the production of military uniforms. The Commune also underwrote the creation of workers’ cooperatives (most of which were devoted to the production of military goods) and transferred control of several shops and factories that had been shut down during the war with Prussia to the workers employed in them. Even as the Commune’s Executive Commission reasserted a commitment to the idea of an “organization of labor,” small businesses were encouraged to produce and sell in a free market. Despite the claims of opponents and later critics, the Commune did not demonstrate an intention to expropriate property. Notably, the Commune did not seize the assets of the Bank of France. The Commune did not articulate a clearly defined industrial policy, and though signs of its socialist impulses are apparent in any number of decrees, most of its policies were necessarily of a political and military nature directed at defending the city from Versailles. The “Declaration to the French People” of April 19, 1871, was the sharpest manifesto of the Commune’s goals, proclaiming individual and communal rights, though offering scant attention to taxing and finances, and indicating nothing about industry. The hint of the proletarian state, and with it a new progressive, non-capitalist economic superstructure, which some—most famously, Marx—saw in the Paris Commune, was stillborn in 1871.

3 Businesses and Bank of France Following the formal declaration of the Commune on March 18, some Parisians—mostly bourgeois—fled the city. It is hard to know how many left, but a sign of their numbers is the increase in the population of Versailles during this period from 40,000 to about 250,000. Most of these Parisians expected to return to the capital, but in the meantime the loss of their skills and spending power was a blow to the economic condition of the city. Nonetheless, the governing commissions of the Commune were determined that the city should operate in a basically normal way, and indeed this mostly occurred, at least until the end came in May. The Commune saw itself as egalitarian, and so some policies were directed at curbing privilege. High salaries for government officials were ended and a maximum salary

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set. A daily wage for National Guards was established (this also served as an inducement to sign up). The Commune was generally supported by small businesses in a city where many petit bourgeois were republicans. Private property was not threatened, and most Communards did not question the free flow of goods. The Commune’s governing commissions worked hard to keep the city supplied with food and other goods during the struggle against Versailles— which included a blockade that began at the end of April. There were both a private economy and a municipally administered economy in food production and distribution. The quarter-million fédérés were fed by the Commune. Restaurants, cafés, and theaters remained open as best they could. Mail service continued, though with interruptions. Parks were open— even repaired following the damage of the Prussian Siege—and the gas remained on to light city streets; the sewers operated to dispose of waste. As the Commune’s government took shape in late March, there were forecasts that the city would descend into crime and disarray. This did not happen. There was a police force, but in fact Parisians seemed to police themselves. Given the fact that the city was at war with the national government, the Commune kept Paris running at a surprisingly smooth pace. As the rulers of Paris, the Communards had easy access to the substantial funds of the Bank of France, located in the former Hôtel de Toulouse on the Right Bank. A representative from the Commune was assigned to the bank, and small loans were made, but there was no effort to seize the assets. Some Communards believed this was a mistake—that the bank’s wealth should have been used to pay for food, supplies, and wages, or simply to threaten the accounts of the wealthy and potentially stay the hand of Versailles. But the Executive Commission did not choose this course because they did not want to compromise the nation’s financial reputation or undermine confidence in money at a moment when France was still recovering from the war with Prussia. Marx later described this as a lost opportunity for the Commune, which he otherwise praised as a harbinger of socialist revolution.

4 Communalism of the Paris Commune The “communism” of the Paris Commune has long been a topic of scholarly interest—in fact, for many decades probably the main topic of interest. Its communism has usually been situated in the handful of collectivist economic, political, and educational programs adopted by the Executive Commission. Afterward, critics accused some Communards of belonging to the First International headed by Marx and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, but in fact that organization had few adherents in the Paris of 1871. Most of the Commune’s reforms were common to the spectrum of the mid-nineteenth-century French political Left—from socialists to Proudhonist

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anarchists to neo-Jacobins, and from communists associated with Marx to those who followed Pierre Leroux. Second-generation adherents of the ideas of Saint-Simon and Fourier were there, too. Looking back, a case can be made that there were also two forms of incipient communalism in the Commune distinguishable from its communism. One was in the desire by Parisians seeking local autonomy and a federal system. This was a communalism writ large that had roots in traditions and institutions dating from the Middle Ages, and that more recently had served as inspiration for the Parisian municipal government during the Revolution of 1789–94. But in 1871 there was also a communalism writ small—an urban communalism evident in militant neighborhood parochialism, generated in part by the massive urban renewal undertaken by Haussmann. This latter interpretation was first offered in 1964 by Jacques Rougerie, the preeminent French historian of the Commune, who strayed from the dominant Marxist-inspired interpretations of his day to describe the events of 1871 as a “communalist insurrection.” Rougerie saw the Commune as characterized less by the catastrophic social antagonisms identified by Marx than by the desire of an “intermediary type” of working class to establish a “free Paris”—that is, a decentralizing revolt motivated at the start by frustration with a poorly prosecuted war, but which quickly evolved into something more. Since Rougerie’s day, the scholarly focus has continued to narrow toward the neighborhood to explain the motivation of Communards. Some scholars have argued that the Communards were simply defending their neighborhoods during Bloody Week, and that parochialism was as strong as social class in the contest. The Commune was, thus, less the sign of class struggle à la Marx than of neighbors defending their streets against outsiders. The working-class National Guard showed a particularly fierce localism in 1871. This urban, neighborhood communalism was also manifested in autarkic economic policies adopted during the spring of 1871, in the persistent regional ethos of migrant workers who joined the fédérés and then, tragically, in the street fighting of Bloody Week. In this sense, the recollection of Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray, a Communard who fought on the barricades and who wrote its first history, still rings true. For Lissagaray, “the Commune was a barricade,” not a government.

CULTURE 1 Revolutionary Tradition The year 1871 was momentous for two related events: the creation of a German Empire that altered the European balance of power and the existence of the Paris Commune. The Commune was important because of the programs and policies it initiated, but even more so for

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its promises. The immediate reality of the Commune, of course, was its utter defeat. This fact colored the future course of French socialism and the European workers’ movement for years to come. By the turn of the century, the Commune as symbol and harbinger was fixed in the European revolutionary tradition. Marx’s well-known analysis, The Civil War in France—written as the Commune was happening—was crucial in this regard and Marxists long echoed his assertion that the Communards had been martyred in the name of the international working class. Along with its historical significance, Marx was struck by both the lessons and failures of the Commune. For Marx, the Commune’s defeat confirmed his suspicion that revolutionary change might of necessity be violent. It was the practical lessons of the Commune described by Marx that were later incorporated by Lenin into his seminal work, The State and Revolution, which served as a blueprint for the Bolsheviks coming to power in Russia in October 1917. Yet before 1914, the European political Left mostly emphasized the symbolic role of 1871. The disunity of the Commune’s leadership; the lack of direction in its political, economic, and military endeavors; its seemingly outdated Jacobin overtones; and most of all its defeat appeared to offer few practical answers to the problems of developing liberal-democratic and industrial states. Was the Commune of 1871 the culmination of the French Revolutionary Tradition that began with the Revolution of 1789, or was it the beginning of a new international tradition that, in the twentieth century, would shift from France to Russia and China? Since Marx, many scholars have taken up the meaning and legacy of the Paris Commune. In 1964, Jacques Rougerie described it as a “communalist insurrection”: an “intermediary” form of working-class insurrection that attempted to establish a free Paris in a federalist France. For the historian Robert Tombs, the fact that the Commune (and the “prudent rebels” who defended it) was placed under siege by the French national army and was constantly preparing for war undermined its chances for success. The sociologist Roger Gould found the Communards themselves to be less motivated by issues of social class than the rebels of June 1848 and driven instead by a “participation identity” that was partly the product of the massive reworking of the urban landscape under Haussmann. The historian John Merriman emphasized the punitive will of the national government and the Versaillais army, determined to crush the Commune and all it stood for. In the end for Merriman, the Commune, particularly the awful street- and barricade fighting of Bloody Week, was simply a “massacre.”5

2 Art and artists The Commune provided the opportunity—brief though it was—for innovation in politics, economics, and art. Several prominent artists

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supported the Commune, and during its short life the Commune was suffused with a utopian spirit typical of moments of revolutionary or religious fervor. This utopian spirit was revealed in public policies, in the art promoted by the municipal government and, later, in the recollections of individual Communards. As with other revolutions—France in 1793, Russia in 1917—there were outbreaks of iconoclasm. Among the artists who supported the Commune were Édouard Manet and Gustave Courbet, both opponents of the Second Empire, who had operated outside official salons and the rules set by the École des BeauxArts. Manet (1832–83) criticized Thiers and the Versaillais, and after Bloody Week made lithographs of barricades that were the somber opposite of Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People” of 1830. Courbet (1819–77) was the most famous and outspoken of the Commune’s artist friends. Born and raised in eastern France, Courbet made a reputation in the 1850s for his Realist depictions of French country life. In Paris during the Second Empire, he was a bohemian critic of established art. Soon after the start of the Commune, Courbet organized an Artists’ Federation, which sought to free artists from what he saw as the tyranny of salon orthodoxy. The Federation gave itself the task of educating (really politicizing) the Commune’s public. Amateur artists and bohemian writers who had been in the shadows during the Empire were encouraged to participate in public exhibitions and concerts. At the same time, the didacticism of the Federation left little room for avant-garde expression—this would have to wait until the next decades. Courbet was elected to the Commune on April 16, and made Delegate for Art. Among his responsibilities was management of the city’s museums and libraries. He appointed the anarchist Élie Reclus as director of the National Library. A memorable moment of Courbet’s tenure was the destruction of the Vendôme Column, which had been erected as a monument to Napoleon Bonaparte following the Battle of Austerlitz (1805). Modeled on Trajan’s Column in Rome and fashioned from captured enemy cannon, its bronze shaft was capped by a statue of Napoleon. Located near the heart of Paris, the Column was the cultural representation of Bonapartism, and for this reason detested by enemies of the Second Empire. Where the iconoclasts of 1793 had attacked signs of the Catholic Church, the iconoclasts of 1871 attacked signs of the Napoleonic Empire and their opponents at Versailles. Adolphe Thiers’s house was demolished on May 15 as retribution for Versaillais attacks on Paris. And on May 16, the Vendôme Column itself was brought down with explosives. Fédérés had photos taken of themselves standing next to the rubble, which included the toppled statue of Bonaparte. Following Bloody Week, Courbet was arrested and served six months in prison. The Column was restored in 1873 and stands today at the center of the Place Vendôme (Figure 6.2).

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FIGURE 6.2  The Vendôme Column was a symbol of Napoleonic power. Just before Bloody Week, the column was destroyed by Communards. It was later rebuilt and stands today. Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

3 Remembering the Commune The memory of the Commune lived on in the memoirs and words of former Communards. For popular audiences, the Communard Olivier-Prosper Lissagaray’s History of the Paris Commune of 1871 (1876), which was translated into several languages, helped idealize the event.6 The female Communard Louise Michel was crucial in keeping alive the memory of 1871. For most of her life, Michel (1830–1905) was the strident activist and intransigent ex-Communard whose single-minded devotion to the cause of revolution was a source of her nickname: “Red Virgin.” At the time of her death, probably no one represented the mystique, the symbolism, one might even say the romantic face of revolution more than Michel, one of the “unruly women” described in Gay Gullickson’s history of women in the Commune. This was not because of Michel’s self-consciously imprecise political ideas, but because of other qualities: her striking physical appearance (remarkably like images of “Marianne”—the idealized, feminine icon of the French republic), empathy for the poor, and revolutionary zeal.

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Born in a small town in eastern France, Michel trained as a teacher before moving to Paris in 1866. During the last years of the Second Empire, she was a vehement anti-Bonapartist and during the Prussian siege a member of a Vigilance Committee. At Montmartre in March 1871, she and her workingclass neighbors confronted the soldiers removing National Guard cannon. Through the end of the Commune, Michel seemed to be everywhere: reviving a Vigilance Committee, advocating for universal free education, organizing ambulances for wounded soldiers, and even finding time to rescue stray animals. Passionate and prone to the dramatic, she volunteered to go to Versailles and assassinate Adolphe Thiers (the offer was not accepted by the Executive Commission). For donning a fédéré uniform, participating in sorties against the Versaillais and fighting on the barricades during Bloody Week, Michel earned a reputation as “the Great female warrior of the Commune.” When the Commune fell, Michel was arrested and taken to a prison camp at Satory on the outskirts of Paris, where Communards of all ages and genders were kept in dire conditions. In December 1871, she was tried and sentenced by a military court to deportation to the penal colony of New Caledonia, where she remained from 1873 until her return to France in the amnesty of 1880. From then until her death in 1905, Michel was a defiant and unrepentant ex-Communard, taking up causes, leading demonstrations, and serving another (shorter) spell in prison. She now became a European and Atlantic figure. In ill health following a visit to French Algeria, Michel died at Marseilles in January 1905. Buried there, her remains were disinterred and brought to Paris, where her funeral cortege and re-burial at suburban Levallois became the occasion for an enormous demonstration of 80,000 to 100,000 persons, which may have been the largest in Paris since the death of Victor Hugo in 1885. In subsequent years, there were pilgrimages to her gravesite, sometimes held in conjunction with anniversary remembrances of the Commune. For devotees, Michel embodied “la mystique de la Révolution” as much in death as in life.

4 Legacies The memory of the Commune and its meaning for France, Europe, and the world have been part of its history ever since 1871. The immediate meaning of the Commune, of course, was its defeat during France’s anneé terrible. Politically, the Commune seemed to bring the nineteenth-century era of barricades and insurrection to an end. When rebellion and revolution happened again in Europe, it would be in Russia in 1905 and 1917. Paris and France were home to the modern Revolutionary Tradition between 1789 and 1871, but at the start of the twentieth century the Tradition shifted to Russia.

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Still, the history and symbolism of the Commune retained a great deal of political and emotional value. After 1871, leaders of both the French political Left and political Right drew meaning from the Commune. Edouard Vaillant (1840–1915), a former Communard and then a socialist politician in Paris during the first two decades of the Third Republic (1870– 1940), emphasized the positive, collectivist, and working-class impulses of the Commune. The leader of French socialism at the turn of the century, Jean Jaurès (1859–1914), had an ambivalent appreciation of the Commune. Disdainful of its politics and appalled by the bloodshed of May 1871, Jaurès nonetheless celebrated and made use of the Commune’s symbolic legacy. Where the political Left venerated “1871,” the political Right attacked it by producing a wave of anti-Communard literature. The sociologist Gustave Lebon (1841–1931) identified in the Commune (which he witnessed) the “madness” of crowds. After 1871, the pétroleuses became the subject of lurid and outlandish popular stories (Figure 6.3). The longest-lasting and best-known memorializations of the Commune were annual marches in March and May to Père Lachaise cemetery, where the last Communards had been executed. The May event was especially important. Summoned by the Left-wing press, sympathetic workers and labor and political leaders like Vaillant and Jaurès made the yearly trek through Paris’s boulevards to the cemetery, where in alternately somber and celebratory tone they invoked the memory of those killed at the Wall of the Federals (Mur des Fédérés). The march to Père Lachaise was a moment used by socialist and labor leaders to recall 1871 more as sacrifice and tragedy,

FIGURE 6.3 Hôtel de Ville, the city hall, was burned during Bloody Week. An abundance of records that historians might have used were destroyed. The building was rebuilt and enlarged in the 1870s. Photo by Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images.

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then as a spur for collective action. The day was punctuated with the singing of revolutionary songs, speeches, and banquet suppers. The march to Père Lachaise ceased during the Vichy period (1940–44) but resumed thereafter. By 1914, the rightist group Action française challenged anniversary commemorations of the Commune by scheduling simultaneous celebrations of their nationalist icon, Joan of Arc. The memory of the Paris Commune has served political ends, but the event shows up in literature, too. A horror novel of 1933 (Guy Endore, The Werewolf of Paris) placed a werewolf (!) in Paris during the carnage of Bloody Week. Better known is Emile Zola’s The Downfall, published in 1892 and set during the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune. Another in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series, The Downfall is partly a story of class struggle, partly a story of national and civil war during France’s année terrible.

Conclusion It is still hard to reconcile the images we have of Paris today—a city of elegant boulevards and vistas; a cosmopolitan Capital of the World; a destination that is welcoming and safe for visitors and tourists—with the violence and destruction of the Commune of 1871. What could prompt such events in a city that had just endured a losing war against Prussia?; what underlying animosities existed in Parisian society that could result in a civil war with the national government? Ever since, ordinary French and historians have struggled to come up with answers. Following the fighting of Bloody Week, the response by many Communards who had not been killed or arrested was to flee France. For the government, there was the handling of those arrested and convicted—many of the latter sent to overseas penal colonies in Algeria or New Caledonia (though their amnesty became a political issue later in the decade). For municipal authorities, there was the rubble of damaged streets and buildings to clean up. For many Parisians, the urge was simply time to push aside the memories. In fact, there was no consensus among Parisians, no agreed-upon memories and legacies about the Commune. The meaning of the Commune itself became politicized. Conservative opponents, many of them associated with the Catholic Church or members of a “moral order” that saw 1871 as a calamitous long-term product of 1789, interpreted the event as the sign of a city that had lost its way. Democracy, socialism, and federalism, which the Commune stood for, had to be defeated. Penance had to be paid—the construction of the Sacré-Coeur Basilica at Montmartre, which has become one of the most famous emblems of contemporary Paris, was a sign of penance. Meanwhile in central Paris, the rubble of burned buildings was removed and the Tuileries Palace—a symbol of the monarchy—was

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not rebuilt. The republic had won out, but a conservative republic that had defeated the Communards. The 1878 Paris World Exposition was a sign to the world that the Commune was just a bad memory. For the political Left—once it began to regroup following the disaster of Bloody Week— the Commune mostly symbolized the struggle of workers against a state backed by the upper classes. Later, some on the revolutionary Left—notably the Russian Vladimir Lenin—saw practical lessons from 1871 that were used when the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917. For the Parisian political Left, the Commune became a noble and heroic gesture to be memorialized with annual marches to the Wall of Federals at Père Lachaise cemetery. The political Left’s adherence to the memory of the Commune would endure longer than the political Right’s demonization of the event. The tragedy of Bloody Week meant that for a long time there was some reluctance for Parisians to contemplate the events of 1871. The burning of the Hôtel de Ville and the municipal records it held meant that historians did not have access to records that might explain the event. Even today, historians such as John Merriman are still disputing the number of Parisians killed during Bloody Week.

7 Paris from the Third Republic to Turn of the Century

Chronology 1871

Paris Commune—Bloody Week

1875

Opening of Opéra designed by Garnier—construction of SacréCoeur Basilica begins

1878

World Exposition

1880

Emile Zola publishes Nana

1889

Centennial of French Revolution—World Exposition—opening of Eiffel Tower

1891

Death of Boulanger

1894

Terrorist bombing in Paris

1895

Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) created—first film shown in Paris

1898

Action française founded—Zola writes “J’Accuse” in defense of Dreyfus

1900

First Métro line opens—World Exposition

Introduction The “Social Question” was a phrase and a way of understanding that was used widely across the Atlantic World in the nineteenth century; Paris was one of the places where the idea was born. In broad terms,

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the phrase meant the gap—real and perceived—between the promises of citizenship and improved standard of living of the Atlantic and Industrial Revolutions, and the reality of everyday life for most people during the nineteenth century. It was not until the second half of the century that the Social Question started to be “answered” with the spread of democratic governments and improved living and health conditions. The answer came partly through the abolition of slavery and as industrial workers organized, via trade unions and strikes, against capital. The last two decades of the nineteenth century saw a lingering economic depression in the Atlantic World that exacerbated the social struggle. At the same time, there was a seemingly endless migration of rural populations to growing cities, and whose presence created competition with urban workers that kept wages low. Advocates of women’s rights asked for the vote and protection of economic property, but with little result. The Social Question was not a notion applied to Africa, Asia, and the Pacific where European powers, and then the United States and Japan, extended their imperial interests. Britain was the greatest colonial power of the late nineteenth century and France was second. France acquired territory in Southeast Asia and participated in the “Scramble for Africa,” gaining possessions in West and North Africa—setting up a long-term relationship with these places that in the twentieth century would generate an African migration to Paris. In the meantime, Europe’s perceived colonial interests shifted tensions from the Continent to Africa and Asia. France and Britain almost went to war in 1898 over a small piece of land in far-off Sudan before stepping away from the precipice. Colonial and imperial France was, paradoxically, also a democratic France. Among the great powers of Europe, France was the only republic. This was the Third Republic born in the turmoil of the military defeat to rising power Germany and the civil war of the Paris Commune. It was not clear that this version of a republic would survive both a series of crises and her many opponents—yet, the new republic did in survive, with the Centennial of the French Revolution in 1889 the symbolic acknowledgment of success. The Republic attempted to answer the Social Question by tentatively initiating a welfare system. Every decade of the Third Republic seemed marked by some existential challenge: acts of anarchist terrorism, the Boulanger Affair of the late 1880s, and then the Dreyfus Affair that extended until past the turn of the century. The anti-Semitism, nationalism, populist politics, and collective violence of the two Affairs were hints of fascist movements in the twentieth century. But the Republic had vigilant and energetic defenders in a Bloc républicaine. The contests between fascists and alliances of liberal and socialist groups that were characteristic of the first half of the twentieth century and the build-up to the Second World War had roots in fin de siècle Paris.

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POLITICS 1 Sacré-Coeur, Communard amnesty, and Republic Grappling with the Commune of 1871 and the terrible violence that ended it was one of the issues dominating Parisian politics in the 1870s. A contest over the memory of the Commune began right away on both the political Right and Left. At the same time, politicians pursued reforms and ideas they hoped would prevent confrontations like 1871 from recurring. Paris was once more capital of France, though the city remained under martial law until 1876. After the Commune, Parisians of all political stripes seemed to have had enough of revolution. The writer and native Parisian Maxime du Camp (1822–94) was a prominent post-1871 voice against the Commune. The popular magazine Le Monde illustré published stories and images that directly and indirectly criticized the Communards in the same of a resurgent “moral order.”1 For religious believers opposed to the Commune—and therefore on the winning side in 1871—there was a need of atonement for the “sins” of 1870–71. This would come in the form of a basilica dedicated to the order of SacréCoeur situated on property at Montmartre (where the Commune began in March 1871) and on land purchased by the National Assembly. The building itself was paid for by donations from Catholics across France. Designed by the architect Paul Abadie, construction began in 1875 and the basilica was consecrated in 1919. Former Communards and their supporters saw SacréCoeur as a provocation. Today, the white stone building sporting a mix of architectural styles and sitting at the very top of Montmartre is one of the most prominent features of the Parisian landscape. The defeat of the Commune had not brought an end to the Republic; indeed, the forces of the Republic had defeated the Commune. Republicans had shown that they could stand against revolution in Paris, and this helped make the idea of a republic more acceptable across the political spectrum. In the debates of the 1870s the other main political option—monarchism—lost out. Some on the Right became resigned to the republic: since the 1880s, the Place de la Concorde—so named since the July Monarchy, and now according to Pierre Nora one of France’s “sites of memory” (lieux de mémoire)—has more and more been associated with conservatism.2 (Figure 7.1) Another heated issue of the 1870s was the fate of convicted Communards who had been sent to prison or to overseas penal colonies. National legislative elections in 1876 and 1877 returned Republican majorities that called for amnesty, and some Communards came home in 1879. As the public increasingly voiced its support, the remaining 2,000 Communards (most of them in New Caledonia) were amnestied in 1880.

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FIGURE 7.1  The Place de la Concorde, 1895. Constructed as the Place Louis XV in the 1750s, it was renamed the Place de la Révolution during the French Revolution and has been the Place de la Concorde (a sign of political reconciliation) since 1830. The Egyptian obelisk was added in 1836. Photo by Levy, Paris / Alamy Stock Photo. (Alamy FDJA4J)

Among the politicians who pushed through the final amnesty was Léon Gambetta, an heroic figure from 1870–71. With impeccable republican credentials, Gambetta took the lead in crafting political compromises with monarchists to create a “conservative republic” acceptable to most French. Gambetta’s Opportunists were one of several political factions or parties that emerged in the 1870s and 1880s, the majority of which were defenders of the Republic. Possibilists were socialists who broke away from the French Marxists in the early 1880s. The Radical-Socialists who, as the saying went, were neither really “radical” nor “socialist,” dominated French politics by the turn of the century. A guiding principle for the Radicals was Solidarism, which advocated protection of both private property and democratic politics. The Radicals were mostly friends of the working class—a politically astute posture that gained them support in Paris through the 1930s. Another prominent republican politician with experience in Paris was Jules Ferry (1832–93), formerly deputy from the Seine during the Second Empire, then prefect during the Siege of 1870; in the Third Republic, he was prime minister (1881–82) and minister of education (1883–85). It was Ferry who was especially responsible for centralizing education and building an

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infrastructure that, as the historian Eugen Weber described, turned “peasants into Frenchman.” That centralization emanated from Paris. The trauma of the Commune slowly faded as the Republic won out in Paris and France in the decades before the Great War.

2 Parisian labor movement The expectations and disappointments of modernity had roots in Paris as much as any place. The Social Question was the perceived gap between the promise of full citizenship dating from 1789 and improved standard of living resulting from economic modernization, and the actual conditions of life for most ordinary people. It was an Atlantic idea with historical roots in particular places—Paris, among them. The phrase persisted during the Third Republic. One goal of the emerging Parisian labor movement of the  late nineteenth century was to address the Social Question by giving the working class (in realty, male workers) greater political and economic rights. In the 1870s, Parisian workers sought the right to form trade unions, which were finally legalized by national legislation in 1884. The right to strike had already been won in 1864. Workers had help from the Paris City Council, which was an elected body (unlike prefects and mayors of the twenty arrondissements, who were appointed by the government). Parisian workers used trade unions and strikes to press their demands with employers; other tools of persuasion were newspapers, public demonstrations, the threat of a “general strike,” and the vote. Persons running for political office, whether the national legislature or the Paris city council, now began to court working-class voters and the support of trade unions. A national alliance of unions—the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT)—was founded in 1895. In 1892, a labor exchange (bourse du travail) was opened in Paris. The issues that most concerned Parisian workers were wages, working conditions, an end to exploitive subcontracting (marchandage), the influx of “foreign” workers, the guarantee of a “week-end” off from the job (the English phrase was used), a ten-hour workday, compensation for work-related injuries, and old-age pensions. Labor laws in the early 1890s and 1900s addressed some of these issues, and a corps of municipal labor inspectors was created to investigate abuses. Still, managers and bosses resisted oversight, and so the laws were difficult to enforce. The 1890s and early 1900s saw many strikes in a variety of Parisian industries that showed the strength of the burgeoning labor movement. The labor exchange was closed in 1893 because of suspected revolutionary activity. Some workers believed in “direct action,” which led to the rise of Revolutionary Syndicalism after 1900. Georges Sorel was the philosopher of this idea. With ties to anarchism, Syndicalists propagandized a general strike that would mobilize the entire working class, stop all work, and thereby take control of the economy and society. However, Syndicalism and the “myth”

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of the general strike faded because, in fact, by the turn of the century most Parisian workers shied away from this kind of revolutionary action. A notable feature—in hindsight, a failure—of both the Social Question and the Parisian labor movement was inattention to the Woman Question. Louise Michel, the former Communard who was amnestied in 1880, was among the few who tried to bridge the two. After her return from New Caledonia, Michel became an activist. She was a supporter of the idea of a general strike, breaking with French Marxists who were moving in the 1890s toward reformism and an evolutionary (rather than revolutionary) strategy. Michel was unrelenting in her criticism of politicians, including potential allies like the Opportunists and Possibilists. She also became an advocate of women’s rights, holding an “essentialist” view of the different political natures of the genders. Michel had been a “soldier” for the Commune but now became a staunch foe of “militarism” (this especially meant opposition to conscription laws) and the paternalist culture she saw as its root. Michel embodied the goals—old and new—of the Social Question, including women’s rights.

3 Boulanger Affair In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the Boulanger and Dreyfus affaires that began in Paris foreshadowed the momentous and troubling rise of fascism in the next century. General Georges Boulanger (1837–91) was a popular figure who had extensive military experience in Italy, during the Franco-Prussian War, and in French imperial possessions in Indochina and Tunisia. He used this experience, along with a certain charisma, much ambition and support from different sections of the political spectrum to build a movement— Boulangism—in the 1880s. He could do this partly because of a crisis of confidence afflicting the Republic emanating from both political Right and Left. In fact, the political Right was almost always against the Republic. With support from politicians who believed he was on their side, Boulanger was appointed minister of war in 1886. From that position, he posed as a “man on horseback” who would champion the military and ordinary people, but also as a new Napoleon who would exact revenge on Germany for the defeat of 1870–71. In hindsight, Boulanger seemed to be building around himself what would later be called a “cult of personality.” When he was dismissed from the ministry of war in 1887, there were street demonstrations in Paris by his supporters. Boulanger now became a politician, promising to run in districts across France in order to come to power through a kind of national referendum. He won a Parisian seat in the Chamber of Deputies in January 1889, drawing support from both Right and Left—this kind of populism seemed to be a new phenomenon. The government responded by changing the election laws so that Boulanger could not run in other districts and, fearing a coup, issued a warrant for his arrest. Boulanger fled

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to Brussels, where he came to an unhappy end, committing suicide in 1891. The Boulanger affaire had unsettled France for two years. What was Boulangism and who were the Boulangists? Historians have been intrigued by these questions ever since. The first Boulangists were from Paris and were on the political Left, but most of Boulanger’s financial support came from monarchists, who were on the political Right. Boulangists of all political stripes seemed united by dissatisfaction with the Republic, by perceptions of political corruption, and by an extreme nationalism directed against Germany. Boulanger drew support from republicans, socialists, workers, the petit bourgeoisie, and a variety of authoritarian monarchist groups animated by anti-German sentiment. The rapid ascent of Boulanger was surprising, revealing fissures in republicanism, including the readiness of socialists and Blanquists to lend support to an authoritarian figure. After Boulanger, Parisian workers in the banlieue began to move from support of republican candidates to support for socialists and far Left groups. “Révanche” (revenge) against Germany was part of Boulangism. Nationalism, which historically had been situated on the political Left, now shifted to the Right with groups like Paul Déroulède’s League of Patriots. For some historians, these developments are signs of “proto-fascism”—indeed, among the first signs anywhere. Some of the historical roots of fascism come from Paris.

4 Dreyfus Affair France’s national capital and largest city was the center of political divisions that troubled the first three decades of the Third Republic. Corruption among republican politicians was one issue. Georges Clemenceau (1841– 1929), originally from the Vendée, but a long-time politician in Paris (he was mayor of the eighteenth arrondissement at the start of the Commune), became embroiled in a scandal involving the financing of a canal across Panama that saw him retreat (temporarily, it turned out) from political life. Catholic conservatives like Albert de Mun would never fully reconcile to the Republic. French Marxists led by Jules Guesde, whose political party was headquartered in Paris, sought to end the “bourgeois republic.” Anarchism was a widespread phenomenon that wanted to undo political systems from the top down with assassinations and bombings. Paris endured an anarchist wave of violence in the early 1890s; in 1894, police reported there were at least 500 dedicated anarchists in the city. Among the most famous were “Ravachol” (François Koenigstein), who proclaimed “Vive l’anarchie” (long live anarchy) even as he was being executed, and Émile Henry, the son of a Communard, who killed six persons with a bomb at the Café Terminus on the Right Bank. Sadi Carnot, the French president (a mostly ceremonial position in the Third Republic), was assassinated by anarchists in 1894 during the wave of terrorist bombings.3

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But the greatest threat to the Third Republic before the Great War was the Dreyfus Affair, which dominated political life in Paris for much of the Belle Époque. The affaire centered around the enigmatic figure of Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935), an officer in the French army who in 1895 was wrongfully accused of spying for Germany. Dreyfus was Jewish and this fact was linked by his enemies to his alleged crimes. Dreyfus was convicted and sent to the penal colony at French Guiana. His supporters soon got the case reopened. The affaire beset France—and Francophiles across the world—for years. “Dreyfusards” sought “justice”; “anti-Dreyfusards” defended the army and the nation. The documents originally cited to convict Dreyfus were found to be forged (coverups by the army were discovered), and in 1906 he was given a full pardon. In the meantime, Paris was embroiled in all the elements that came to define the affaire: public accusations, inflammatory newspaper articles, trials, and street demonstrations. The affaire split families and political parties. These years witnessed large mass mobilizations drawing from all social classes, though in some respects it was more an affaire for the intelligentsia than for the Parisian working class. An aspect of the Dreyfus Affair that would echo in the twentieth century was the anti-Semitism of the anti-Dreyfusards. Edouard Drumont’s La France juive (Jewish France, 1886) was an early anti-Semitic work that linked Jewishness to a critique of capitalism. For his enemies, Dreyfus represented the corruption, secularism, and weakness of the Republic. The affaire awakened modern popular anti-Semitism that in hindsight was a hint, like Boulangism, of twentieth-century fascism. For years, Paris was divided between Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards. Certain individuals played important roles. The novelist Emile Zola published a famous article (“J’Accuse”) in Clemenceau’s republican Dreyfusard newspaper L’Aurore attacking conservative elements in French society, including the Catholic Church and the army. Jean Jaurès was a labor leader, historian, newspaper editor, socialist politician, and eloquent Dreyfusard. The anti-Dreyfusard group Action française led by Charles Maurras created a model for the anti-republican and Right-wing populism that would become more prominent in the next century. It was during these years that Joan of Arc was adopted as a symbol by the political Right. The twentieth-century struggle of fascism versus anti-fascism had roots with the Dreyfus Affair in turn-of-the-century Paris.

SOCIETY 1 Women’s work Women had, of course, always been a significant part of the Parisian workforce—at home (their own or as servants in the homes of wealthier classes), in the shop, and during the nineteenth century in the factory or office. Women were a growing part of the industrial and manufacturing economy

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in the modern era. But they entered the workforce with disadvantages, since the economy, like the larger society, placed greater value on male over female labor. A persistent theme for working women in Paris of the Third Republic was a determination to acquire skills that would allow them to advance economically and socially. An important skill sought by many working-class Parisian women in the late nineteenth century was sewing. This was not the needlework of the past, but rather the ability to use a sewing machine to stitch the ready-made clothing sold at department stores. Paris’s garment district, the Sentier, depended considerably on immigrant male labor and supplied much of the ready-made clothing for the Bon Marché, Galeries Lafayette, and other grands magasins. As demand for inexpensive clothing increased during the first decades of the Third Republic, production was expanded to include women working at home or in the factory. The easy-to-use Singer sewing machine—known in France as “la Singer”—was available in Paris by 1870, and in use for mass production by the 1880s.4 Sewing machines were set up by entrepreneurs and business owners in shops and factories, where the work was done mostly by women and children working long hours, paid less than male adults and performed in unpleasant conditions. This was “sweated labor” (the English phrase was used). A great deal of sewing work was also done at home by individual women. This, too, was sweated labor, though as Judith Coffin has written, of a different kind: “hidden labor”—hidden from observers and from the labor inspectors who were beginning to enforce laws designed to prevent conditions like this. In Paris, the “factory had come to the home.”5 This was a variation of women’s “double burden”: caring for the family and working at a job. By 1900, there were about 800,000 homeworkers in France, most of them women. Still, working at home with the sewing machine was not simply a bad or a good thing. Some women preferred the workshop because friends and conversation could be found there, even as others felt oppressed in the factory and “freer” at home where they could mind children. The goods at the Parisian department stores, especially clothing, which generated most sales, were typically produced by young women sitting at home or at workshops before a sewing machine. Consumer culture in Paris in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was built on the labor of persons like these.

2 Immigrants French migrants came to Paris to work not only in the garment industry, but in many other areas: construction, textiles, transportation, and business offices; as servants in the homes of the upper classes; or as servers in restaurants. Of course, provincial French had been attracted to Paris for centuries; one difference in the first decades of the Third Republic was that foreign workers were also arriving in increasing numbers.

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Regions of France specialized in sending certain trades to the capital. Mountainous and relatively poor central France dispatched Auvergnats, who in the past had traditionally worked as water carriers, but who by the late nineteenth century were working as restaurant servers and operators of cafés and taverns. Limousins from the departments of Creuse and Haute-Vienne had long worked in the Parisian construction industry, particularly as stonemasons. Many coachmen were migrants from departments south of the Loire River like Aveyron, Cantal, and Corrèze. “Germans” (really, Alsatians) looked for jobs in the furniture and textile trades after Alsace was annexed to Germany following the war of 1870–71. Breton migrants arrived from western France in large numbers for the first time in the 1870s: women working as servants and men in a variety of suburban industries. The Bretons were probably the last distinct provincial French to arrive and establish themselves in Paris. Like others, they had to endure stereotypes about provincial backwardness. In 1891, about half the people living in the capital were not born there. Disease and overcrowding were problems. The most common disease in the workingclass quarters of Paris was pulmonary tuberculosis.6 The Parisian clothing and textiles industries attracted immigrants from Eastern Europe, especially Poles and Jews, who settled in the Marais and Saint-Paul neighborhoods of the Right Bank, close to the city’s garment district near the Rue Sentier. “Le Sentier” became a world of its own at the end of the nineteenth century, filled with small-scale clothes dealers. Jewish East Europeans speaking Yiddish were a proletariat, though a distinct one that found it difficult to integrate into the burgeoning French labor movement of the Belle Époque. In the 1880s and 1890s, workers from Southern Europe also began to arrive. Initially, most worked in the building industry. Italians from the Piedmont region, along with Spanish and Portuguese, now competed for jobs with the stonemasons of Creuse. To look ahead after the end of the Great War, Belgian and Polish migrants would come to Paris, replacing other working-class groups—French and foreign alike. All migrant communities coming to Paris, whether provincial French or foreign, faced the challenge of integration. Sometimes the problem was solved by settling into certain arrondissements where others from their region had settled earlier. Bretons tended to live in the banlieue, while Auvergnats and Limousins were more likely to reside in the working-class neighborhoods of Paris proper. To take a few examples, by the end of the century, metal and leather workers from Cantal favored the eleventh arrondissement, while Creusois lived in the fourth, fifth, and seventeenth arrondissements. The neighborhood around the Rue Mouffetard on the Left Bank became a veritable Creusois “colony.” As families moved permanently from the departments to Paris, integration happened: restaurants and cafés serving regional fare were opened; newspapers were established specializing in reports from back home; and social organizations (amicales and sociétés d’orginaires) were created to allow migrants to retain, as best they could in cosmopolitan Paris, a cultural connection with the provincial home.

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The Statue of Liberty, which welcomes immigrants to the United States arriving at New York’s harbor, was designed and created in Paris in the 1870s by the sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi. It was dedicated in New York in 1886.

3 Social class and society in Belle Époque The term “Belle Époque” was coined by a post-1918 generation looking back to an idealized Paris at the end of the nineteenth century. The term connoted a special time, pregnant with new and progressive possibilities in art, technology, commerce, and social relations; in hindsight, it seemed to be an era of innocence wiped away by the battlefield horrors of 1914–18. For many in Paris’s middle and upper classes, the last two decades of the nineteenth century brought economic prosperity, a new style of bourgeois culture and, politically, acceptance of the Republic. There was a growing service sector catering to bourgeois needs: servers at restaurants and cafés, and clerks for a Parisian financial sector (which was more devoted to supporting Russian and colonial infrastructure than to building French roads and railways). Upper-class Parisians seemed to look at others in a new way; the term clochard (tramp) was coined in the 1890s to describe the homeless poor at Les Halles or sleeping on the quays. Upper-class Parisian women of the Belle Époque flirted with unconventional activities, though sometimes they were punished for doing so. A femme mondaine (women’s world) took shape in Paris of the second half of the nineteenth century. This might include a busy social life, which in turn required servants to maintain the home and tutors to educate children. Bourgeois wives and mothers were expected to develop a public persona and find venues to engage in elevated conversation—an updating of the salon culture of years past. There were “rules” of respectability, even if they were not always observed. During the Belle Époque, bourgeois parisiennes seemed to have adopted elevated expectations for satisfying sexual desires, whether in the marriage or outside of it: tolerance of adultery, for women and men, ebbed and flowed during the Third Republic. Still, when it came to relations outside of marriage, a double standard persisted.7 For bourgeois wives and mothers who transgressed too many boundaries, and in a France still operating under the laws of the deeply paternalistic Napoleonic Code, there were private mental asylums where doctors attempted to restore “domesticity” to female patients. Having pets, especially small dogs, but other animals, too, was a sign of “embourgeoisement” in late nineteenth-century Paris. A pet represented domestic tranquility and fidelity, and in this sense seemed to be a curious antidote to the struggle between social classes that had rocked Paris for most of the century. Keeping a pet in Paris during the Belle Époque tended to be a sign of the social class that one belonged to.8

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Representative in certain ways of the bourgeois woman of Belle Époque Paris was Marguerite Durand (1864–1936). Durand had an early career in the theater before marrying a wealthy lawyer and dabbling in politics in the 1880s. By the early 1890s, she had made a name for herself as a writer, first for the prominent newspaper Le Figaro and then independently. Durand was an early feminist and advocate for women’s political and economic rights. In style, temperament, and upbringing, Durand was bourgeois. Her pet was not a lap dog, but a (tame) lion she named “Tiger.” Durand’s bourgeois style was unconventional, and therefore not entirely out of step during the Belle Époque.

4 Public health and crime In the late nineteenth century, social scientists, public health officials, and doctors began to look closely at the health and living conditions of working-class Parisians. What they found was troubling. Disease, alcoholism, crime, and prostitution were prevalent. As in the past, observers assumed these impacted the “moral” condition of the lower classes, and that in turn this was related to political unrest. But now these issues were also cast as part of a general decline of a French “race” engaged in a demographic competition with Germany, the new national rival. The influence of social Darwinist ideas, too, seemed to set Parisian society in a new light. Most of the diseases that plagued Parisians in the first decades of the Third Republic were associated with poor living and working conditions: tuberculosis, diarrhea, diphtheria, and typhus filled hospitals with working-class patients. The last outbreak of cholera in Paris occurred in 1892. Improvements in water distribution and waste disposal under Haussmann, and then discoveries about germ theory by Louis Pasteur in Paris and Robert Koch in Germany, finally led to methods to counter the deadly disease. “Disinfectors” replaced “sanitarians” in the effort to put germ theory into practice. Neighborhood hygiene commissions in Paris were precursors to a national health law of 1902.9 Alcoholism was not considered a disease by doctors, but rather a moral condition. Working-class men seemed especially prone, which in turn was seen to wreck families: the father and husband who spent too much time at the neighborhood tavern drinking away the wages that should have gone to support the family was a deeply held supposition in late nineteenth-century Paris. For their part, workers saw opinions about alcohol as a reflection of class bias.10 The potent spirit “absinthe”—popular among bohemians—was outlawed in 1914. Alcoholism mostly affected men (though not entirely— Degas’s sad “L’Absinthe Drinker” was a young woman). Another perceived curse of the Belle Époque, even though it was regulated by police, was prostitution, sometimes called after the English “Le Business.” Paris had a large population of prostitutes: in the 1870s, as many as 15,000 annually went for health inspection before the sanitary police. There were brothels (maisons closes), prostitutes working for pimps (respecteuses), and

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those who worked on their own (insoumises). The Place Pigalle and Quartier de Bréda were sections where prostitutes could be found working.11 In 1880, a survey of prostitutes at Saint-Lazare prison showed an average of two arrests each year for not registering or undergoing the mandatory health check. The city maintained a “morals brigade” (brigade des moeurs) to keep track of illegal prostitution. Trends in arrest of prostitutes reflected changes in Parisian politics and police administration.12 Crime occurred across the city (the Porte Saint-Denis and Rue PierreLescot were notorious areas), and at all ranks of Parisian society during the Belle Époque: one of the most famous murder trials of the era was of the wealthy socialite Henriette Caillaux, who shot and killed the editor of Le Figaro for publishing articles attacking her politician husband. Domestic crimes like the battering of women tended to go unreported. Another “silence” in Belle Époque Paris had to do with sexual identity. Police records of the period reveal a subculture of working- and middle-class gay men masking their sexuality and harassed by police pursuing (to use the legal language of the day) “pederasts” and “sodomites.” Police patrolled streets around the Palais-Royal looking for male prostitutes (nicknamed jésus) who were often newly arrived young provincials, and whose clients were tantes (aunties).13 The “dangerous classes” of the 1880s and 1890s included persons who did not fit the heterosexual norm. Nonetheless, an early gay and lesbian subculture was developing in the city. Male and female prostitutes in Paris might belong to networks, but mostly operated on their own. Acting as criminal gangs were apaches (the word probably taken from the Native Americans of the Southwest United States): bands of young men who robbed, stole, or assaulted, especially at the urban perimeter. The apaches, like most elements of Parisian subculture, generated a great deal of exaggerated tabloid newspaper coverage during the Belle Époque. This was enhanced by the apache’s nihilistic attitude toward society, their talent with knives and the savate (a French martial art), and their tattoos, which included a blue dot under the left eye.14 Stories of crime and sexuality sold well in Belle Époque Paris. The police official Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914) developed anthropometric techniques, including the first mug shots, to keep tabs on suspected Parisian criminals like the apaches.

Bridges across the Seine

T

he Seine River, whose natural history is so closely tied to Paris’s urban history, begins in Burgundy and empties into the Atlantic Ocean at Le Havre. It runs about eight miles through Paris, dividing the city into Right and Left Banks. Today, there are two small islands in the Seine at Paris: the Île de la Cité and Île Saint-Louis. Early bridges, including the Grand

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and Petit Ponts built by the Romans, made use of these islands. The first crossings were mostly footbridges, while ferries were used to transport wagons and heavier loads from one bank to the other. More bridges were constructed during the Middle Ages; these, like their predecessors, were sometimes washed away in floods. Most early bridges were built of wood, but by 1607 Paris also had four stone bridges. As elsewhere in Europe, Parisian bridges had housing which tended to restrict traffic and were plagued by occasional fires. Henri IV began construction of the Pont Neuf (new bridge) which joined the far western point of the Île de la Cité with the Right and Left Banks. Completed in 1607, the Pont Neuf was a different kind of Parisian bridge: scenic, wide, and with no housing. It was immediately popular with Parisians of all social classes, and because there was no housing to obstruct passage it was much used by peddlers singing out their cris de Paris. An equestrian statue of Henri IV was added in the 1630s. The Pont Neuf is Paris’s oldest bridge. After the Pont Neuf went up and proved so popular, French kings seemed inclined to enhance their legacy by building bridges across the Seine. Louis XIII added five bridges in the seventeenth century. From 1815 to 1914, nineteen bridges went up over the river in the expanding metropolis. There were no wooden bridges after the 1780s, while iron and steel were added to construction materials in the nineteenth century. During the Second Empire, Prefect Haussmann took care to integrate the bridges with the transportation axes he wanted. Two bridges were added when the peripheral highway circling the city was built in the 1960s. By the end of the twentieth century, there were thirty-eight bridges crossing the Seine at Paris. The Pont de la Concorde began as the Pont Louis XVI in the 1780s, joining the Faubourgs Saint-Honoré and Saint-Germain. It was completed in the 1790s with stones from the Bastille (torn down in 1790): Parisians could now tread on the hated symbol of oppression. The Pont de la Concorde was one of the city’s “political” bridges, whose name changed as new governments came to power. Napoleon Bonaparte had three bridges built, including the Pont d’Iéna (finished 1813, and named after a military victory), linking the Champ de Mars on the Left Bank with Chaillot on the Right Bank. At the other end of Paris, there was the Pont d’Austerlitz (likewise named after a military victory) linking the Jardin des Plantes with the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Like other bridges, it was widened over the years to accommodate automobile traffic. The Pont Alexandre III went up in the late 1890s and was inaugurated at the World Exposition of 1900. It was named in honor of the Russian Tsar and to provide an emblem for the defensive treaty signed between France and Russia in 1894 that made the two countries allies against Germany. Built of steel and decorated in extravagant, neo-baroque style with enormous lampposts highlighting

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watery themes, it connected the Invalides and Champs-Élysées. The Pont Alexandre III is a spacious bridge still much used by both automobile traffic and pedestrians. Passerelles were early pontoon boats parked in the river with passages for use by pedestrians. The only pedestrian bridge in Paris today is the Pont des Arts connecting the Louvre and Institut de France. Beginning in the early 2000s, couples attached padlocks to the Pont des Arts as a sign of their love. There were so many “love locks” that city officials worried they might damage—maybe even sink!—the bridge, and so they were removed.

ECONOMY 1 Métro and sewers “Everything into the sewer,” recommended Louis Pasteur as a way to sanitize Paris and improve the health of the city’s population (and after initially opposing the idea on scientific grounds). As in virtually every era, Paris’s sewers were improved in the years before the start of the Great War. This was not the only large-scale work taking place beneath the streets of the capital: work on the Paris subway system—the Métro—began in 1898 and the first lines were opened in 1900 to coincide with a World Exposition. The Paris Métro was to become one of the great public transport systems of the world, and a model for other cities building subways. For much of the nineteenth century, Parisian engineers and public health officials had debated how to dispose of the city’s human waste. For a long time, cesspools and large barrels had been used rather than pipes leading to a sewer system, as in other large cities like London. During the Second Empire, reformers called for “tout-à-l’égout”: everything, including human waste, into the sewers. The debate went on after 1871, with cesspool companies and some scientists and doctors opposing the idea, arguing that underground waste would accumulate and generate disease. But as the sewers were expanded, and as engineers improved their capacity to flush waste material, the argument swung in the 1890s in favor of tout-à-l’égout. The politics of the Third Republic played a role, too, with “republican” engineers demanding “equal treatment for the excrement of rich and poor alike.”15 Still, the expanded sewers could not contain everything: heavy rainfall caused the Seine to flood in January 1910, filling the sewers and inundating sections of the city. Also flooded in 1910 were the underground lines of the Paris Métro. The civil engineer Fulgence Bienvenüe (1852–1936) designed a subway project that was accepted by Parisian authorities in the 1890s. His plan called for the construction of nine lines; the first to be completed, in 1900, ran diagonally

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across Paris from the Porte de Vincennes in the southeast to the Porte Maillot in the northwest. The period between 1898 and the 1920s (aside from the war years) was the busiest for construction, as more and more lines crisscrossed the city. Eventually, there were extensions into the banlieue; a few sections were above ground and elevated, but mostly the lines ran underground. A distinctive, now much-beloved feature of the Métropolitain, were the Art Nouveau entrances designed by Hector Guimard; many of these still exist, and like the Eiffel Tower or Notre-Dame, they have become emblems of Paris. The subway system quickly became popular, and as usage increased the demand for new lines and new stations grew. Maintaining and improving the Métro would become one of the foremost responsibilities for all municipal governments into the twenty-first century. Stations were named after persons or places, and sometimes the decisions generated controversy: Robespierre (of the Committee of Public Safety) did not get a Métro station until 1937 when the Left-leaning Popular Front government had it built in an eastern working-class suburb. The Bienvenüe Métro station named after the subway’s designer is on the Left Bank. An accident killing several people at the Couronnes Métro station in 1903 did not deter expansion of the subway.

2 Consumerism Paris has long been a center for the production of luxury goods directed at a mostly middle- to upper-class clientele; this remained the case during the first decades of the Third Republic. However, as buying attitudes evolved and production modernized, replacing hand-crafted goods with mass-produced items, Parisians of all social classes, like citizens in other big cities of the Atlantic World, were drawn to cheaper household wares, clothing, and personal items. This was not completely new to the Third Republic: mass production and commercialization had started earlier in Paris, certainly by the 1840s. As workers knew from their own experience, and other observers more abstractly, mass production contributed to the decline in apprenticeship and traditional skills: thus, the crafting of fine furniture—a mainstay of the Paris economy for centuries—had all but ended by the 1920s. This was partly a structural development, but also a reflection of changes in taste. The combining of “citizen” and “consumer” was occurring in Paris as it was in London, Berlin, and New York. The new outline of consumer culture in Paris was most obvious in the city’s many department stores. Paris’s first elevators were in department stores moving customers from floor to floor. The Bon Marché along the Rue des Sèvres of the Left Bank was one of the first department stores in the world, and the largest before 1914. It thrived by combining the habits of a family-run operation with the new demands of the age of mass consumption. The Boucicault family recognized, as did the managers of Paris’s other grands magasins, the “revolution in retailing” that was taking place in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

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During the Third Republic, Paris was the world capital of fashion for middle- and upper-class women. The Realist novels of Emile Zola and short stories of Guy de Maupassant (1850–93) spoke to the place of consumer culture and the surge in women’s fashion in the 1890s. Fashion magazines, poster art, and commercial signage (l’affiche), along with eye-catching displays in boulevard shop windows, offered advertisement and enticement to buy. The central districts of Paris, as opposed to the outer arrondissements, were the urban heart of this new commercialization—for well-off Parisians—and for the tourists who were flooding the city from other parts of Europe and the Americas. World Expositions in 1878, 1889, and 1900 showcased the city’s consumer culture.16 Commercialization and buying clothing off the rack did not imply a lack of style. Les modes parisiennes were now global standards in dress and style, much as Paris had earlier set standards in architecture and dining. All Parisian social classes joined the consumer revolution, and all were educated by advertisers to shop and spend. Where bourgeois shoppers went to the Bon Marché, working-class customers patronized the Grands Magasins Dufayel, an elaborate edifice opened in 1890 near the Goutte d’Or (the setting of Zola’s L’Assommoir) in the north of Paris. The native Parisian Georges Dufayel (1855–1916) allowed his working-class customers to buy on credit.

3 Working-class residential patterns The Haussmannization of Paris during the Second Empire initiated a permanent shift in residential patterns. Before the 1850s, there was— with exceptions like the bourgeois western districts and the workingclass faubourgs of the east—a considerable mixing of social classes in neighborhoods. But after the rebuilding of the 1850s and 1860s, middleand upper-middle class Parisians lived in the central arrondissements while poorer residents mostly lived in the outer arrondissements and banlieue. This remains the case through the present. Affordable housing for Parisian workers had been a political, economic, and social issue for much of the nineteenth century. Politicians and urban reformers had discussed “worker cities” since the 1840s. A Healthful Dwellings Commission of 1851, working in the shadow of the class conflict of the June Days, made numerous specific recommendations that went unfulfilled.17 During his tenure as prefect of the Seine, Baron Haussmann encouraged the building of affordable housing for workers in the central arrondissements, but contractors could make more money building apartments for the wealthy, and so this is what they did. High rents drove workers to cheaper accommodations in the banlieue. During the Second Empire, the sociologist and engineer Frédéric le Play wrote about the inadequacy of working-class housing. In the Third Republic, the “Solidarism” of Emile Durkheim sought, among other things, to

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improve workers’ housing. After 1871, this idea had advocates in the Paris City Council, including the militant socialist and former mechanic Jules Joffrin. Still, a great many Parisian workers continued to live in unhealthy garnis, sometimes as much as twenty persons to a room. In 1876, there were about 9,000 hôtels garnis with 142,000 residents in Paris; in 1900, there were 12,660 holding 210,000 persons, with especially dense living conditions in the working-class sections of the thirteenth arrondissement and the proletarian strongholds of Belleville and La Villette. Life in the working-class banlieue took on a character of its own. Suburban communes like Montrouge and Pantin were part of and yet separate from Paris. Montrouge is on the southern edge of Paris (today, south of the peripheral highway circling the city). Historically, it was the home of monasteries and quarries and of the stone that built much of the capital. In 1860, sections of Montrouge were annexed to the fourteenth arrondissement. Many workers, most of them unskilled, lived in Montrouge and Pantin, but worked in the city. Increasingly, chemical, metal, and textiles industries could be found in the banlieue, and so workers could both live and work in the same area. A state-of-the-art clothing factory employing 700 workers (mostly women) opened in Montrouge 1893. Pantin is in the northeast of Paris, just east of the nineteenth arrondissement. The

FIGURE 7.2  The Zone, c. 1900. Parisian poor on the urban margin. The bearded man is wearing wooden shoes (sabots) worn by some French until the twentieth century. Photo by Roger Viollet/Getty Images.

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Canal de l’Ourcq—commissioned by Napoleon in 1802 and opened to navigation in 1822—was a passageway for commerce and passed through the commune. Pantin’s population was under 5,000 in 1860, but after the annexation it grew to 30,000. A sign of residential wealth and standard of living was the amount and kind of food sold at neighborhood markets: Pantin, with a large population of unskilled and poorly paid laborers, consumed far more potatoes and vegetables than Puteaux in the western banlieue, whose population of skilled metal and other skilled workers ate relatively more meat and dairy products (Figure 7.2). Pantin and Montrouge became new working-class strongholds because of Haussmannization, and with predictable political results—like Belleville and La Villette, they were part of Paris’s Red Belt (i.e., favoring the political Left).

4 Entrepreneurialism Parisian entrepreneurs thrived in the early years of the Third Republic, investing money in businesses in the capital and overseas, though spending less on ventures in provincial France. At the same time, the 1880s and 1890s saw the rise of the first genuine Parisian labor movement, following the legalization of strikes (1864) and trade unions (1884). There was also a new promise of social protections from the government. Businessmen and entrepreneurs sought to downplay competition in favor of a united front against trade unions and radical political/social movements like “Syndicalism.” Parisian entrepreneurs could act together through the Paris Chamber of Commerce, which was first housed at the Hôtel de Ville and then at the Place de la Bourse. Ever since the Restoration, the Chamber had supported commercial schools, a board of tourism, and urban fairs. Parisian businessmen and entrepreneurs tried to act in concert during times of labor strife, while supporting arguments favoring laissez-faire and the free market. The idea of chacun chez soi, chacun pour soi (each on his own, to each his own) held sway among Parisian entrepreneurs in the years before the Great War. Parisian construction thrived after 1871, though there was a downturn in the 1880s. Stone and rubble stone remained the main building materials, while iron and steel were used in larger structures. A “workers’ church” (the Église Notre-Dame du Travail in the fourteenth arrondissement), finished in 1892, was made of iron. A provision of the building code of 1902 allowed for more stories to be added to new buildings, and so elevators became more common. Art Nouveau style was popular. The first decades of the Third Republic coincided with a Second Industrial Revolution that emphasized technology, chemical, and steel, compared with the textile and rail production of the First Industrial Revolution. These developments occurred in Paris as they did across much of the Atlantic World. At the same time, skilled workers were for the first time moving away from the crafting of luxury goods that had long been associated with the city.

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Automobile manufacturing was a new industry that “took off” in Paris after the turn of the century. Among the famous Parisian entrepreneurs of this period was the automobile industrialist Louis Renault (1877–1944). Born in Paris to a bourgeois family, his father had prospered in textile and button manufacturing. Renault’s two brothers, Marcel and Fernand, took over their father’s business, while Louis pursued an interest in mechanics and engineering. Louis built and successfully tested his first car in 1898 (sending it up the steep hill of Montmartre), and then the next year teamed with his brothers to open a manufacturing plant in the western suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt. The Renault automobile became a great success, making Paris an early leader in car manufacturing. In 1914, the Renault plant in Boulogne-Billancourt and the Dion-Bouton plant in suburban Puteaux each employed over 2,000 workers. Yet, economic progress in Paris and France was “uneven” compared with other parts of the Atlantic World. Renault was slow in taking up the mass production techniques that made Henry Ford and the United States a world leader in car manufacturing. Renault’s voitures were popular in France, but less competitive elsewhere. Louis Renault himself had a difficult and cantankerous personality. Later, he would be accused of collaborating with Germany during the Second World War and died in 1944 under mysterious circumstances while being held for trial.

CULTURE 1 Café sociability The Belle Époque was the “beautiful” era in Paris—beautiful for its art, music, design, and cultivation of leisure. Looking back, even the tense politics of the Boulanger and Dreyfus Affairs could not entirely wipe away the fun and frivolity that seemed to stamp this period. A setting that represented the Belle Époque and remains very much associated with the Paris of these years is the café. The Parisian café was, in fact and legend, a birthplace of both revolution and a modern form of leisure; an incubator of class consciousness and a vital place for social networking. Historically, Paris had an incredible number of cafés: approximately 3,000 in 1789; 4,500 by the late 1840s; 22,000 in 1870. A numerical peak may have been reached in 1885, with more than 40,000 cafés. A count in 1900 placed the number at more than 30,000. Even more remarkable, Paris had an extraordinarily high number of cafés per inhabitants—eleven for every 1,000 persons in 1900, compared, for instance, with London’s one café for every 1,000 persons. Naturally, cafés were not all the same. They catered to different clienteles and went by a bewildering variety of names: goguettes were cafés where workers sang; the gargott was a “greasy spoon”; bistro, boite, cabaret, brasserie, assommoir, bastingue were other monikers, each

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implying a certain variation. The café-concert became popular after 1880 (though after 1900 it was starting to lose ground to cinemas). There were cafés directed at regional populations; the Auvergnat café owner catering to a clientele speaking the same patois became a stereotype. Most lodging houses had cafés. Wine became the main libation after advances in the winemaking industry during the Second Empire, but beer, brandy, coffee, and absinthe were available, too. A quick lunch of bread and meat or soup was available for the working-class clientele. The café was a place to talk, laugh, read the newspaper, or write a novel. Aesthetically, cafés were lively, sometimes gaudy places adorned with zinc counters, mirrors, and basreliefs.18 Certain working-class trades frequented certain cafés, with rituals of proletarian camaraderie on display, sometimes acting as a deterrent to other potential classes of customers. Alcohol abuse could be a problem. Males dominated café life, both as owners and as customers, but women participated, too. During the Third Republic as before, cafés were regulated and policed, partly to control prostitution. At the same time, the café could be a place to take shelter from the authorities. There was an “etiquette,” an “intimate anonymity” to café sociability that served as protection from the outside. The Parisian café was a political place where class consciousness happened. In the 1870s, most café owners seemed to be moderate republicans, but there was a gradual shift to the political Right in the 1890s. In an atmosphere of labor strikes and heightened class consciousness before the Great War, talk of revolution could be heard in Parisian cafés.

2 Montmartre and greenspace Central to the spirit of the Belle Époque were the physical setting and sociability of Montmartre, a prominent neighborhood and hill on the northern edge of Paris. Another aspect of public life that marked Paris during the Belle Époque were the big and small public parks dotting the city. Montmartre’s artistic and bohemian reputation probably reached a peak during the Belle Époque. Montmartre had been annexed by the city in 1860 to become part of the eighteenth arrondissement. Le Chat Noir (1881) was the first cabaret to open in Montmartre. Some Parisians were aghast at the way Montmartre quickly became a “New Babylon,” but most accepted what it added to the city’s reputation as an incubator of the avant-garde. The artistes of Belle-Époque Montmartre became even more famous after they were gone. The artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s (1864–1901) short stature, taste for the picaresque, and painting talent made him stand out even in this colorful milieu. He moved to Montmartre in 1884, frequenting cafés and brothels, capturing the likenesses of their habitués; dancers and prostitutes were his favorites. The prolific artist was a great documenter of his time and place. One of the places Toulouse-Lautrec frequented was the Moulin-Rouge, located at

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the Place de Clichy, just down the hill from Montmartre. Built in 1889 on the site of an earlier famous dancehall and drawing upon the tradition of the café-concert, it was lavishly decorated in order to entice a wealthy clientele. The raucous “cancan” was revived at the Moulin-Rouge. Nearby, the popular singer and promoter Aristide Bruant set up another famous entertainment venue, the Lapin Agile. One of the world’s early wax museums (the Musée Grévin) went up in 1882 at the Boulevard Montmartre. “Impressionism”—a colorful style of painting we associate with the canvasses of Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, and Paul Cezanne—had roots in Paris and in the countryside near the capital. Monet (1840–1926), a native Parisian, was Impressionism’s most important practitioner and proponent. It took a while for the work of the Impressionists to be appreciated, but today the style is popular around the world. Among the well-known “révoltés” (new-style bohemians) and musicians who flocked to the haven of Montmartre were future famous artists Jean Renoir, Maurice Utrillo, Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, and Paul Cézanne. Writers were there, too: Guillaume Apollinaire, Gertrude Stein, and Max Jacob; and Erik Satie, the composer and musician. A favorite place to board was the Bateau-Lavoir (“wash-house boat”) on the Place Émile-Godeau. The spirit of Picasso’s Cubism was generated at the Bateau-Lavoir. Paul Verlaine (1844–96), originally from Metz, but a lover of Paris, frequented Montmartre and Montparnasse. He lived a difficult and passionate life, which came out in his relationships with other writers (including Baudelaire and Rimbaud) and in his poetry. Bourgeois and students, then tourists, ventured to Montmartre to soak up the ambience. Yet much of this had faded by 1914, and in the second half of the twentieth century artistes moved to other sections of Paris, while Montmartre became a tourist destination. During the Belle Époque, Montmartre was part of and yet distinct from Paris. A quality of separation was true, too, of the city’s parks. If Montmartre promised something risqué, the parks offered a small taste of the natural, and a respite from the daily hustle and bustle. Paris of the Belle Époque could boast a multitude of small, neighborhood parks and several large parks: the Bois de Boulogne on the western outskirts, the Bois de Vincennes in the southeast, the Buttes de Chaumont in the working-class northeast of the city, the Parc Montsouris and Luxembourg on the Left Bank, and the Parc Monceau on the Right Bank. Père Lachaise cemetery in the northeast was a kind of park, too.19 There were habitués of the parks and a culture, no less than at Montmartre. Mothers and children embraced green space. The big parks drew lovers on a stroll and the inevitable flâneurs. Noctambules were night-time flâneurs. The Grand-Guignol at Montmartre (created 1897) offered macabre drama. Artists set up easels at the Bois de Boulogne, which was also a place for physical activities: bicycling, boating, and cricket (adopted from the British). The Longchamp horse racing course was at Bois de Boulogne, and the park would develop a lively sex trade in the twentieth century.

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3 Expositions and Eiffel Tower The decades before the start of the Great War seemed in hindsight a moment of both spectacle and anxiety. Paris had recovered physically, if not emotionally, from the trauma of the Commune. The Métro made the city a model of transportation innovation. Paris was the artistic capital of the world and a mecca for tourists. The hosting of three World Expositions in this period seemed to confirm the city as Capital of the nineteenth century. The colonial exhibit of 1900 highlighting France’s “civilizing mission” in Africa, Asia, and Oceania also had the effect of asserting Paris’s place in the imperial world. At the same time, Germany’s rise to great power status created nervousness, and for some a score to be settled: the statue representing the city of Strasbourg (annexed with Alsace to Germany in 1871) at the Place de la Concorde was periodically draped in black to remind everyone of the loss. The enormous crowds and outpouring of grief that accompanied the funeral of the great writer and stalwart republican Victor Hugo in 1885 seemed to represent the passing of an old world that France and Paris had once dominated. Paris hosted World Expositions in 1878, 1889, and 1900. Each was bigger and attracted more visitors than the last. The 1878 Expo was held on the Left Bank’s Champ de Mars and adjacent Right Bank site of Chaillot and Trocadero. The Exposition attracted almost 16 million visitors and showed that Paris had recovered physically from 1871—a sign of the resiliency of the city. The Exposition of 1889 had a political ring to it since it occurred with the Centennial of the Revolution of 1789; the triumph of the Republic was explicit in the exhibits. The 1889 Expo attracted 32 million visitors and the 1900 Expo 48 million (the largest number until Osaka, Japan, in 1970). All three highlighted advances in technology and architecture. New devices and machines, soon to be for sale at the grands magasins, were on display: early versions of the telephone, elevator, and refrigerator in 1878; cameras, bicycles, and light-bulbs in 1900. The 1900 Expo showed off Parisian decorative arts and high culture—the Grand Palais and Petit Palais were opened on the Right Bank for these and other fine art displays—and the scientific accomplishments of Louis Pasteur and the physicists Marie and Pierre Curie. The imperial exhibits from Africa and Asia lent an air of exoticism. The ornate and wide Pont Alexandre III, built to honor the 1894 Franco-Russian defensive alliance, allowed visitors to easily cross the Seine to get from one venue to the other. The second modern Olympic Games (though a small affair compared to today) was held in conjunction with the 1900 Exposition. A fascination with iron architecture and modernist style was evident with the construction of the Eiffel Tower, which was initially intended as a temporary exhibit for the 1889 Exposition. The 300-meter iron structure was designed by a team led by Gustave Eiffel. Construction began in January 1887 and took just two years to finish. It was like nothing else on the Parisian horizon, and for this reason generated much opposition. But

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FIGURE 7.3  Eiffel Tower. The tower was constructed as part of the 1889 Centennial of the French Revolution with the expectation that it would come down afterward. But the tower proved so well-liked—eventually becoming a famous symbol of the city—that it stayed. © Casey Harison.

the tower received 12,000 visitors a day during the Expo (over 1,700 steps to the top!), and fans started to outnumber detractors. La Tour Eiffel stayed to become perhaps the most famous modern emblem of the city. During the Belle Époque, Paris, partly because of its World Expositions, became a tourist destination like never before (Figure 7.3).

4 Tourists and foreign artists Tourists and artists from around the world flocked to Paris during the Belle Époque. Some came because of the Expositions, some to sample the artistic life of Montmartre, others to take part in the pleasures of a city they had read about in the novels of Balzac or Hugo or had seen in the paintings

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FIGURE 7.4 Hôtel de Ville. Today, the mayor of Paris has an office here. The building and the square in front were enlarged in the nineteenth century. The square is officially the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville, but is commonly referred to as the Place de Grève. The Hôtel de Ville was burned during the Commune. © Casey Harison.

of the Impressionists. Paris already had a reputation as a universal city, and this was enhanced in the years before the Great War. Modern tourism began in the second half of the nineteenth century and Paris was key to that development. Haussmann had tourists in mind as he rebuilt the city in the 1850s and 1860s. City officials and business leaders now considered tourism an industry with the potential to generate a great deal of revenue—this would be even truer of the second half of the twentieth century. In fact, tourists were mostly directed to bourgeois Paris: the boulevards, grands magasins, monuments, museums, and quays along the Seine. Tourists might also venture to nearby locations like Versailles, Chartres, or Fontainebleau. They did not go to the industrial banlieue. This touristic itinerary has changed little since the late nineteenth century (Figure 7.4). Perhaps even more so than in the past, the “transnational” Paris of the Belle Époque was also a tremendous draw for artists, both men and women, from across the world. The work of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters like Monet, Pissarro, Seurat, and Caillebotte beckoned students and fellow artists. Some of the city’s most influential modern artists were

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foreigners living and working in Paris around the turn of the century. These were migrants or “expats,” not tourists. Many of them knew and lived close to each other in Montmartre or Montparnasse. Paris’s departmental prefect counted almost 6,000 foreign artists in the city in 1911: Spanish, Americans (North and South), British, Czech, Russian, Italian, Hungarian, Norwegian, Polish, and more. Private art academies employing established artists and instructing foreign students flourished. The Salon rules were altered in 1880 so that foreign artists could compete. The influential poster artist Théophile Steinlein came to Montmartre from Switzerland in 1881. The Mexican Diego Rivera spent almost a decade in Paris after 1900. The Japanese artist Kuroda Seiki was in Paris before returning to Tokyo in 1893. There were many from the United States, among them Mary Cassatt, who spent years working with Edgar Degas, becoming an accomplished Impressionist in her own right and a permanent resident of the city. Not everyone headed to Montmartre. In the 1890s, the Norwegian Edvard Munch and the Czech Emil Fill lived in Left Bank Montparnasse, which eventually surpassed Montmartre as the city’s artistic hub. The most famous and influential of the foreign artists was the Spaniard Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), who lived in Montmartre and Montparnasse off and on between 1900 and 1914. Picasso was at the Bateau-Lavoir and a habitué of the Lapin Agile when he and Georges Braque developed the new artistic style of Cubism. Like others in the artists’ colony—few of whom in fact would go on to achieve prominence—Picasso was absorbed into Paris. Today, the Picasso Museum (opened in the Marais in 1985) is one of the few in Paris devoted entirely to the work of a single artist.20

Conclusion In many ways, the Paris we are familiar with today emerged in the two decades before the turn of the twentieth century. Familiar structures like the Eiffel Tower and Sacré-Coeur Basilica were built or begun during these years, and the famous artists’ enclave at Montmartre developed. Some of the wellknown department stores that still cater to Parisian consumers and tourists appeared on the grand boulevards. World Expositions hosted by Paris in 1878, 1889, and 1900 proclaimed the prominence of the city and were landmarks in the touristic evolution. Other characteristic, modern features of the city took shape during these years. One was the politicization or factionalizing of the population, and which during these years often mobilized for or against ideas or personalities: Boulanger and Dreyfus in the 1880s and 1890s are the most famous affaires of the era. As had been the case with political and social movements since 1789, Parisian politics of the Belle Époque seemed to be a hint of the future—here, the contest between socialism and fascism of the twentieth century. A modern form of terrorism using new technology (dynamite) and striking at new targets (civilians) in order to sew general

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anxiety emerged in Paris. There was a worrisome precociousness to Parisian politics in the last third of the nineteenth century. Paris’s population swelled before 1900 with immigrants arriving mostly from rural France, but also from Southern and Eastern Europe. This was a sign of things to come. The immigrants overwhelmingly belonged to the working class, and they mostly worked jobs in suburban industries or at sewing machines (at home or in factories), as servants in the homes of the wealthy or as servers in restaurants and cafes. Women’s work was a significant and growing part of the Parisian economy. As in the twentieth century, the integration of rural and foreign-born populations was not easily achieved and took time. Artists flocked to Paris, too, especially to sections of the city like Montmartre and then Montparnasse. Paris not only generated avant-garde political ideas, but also avant-garde art. The artistic products of this period—including the famous paintings of the Impressionists—are still among the most valued and popular in the world today.

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8 Paris from the Belle Époque to the Great War

Chronology 1900

First Métro line opens—Paris World Exposition

1901

Large strike of subway workers

1902

Méliès film Trip to the Moon

1903

First Tour de France bicycle race begins and ends in Paris

1905

Creation of French Socialist Party (SFIO)

1910

Seine River floods—Velodrome opens

1912

Bonnot Gang subdued—Paris-Madrid air race

1913

Nijinsky’s “Rite of Spring”

1914

Assassination of Jaurès—start of Great War and Battle of Marne—Union Sacrée government

Introduction Chronologically, the Belle Époque stretched from about 1890 to the start of the Great War in 1914. Given the horrors of that war and the peril in which it placed Paris, especially near the beginning, the sense of perpetual peace and prosperity of the Belle Époque seems, in hindsight, illusory. The “calm before the storm” is one way to think about Paris during the Belle Époque. Another way is the rejection of accepted norms in art and thinking with the start of the new century. Paris grew as a world cultural center of avant-garde artistic experimentation. The twentieth century kicked

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off with yet another successful World Exposition. Artists migrated from all corners to take part in Paris’s creative ferment—which itself migrated from Right Bank Montmartre to Left Bank Montparnasse. During these years, film, as both a new art form and eventually a global commercial enterprise, began with Parisian filmmakers like Georges Méliès and the film company Pathé. Film and other new industries, including automobile manufacturing and chemical industries, planted themselves in the banlieue, which became an ever more dynamic suburban zone, drawing workers—Parisian, French, and foreign—to places like La Villette and Billancourt that had hardly been considered part of Paris before 1900. Parisian thinkers, too, turned away from the norm: the early sociologists Gustave Le Bon and Emile Durkheim argued against the existence of innate human rationality, which the horrors of the battlefields of the Great War would soon seem to confirm. By the start of the Belle Époque, the Third Republic had been in existence for a full generation, years longer than its predecessors (First Republic, 1792–99; Second Republic, 1848–51). The Republic seemed to have triumphed through one crisis after another, including the seemingly endless Dreyfus Affair, as well as the rise of far Right (Action française) and far Left (Revolutionary Syndicalism) challengers. The labor movement and its contest against capital continued during the Belle Époque, with strikes in one industry or another seeming to happen almost every day in Paris. Nineteen-aught-five was a momentous year that saw the creation of the French Socialist Party and the passage of laws on “laïcité” guaranteeing separation of church and state in France. International contests among France, Britain, and Germany over imperial interests, especially in Africa, raised the prospect of a larger conflict. International crises in French-controlled Morocco, combined with the ongoing desire by many French for révanche, seemed to make war with Germany only a matter of the next provocation. The European alliance system that pitted France and Russia, and with the Entente of 1904, Britain, against Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy foretold a great struggle that might redraw the map of Europe. And yet any war, because of the huge size of European armies made even more lethal with the terrible new military technology at their disposal, was—surely—unthinkable. Jean Jaurès, a thoughtful and humane politician, spoke against war for years, but was assassinated in Paris in July 1914. This was an ominous foretelling of the carnage that was soon to take place disturbingly close to Paris itself.

POLITICS 1 Far Right Paris and Vienna were two important settings for the birth of the modern political Far Right at the end of the nineteenth century. The Far Right was characterized by a rejection of the Enlightenment—essentially, the notion

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FIGURE 8.1 Sacré-Coeur Basilica. A monument to France’s “Terrible Year” of 1870–71, which saw defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the Civil War of the Commune of 1871. The church is located at the top of the hill of Montmartre. © Casey Harison.

that all persons are born free and equal—and by adherence to racist, ethnocentric, xenophobic, and authoritarian ideas. The Far Right adopted anti-Semitism and was often drawn to charismatic leaders. In Paris, the Boulanger Affair of the late 1880s and the Dreyfus Affair after 1894 both contributed to the birth of the modern Far Right. In hindsight, we can see that both were proto-fascist movements. In Paris, the origins of the Far Right were partly connected to a longstanding opposition to the Republic and the democratic legacies of the French Revolution. Some on the Right wanted to restore the place of the Catholic Church in society; some looked to the monarchist tradition— usually the Bourbons—to provide a “legitimate” political ruler. But by the Belle Époque monarchical sentiments were beginning to fade, at least to the degree that they represented a viable form of politics. Rather, conservatives

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or reactionaries sought to create new political goals, parties, and leaders that would take France away from both the traditional monarchist and more recent republican traditions (Figure 8.1). Two figures who helped lay the intellectual groundwork for the modern Far Right in Paris were Maurice Barrès and Édouard Drumont. Barrès (1862– 1923) was born outside of Paris but made his literary and political career in the capital. He wrote about both a “cult of the self” and (perhaps a contradiction) “nationalism” (a term he may have coined). Barrès supported the rightist group Action française and was a promoter of the cult of Joan of Arc, the fifteenthcentury French heroine who became a symbol of the political Right in France during the Belle Époque. Drumont (1844–1917) was a native Parisian and one of the creators of modern anti-Semitism (a term he coined). A writer and prominent anti-Dreyfusard, Drumont’s anti-Semitism drew from traditional Catholicism and opposition to capitalism. Drumont was also a racist who connected his beliefs to pseudo-scientific and social-Darwinist ideas. The most important of the new rightist movements was Action française, which was born in the turmoil of the Dreyfus Affair. One of the founders of the group was Charles Maurras (1868–1952), who advocated a return of the monarchy, mostly as an authoritarian alternative to the democratic republic. Action française was active in Paris, publishing a newspaper of the same name and sponsoring a youth group—the Camelots du Roi—that engaged in street battles and intimidated opponents at the universities, Leftist newspapers, and political offices. Action française was also anti-Semitic. The organization would have a long life and undergo many permutations in the twentieth century. In future decades, it would support the rise of fascism during the build-up to the Second World War and would endorse France’s Vichy regime. After many years in Parisian politics, Maurras went to prison for collaboration during the German Occupation of the Second World War. Paris was a birthplace of modern political opposites: The Enlightenment and French Revolution of the eighteenth century and, during the Belle Époque, proto-fascism.

2 Political Left The modern political spectrum, from Right to Left, was represented in Paris’s history. Indeed, Paris is arguably a birthplace of two of the most important modern political movements: socialism and fascism. Jules Guesde (1845–1922) was born in Paris and was a founder of the first modern French worker’s party—the Parti Ouvrier (1880). In most ways, Guesde was an orthodox Marxist, though he later joined with bourgeois and Rightist political parties in a unified government during the Great War. Gustave Hervé (1871–1944) was born in Brest, but lived most of his life in Paris, where he died. Hervé was a socialist, but of a proto-totalitarian form that later would have an influence on the Italian fascist Mussolini. Hervé was an extremist. Georges Sorel (1847–1922) was born outside of Paris but spent

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most of his life in the capital after moving there in the 1860s. He was trained as an engineer, but after retiring from the municipal Department of Public Works devoted himself to new ideas. Sorel’s most famous work is Reflections on Violence (1908), which came about partly in response to the move toward reformism by the CGT following a series of strikes in 1906. Theoretically, the book straddled the line between anarchism and socialism. It had as much to say about “spirit” as it did about tactics. Sorel glorified and prophesized the general strike—a revolutionary event during which all workers, stopping their labor and coordinating their actions, would bring society to a standstill. For Sorel, writing about the “myth” of the general strike would act as a catalyst for revolution. His worldview was in some ways anti-scientific and, in its forecast of the need for violence and dictatorship, anti-democratic— perhaps a hint from Paris of the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. More conventional and influential than Sorel was Jean Jaurès. Jaurès was from Southern France, where he was raised in a bourgeois family. He went to Paris as a boy to attend the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and from there the École Normale Supérieure, where he was a student in philosophy alongside Henri Bergson and Emile Durkheim. Returning home to teach, Jaurès was radicalized by local labor strife and by reading Marx. A powerful writer and public speaker, Jaurès was elected as a representative to the legislature from his southern district. Moving toward socialism and internationalism, in 1889, he helped found the Second International (the successor to Marx and Bakunin’s IWA). But unlike Sorel or others on the Far Left, Jaurès was a democratic socialist, and temperamentally a moderate for whom progress should occur through political debate and institutional change rather than revolution. He was one of the founders in 1905 of the French Socialist Party and its influential newspaper, L’Humanité (which later became the organ of the French Communist Party). Jaurès was also an accomplished historian, serving as editor and contributor to the multi-volume Socialist History (1900–03). As head of the Socialist Party, Jaurès was not only a tireless advocate for the working class, but (unlike the Marxists) also sympathetic to the petit bourgeoisie and peasants. He was a vehement Dreyfusard, an anti-militarist opposed to laws on conscription, and deeply worried about the alliance system that would eventually take Europe into war in 1914. In late July 1914, just before the start of the war, Jaurès was assassinated by a young French nationalist. Jaurès instantly became a martyr for the anti-war Left; he is revered in Paris and elsewhere through today.

3 Commemorating the past, celebrating the Republic Politically, the years after the end of the Commune saw Paris and France grapple with the fate of the Third Republic, which had been born in the defeat to Germany and the civil war of the année terrible. Would the Republic

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survive or be replaced by another form of government? There was a Bourbon heir, the Comte de Chambord, and monarchism still had supporters, but the obstinacy of Chambord on a symbolic issue—he insisted that the white Bourbon flag replace the tricolor national flag—helped doom the monarchist cause. A contest of wills between the monarchist-leaning president (the former General Patrice de MacMahon) and legislative republicans led to elections in 1877 that returned a clear republican majority. The Third Republic had been confirmed. It would be governed through a bicameral legislature: National Assembly and Senate. The parliamentary Republic would survive severe tests in the coming years, including the Boulanger and Dreyfus Affairs, a financial debacle over financing of a Panama canal, and the Great War. The three French republics (1792, 1848, and 1870) all had been born in Paris, and now Paris would take the lead in institutionalizing the republic politically, symbolically, and intellectually. Educational reforms emanating from the capital and imposed across the country helped turn “peasants into Frenchmen” and most French into republicans.1 The centennial of 1789 provided the opportunity for the capital to celebrate both the Revolution and the Republic. The Paris City Council helped organize Centennial festivities that included hosting a World Exposition and building the Eiffel Tower.

FIGURE 8.2 Plaque to the Communards killed at Père Lachaise Cemetery. ­Beginning in the 1880s, there were annual marches to Père Lachaise by persons seeking to keep the memory of the event alive. © Casey Harison.

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Preparations began as commemorations of the Commune were also becoming annual affairs—part of a “politics of anniversary remembrance” that was at the same time a battle over the meaning of the Republic. The first commemorations of “1871” were small affairs during which amnestied Communards marched to Père Lachaise to lay flowers at the Wall of the Federals, where the last Communards had been shot. But by 1889, the annual marches—one in March signifying the start of the Commune and another in May signifying its end—had become large public events. The May commemoration especially was an important political day, and one for which a tradition had taken root. On the day of the trek, the schedule of events and a map of the route were printed in newspapers. At Père Lachaise— now the de facto pantheon for Paris’s revolutionary class—crowds walked respectfully to the Wall of the Federals and listened to speakers describe the heroism of the Communards. The day was punctuated with the singing of revolutionary songs, banquet suppers, and more speeches. The crowds for these pilgrimages could be large (tens of thousands by the early 1900s) and boisterous. Police were always present (Figure 8.2). Of course, not everyone supported the Republic or celebrated 1871. In 1914 and after, the Rightist group Action française directly challenged the Communard commemoration by scheduling a simultaneous celebration for its nationalist icon, Joan of Arc. Another way that the Revolution and the Republic were institutionalized was through the founding of a chair of French Revolutionary Studies at Paris’s Sorbonne University. The historian Alphonse Aulard (1849–1928) was appointed in 1885, the first in a line of eminent scholars to fill the seat. A champion of Danton over Robespierre, Aulard emphasized the moderate and nation-building tendencies of the Revolution—an interpretation that fit nicely with the direction the Third Republic was taking during the Belle Époque.

4 Paris on the eve of the Great War The mood in Paris before the start of the Great War in August 1914 was anxious but resolute. The build-up to war against Germany had been long in the making. Members of the political Left, including Louise Michel and Gustave Hervé, had been engaged in an anti-militarism campaign for years. The Boulanger and Dreyfus Affairs, and the rise of Rightist groups like Action française and the League of Patriots, had been fueled in part by a desire for révanche against Germany. On major holidays, the statue representing Strasbourg at the Place de la Concorde—that city had been annexed to Germany in 1871—was draped in black as a reminder of the loss of the territories of Alsace and Lorraine Should war erupt. Parisians, like most Europeans, thought it would be brief. Militarily, Paris was prepared in 1914, though only after many years during which the size of the national army and the obligation of males to serve were hotly debated. Before 1914, the political Left, particularly

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the new Socialist Party, adopted a stance of anti-militarism. This meant opposition to conscription, a call to reduce the number of years served by soldiers, a shift from military to social spending, a desire to move away from entangling alliances, and support for international efforts at promoting peace. Conscription, like the building of huge warships and lethal battlefield weapons, was one element of the pre-war arms race; after Germany enlarged her army in 1913, France did the same, passing a law that required soldiers to serve three years rather than two. There were periodic anti-war demonstrations in the capital, often tied to issues related to the working class, and led by politicians and political parties on the Left. Jean Jaurès was the most eloquent and persistent of the anti-war politicians. Jaurès’s assassination by a French nationalist in July 1914 was a blow to the cause of peace and, seemingly, a sign that a course for confrontation had now been set. Germany declared war on France on August 3. As the German offensive moved rapidly through neutral Belgium and across northern France, the capital’s position became precarious. In September 1914, at the momentous Battle of the Marne, Parisian taxis would be mobilized to help save the day.

SOCIETY 1 Workers and clerks Like any big city, Paris during the Belle Époque required a large workingclass population. And like other big cities of the Atlantic World, many workers were shifting from manual or craft labor to office jobs. Near the turn of the twentieth century, workers made up about 60 percent of Paris’s population.2 To give a few examples, in 1911, there were 20,000 furniture makers; 17,000 shoemakers; 9,000 tanners; 8,000 jewelers; and 60,000 construction workers. These numbers had changed little since the 1860s (though there was a decrease in construction workers, who had flooded the city during Haussmannization). Workers lived mostly in the banlieue and in districts like Belleville. Poverty characterized a portion of the working class, especially the unskilled, though there were signs of improvement in health compared with the past. Unemployment and underemployment remained problems. Wages improved for municipal workers because of oversight coming from the city council. However, the wages of craft workers declined during the Belle Époque due to market forces that put their products in competition with those of lower wage workers elsewhere in Europe and the world. A study from 1907 found that unskilled Parisians spent about 80 percent of their budget on food and skilled workers 65 percent. A lack of kitchens in small apartments meant workers took their meals at neighborhood cafés. The typical workingclass meal had a certain structure: appetizer (usually soup), entrée (with meat and vegetable dishes), and dessert. There was also an informal take-out meal (cuisine à emporter) that was becoming more widespread, especially among

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young workers. Most workers spent a lot of time walking to and from the job, and so there had to be access to “street food.” In 1900, Paris had about 1,500 restaurants, 2,000 cafés, and 9,000 marchands de vin (or mastuoguets), which served both food and drink. The prix fixe meal, still common today, was mostly for bourgeois and petit bourgeois customers. Parisian men drank a lot of alcohol. Even with the differences in eating habits among the social classes, by 1900, there was improvement in the working-class diet, with more calories consumed, especially carbohydrates like bread and pasta. Male Parisian workers had greater access to calories than female workers (roughly 1,250– 1,600 versus 850–1,050). Judging by the height of military recruits, Parisian youth in 1900 were probably in better health than youth from rural France.3 The biggest health issues in working-class neighborhoods before the Great War had to do with elevated rates of tuberculosis and infant mortality. Between 1887 and 1895, the city opened twenty-four health clinics in working-class neighborhoods to help improve health care, yet high infant mortality persisted. Even though the deeply unhealthy urban landscape of the first half of the nineteenth century had improved, there was still a wide discrepancy in quality of life between upper and lower classes. There was an increase in the mass production of goods and the opening of new department stores—including the Magasin Dufayel, which targeted the working class—yet compared with the bourgeoise, few workers, skilled or unskilled, fully joined the “consumer revolution” taking place at the turn of the century. The first îlots insalubres (unsanitary neighborhoods) were designated by municipal authorities before 1914. Employés were clerks with jobs in business or government offices. During the Belle Époque, there were more clerks in Paris than ever. The white-collar sector grew from approximately 125,000 persons in 1866 to over 350,000 in 1911. The greatest increase in this sector was among women, who made up about 15 percent of the white-collar work force in 1866 and about one-third in 1911.4 White-collar workers generally had better health and housing than working-class Parisians, and though it is hard to measure, almost certainly higher expectations for the future. Female clerks earned better wages than female workers. The urban geography of clerks changed, from living and working mostly in the central districts of the Right Bank to distributed across virtually all arrondissements on the eve of the Great War. Some clerks were civil servants (fonctionnaires) who had talent beyond the office desk: the customs clerk (douanier) Henri Rousseau (1844–1910) painted exotic canvasses in a naïve style in his spare time. Near the turn of the century, Douanier Rousseau’s secret talent was discovered, bringing him fame late in his life.

2 Foreigners Émigrés (persons moving permanently and changing their citizenship) and ex-patriates or “expats” (persons living away from home, but not changing

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citizenship) had long found Paris a hospitable destination. This was certainly the case during the Belle Époque. Paris was permanent or temporary home to a tremendous variety of foreign-born: East European Jews working in the clothing industry, Italian and Portuguese stonemasons repairing streets and building apartments, and American and British expats trying to become artists. By the turn of the century, Russians had lived in Paris as émigrés or expats for many years. Some were aristocrats, some ordinary workers, and others belonged to the intelligentsia or were self-proclaimed revolutionaries fleeing the autocracy. Indeed by 1900, Paris may have been Europe’s “revolution central” for Russian expats opposed to the tsarist regime back home. Among them was the Social Democrat Boris Krichevsky, an economist engaged in an intellectual contest with other Russian expats about the question of Russia’s readiness for revolution, including the Marxist Vladimir Lenin. Another Russian expat and long-time critic of capitalism was Maksim Kovalevsky, who had been raised in Moscow’s upper class before fleeing late in the nineteenth century. Kovalevsky established a Russian School of Social Sciences in Paris where Lenin taught for a while. One of the best-known Russian émigrés in Paris was Charles Rappoport. A member of the terrorist group People’s Will that assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881, Rappoport was in Paris by the late 1880s, becoming a French citizen in 1899. Writing under the pseudonym “Ossip,” Rappoport was a revolutionary, initially a colleague of the French Marxist leader Jules Guesde, and then in 1905 a founding member of the French Socialist Party (SFIO). Later, he would join the French Communist Party (PCF). The Russian ex-patriate intelligentsia in Paris tended to base their assessments about the prospects for revolution in Russia on the history of revolution in Paris. Among these was Lenin, who was in Paris from 1909 to 1912. Lenin was a diligent student of French revolutions and Paris’s insurrectionary history, particularly the Commune of 1871. As much as anyone, Lenin insisted on the continued relevance and practical lessons of 1871. He incorporated these into State and Revolution (1917), one of the landmark documents of the twentieth century. While in Paris, Lenin met a colleague, Inessa Armand (with whom he may have had an affair), a native Parisian who would be in Russia at the time of the 1917 revolution. Paris, which had generated many a revolution of her own in the past, now was a breeding ground for revolution abroad.

3 Women’s lives The lives of Parisian women, many of them poor and arriving from the provinces, took myriad forms during the Belle Époque, generating images and individual stories that are still with us in history books, literature, and film. “Midinettes” were young female garment workers in factories, typically fresh from the provinces, looking for something new and perhaps a

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match with a well-off young man. In this sense, the midinette was the “granddaughter” of the grisette of the 1830s. The term midinette referred to the lunch hour stroll when young workers hoped to make the right acquaintance. To maintain a fashionably small waistline, midinettes kept themselves notoriously underfed. Like the grisette, the midinette was the object of much popular fascination of the day.5 The Parisian brasserie was the casual restaurant serving workers and clerks. Brasseries à femmes of the Belle Époque were taverns where a form of prostitution—legal, though highly regulated—occurred. Most brasseries à femmes were located in the central districts of the Right Bank and in the Latin Quarter of the Left Bank. Patrons were served beer by barmaids, mostly young women and often recent migrants from rural France, known as verseuses. They wore short skirts, sometimes with an exotic flair—posing as a Spanish or Scottish peasant, for instance. The verseuse would sit at the table of the patron, chat, and encourage him to drink. The two might end up at a nearby hôtel de passe with which the manager of the brasserie had a financial arrangement, or there could be a “Cave of Venus” (a room with a bed) in the back. Most clients were students, clerks, or artists. The women received meals from the owner but had to pay a fee to work. Over time, verseuses could build up a clientele and earn a decent living.6 Many young women moved to Paris to work as servants in the homes of middle- or upper-middle class families. This was true of female Bretons, arriving in the capital in great numbers from Western France. The Bretons, as much or more than other migrant groups, were the subject of demeaning stereotypes. “Bécassine” was a cartoon character that debuted in 1905 in the girls’ magazine La Semaine de Suzette. Bécassine was the unflattering stereotype of a Breton maid: dressed in traditional garb of regional cap and skirt, she was a “blockhead … (d)ull-witted, but sweet,” and from illiterate peasant or village stock. Negative labels were applied to male Breton migrants, too, and proved difficult to shake.7 Upon arriving in still rural Montparnasse with her bourgeois family in 1881, the fate of the artist Camille Claudel (1864–1943) was much different from the Bécassines. Born in the northern department of Aisne to a bourgeois family, and the older sister of Paul Claudel, who would become a famous poet and diplomat, she was a sensitive child, who as an adult became an accomplished sculptor. Claudel worked in the Paris studio of the famous sculptor Auguste Rodin, with whom she had a long relationship. Unfortunately, signs of mental instability began to appear in her mid-twenties. Earlier in the century, women demonstrating mental instability had sometimes been treated through the “family life” method pioneered by Marie Rivet. But Claudel spent the last thirty years of her life institutionalized. Little appreciated at the time, since her death Claudel’s art has been recognized as part of the avant-garde spirit of the Parisian Belle Époque. A national museum devoted to her work finally opened near Paris in 2017.

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4 Wealthy western Paris Paris had almost 3 million residents at the start of the Great War. The working-class poor lived mostly in the old eastern faubourgs or the northern banlieue, while wealthy residents found the western districts of Paris enticing; this pattern had been in place since the eighteenth century and still mostly holds. By the Belle Époque, the eighth and seventeenth arrondissements were home to many from the upper bourgeoisie, the descendants of noble families, diplomats, politicians, and the business and financial elite. Residences were large and lavishly furnished. The area was not physically segregated from the rest of Paris, yet the distinctions in social standing and

FIGURE 8.3  Arc de Trimomphe. A famous symbol representing Napoleonic military and political power. When it was completed in 1836, the arch was situated at the western edge of Paris. Today, one can climb stairs to the top for an impressive view of the Champs-Élysées, which extends to the east. © Casey Harison.

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quality of life were sharp. The 8th was the most densely populated Parisian arrondissement by the 1890s. Western Paris was a relatively new part of the city compared with the center, eastern districts, and the Left Bank districts near the river. The Champs-Élysées is the broad avenue running east-west that is the main thoroughfare in western Paris, and it was not laid out until the late seventeenth century. The famous traffic circle on the western edge (L’Étoile) was done at the end of the eighteenth century, and then in 1806 construction began there on Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe. After the Arc was completed in 1836, it would become one of the most familiar emblems of the capital. During Haussmann’s era, the Champs-Élysées would attract restaurants, cafés, and dancehalls. Its gas lighting made it a premier entertainment and shopping district (as it remains through the present). Luxurious mansions were built on both sides of the avenue. By 1900, residences in this area were the first in the city to have hot and cold running water. Because the Champs-Élysées is so wide, it can host parades and large crowds for national celebrations like Bastille Day, the return of Napoleon’s body in 1840, the end of the Great War in 1919, and the Liberation from German occupation in 1944 (Figure 8.3). The Parc Monceau in the western eighth arrondissement was originally begun by the duc d’Orléans in the eighteenth century and was developed as a public park by Napoleon III’s park engineer, Alphonse Alphand, during the Second Empire. Rather than the formal French style of park (like Luxembourg on the Left Bank), Alphand refurbished Monceau in the popular English style of meandering pathways adorned with statues of famous figures (Guy de Maupassant and Frédéric Chopin, for instance) set out here-and-there to surprise and delight the stroller. Wealthy neighbors used the Parc for a break or to send children out for air, perhaps supervised by a Breton servant, and maybe unaware that Communards had been summarily executed there in May 1871.

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aris has long been associated with pleasure. This was its reputation among both Parisians and visitors. Yet pleasure and entertainment could be segregated by social class and physical space. At the upper end were the balls and salons hosted by nobility, Bourbon and Orléans kings, and Bonaparte emperors. At the other end of the social spectrum—that of “the people”—were the popular theaters, dancehalls, cabarets, caféconcerts, and streets. This was the Other Paris, the place where society

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could be, as briefly during Carnival season, turned upside down. During the Medieval and Early Modern eras, this was also the world of the Cour des Miracles (court of miracles) inhabited by beggars who faked infirmities for alms, but whose facilities “miraculously” returned once they were back in their own neighborhoods. It was the domain of street entertainment and performers: charlatans, mountebanks, and saltimbanques; of the picturesque, but untranslatable gueux, argotiers, rifodés, and coquillards.8 On Sainte-Cathérine Day in November, unmarried women donned colorful hats to have a fun time. One of the best-known of Parisian popular entertainments is the dance called the “cancan”—the boisterous, devil-may-care, slightly risqué highkicking routine performed by women in dancehalls in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The cancan was one of many dances of the people. The cancan probably began in 1832 at the Bal Chicard, a dancehall on the Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the Les Halles district. The dance may have derived from another, the chahut (which itself probably came from the Spanish cachucha). The cancan quickly grew popular, so that by the mid1830s tens of thousands of Parisians were attending the dancehalls where it was performed. Well-known personalities of the day like “Queen” Pomaré and Céleste Mogador perfected the high kick. Bourgeois sensibilities were (temporarily) disturbed, and so in the 1840s the authorities banned the dance. But the fun could not be contained, and by the Second Empire the cancan was back, along with other new dance fads, most of them with names drawn from seemingly exotic Eastern Europe: the hongroise, the russe, the varsovianna, and the polka. A popular venue for the cancan was the Bal Mabille on the Champs-Élysées. At first, the Bal Mabille was a place for the working classes, but over time it attracted a wealthier clientele. It was an ostentatious space with extravagant fixtures, including palm trees made of zinc and gardens with gas lighting. There were dancers in wild costumes and an orchestra. The music filling the room might be that of Jacques Offenbach (1819–90), the composer of light operettas like Orpheus in the Underworld (1858). Offenbach was musical director of the Comédie-Française before opening his own theater in the mid-1850s. His most successful years were during the Second Empire. Even today, we associate Offenbach’s name with the cancan and the frivolity or decadence of the Second Empire. The Bal Mabille closed in 1875, as the cancan itself temporarily faded. But the dance returned near the end of the century to the new popular entertainment quarters of Montmartre and Pigalle. The fun, the athletic high kick of the dancing women now found a home at dancehalls like the Moulin Rouge, Grille d’Égout, and Rigolboche. Toulouse-Lautrec captured the energy and fun of the cancan dancers in his colorful paintings.

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ECONOMY 1 Organization of labor During the Belle Époque, labor in Paris was more organized than it had been since the abolition of the guilds during the French Revolution. “Organized” in the late nineteenth century implied the existence of syndicats (trade unions), legal since 1884. By 1900, there were 681 syndicats in Paris with over 52,000 members (compared with 120 trade unions and 9,400 members in 1884), many of them attached to nationwide federations. The French labor movement at the turn of the century was less advanced than in Britain or Germany, but nonetheless better prepared to stand its ground against capital and better able than before to sway the government. The organization of labor in Paris contributed to the emergence of a national program of social welfare around the turn of the century. The actual process of work in Paris, especially factory work, likewise was organized in ways it had not been before. “Taylorism” was assembly line production, first introduced in the United States, that spread across the world, including Paris, after 1900. For some factory owners, as for some politicians, Taylorism was also a way to discipline labor, particularly given the long history of working-class rebellion in Paris. Automobile plants in the suburbs adopted assembly line production. In fact, Taylorism did not really discipline the workers, who continued to pursue their collective interests through strikes. The suburban Paris automobile industry saw many strikes and spontaneous demonstrations in the early years of the new century, most of them having to do with control of workspace and production. Here is one example from the small carmaker La Minerve in the suburb of Billancourt: a strike happened in March 1904 following a long period of simmering resentment by workers over the “arrogance” of a foreman. When the latter fired a worker, there was a “riot.” Workers, singing revolutionary songs, went to the owner to demand that the foreman be fired.9 The police were called to put down the demonstration. In Parisian industries, where Taylorist methods were used, workers often resisted, but as in this case the authorities sided with the boss. Parisian service workers mobilized for “direct action,” too. Food workers created a union, joined a national federation in 1902, and then went on strike in 1903 and again in 1907 over pay and other issues. Their strikes failed because employers quickly hired replacement workers. However, a strike in 1913 was more successful. The way in which Parisian workers organized at the turn of the century was yet another answer to the Social Question. Compared to the past, politicians now were more likely to respond positively to the demands of workers. Labor reforms passed by the French legislature between 1906 and 1911 saw workers win a guaranteed day of rest during the week, ten-hour

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workday, the right to a pension, compensation for on-the-job accidents, and a renewed commitment by the state to end exploitative subcontracting. Problems remained: for instance, the law on accident insurance did not require that employers purchase it, nor were all workers included. Still, the new set of guarantees was the beginning of a modern system of social welfare, and thus an improvement in working and living conditions for Parisian workers.

2 Industrial banlieue Paris endured stretches of economic malaise before the Great War. Pockets of poverty (îlots insalubres) were identified for assistance in 1906 and 1919. Yet overall economic production in the capital ramped up around 1890 and remained vibrant through the early 1900s. During these years, industry especially developed at a tremendous rate in the banlieue, where the Parisian working class grew and transformed. Paris was one of the world’s financial centers in 1900, with bankers endorsing ventures across the French Empire in Africa and Asia, as well as projects in Russian and Ottoman territories. While Parisian bankers were less willing to spend money in France itself, a handful of entrepreneurs worked with the government to expand industry in the Parisian suburbs. The number of factories in the banlieue employing more than 500 workers more than doubled between the 1890s and early 1900s. Thriving banlieue industries included gas, petroleum, electricity, chemicals, airplane, and automobile manufacturing. There were hundreds of automobile-related firms in the Paris suburbs before 1914, along with another new industry: most of France’s film production companies. Transportation across Paris modernized with the introduction of the automobile. There were still about 80,000 horses used for transportation in Paris in 1880, but that number declined to 55,000 by 1912. There were 10,000 horse-drawn fiacres (cabs) in 1896, but by 1922 there were none. Paris was a major producer of automobiles before the Great War. Renault grew from making six cars in 1898 to almost 5,000 in 1913. Taxis replaced fiacres after 1900. Busses arrived, too, the first in 1906 taking thirty passengers from Montparnasse to Saint-Germain. By 1937, Paris had 4,000 busses on dozens of lines crisscrossing the city. And Montmartre and Belleville had funiculars to haul passengers up steep hills. Yet, automobile production in Paris and France was “uneven” compared with Germany, Great Britain, and the United States. There was mass production of cars in Paris, but not on the scale of the Ford plants in Detroit. Paris and France essentially had a “mixed” economy. As prices declined, the crafting of luxury goods nonetheless continued to play an important role in the economy. Even the new suburbs remained tied to an older, traditional system of producing comestibles for the Parisian market. As they had for

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centuries, peaches came to Paris from nearby Montreuil, asparagus from Argenteuil, and peas from Clamart.10 The areas that saw the greatest industrial expansion during the Belle Époque were the northern, northeastern, southwestern, and southeastern banlieue (Map 3). The population of Saint-Denis in the north grew from 16,000 to 72,000 between 1860 and 1914. Overall, the city’s workingclass population expanded more than 20 percent in these years to about 648,000 persons. The population of the banlieue tripled between the suburban annexation of 1860 and the start of the Great War. Many workers arrived from Belgium and northern departments. Railroads connected the banlieue not only with the rest of the country but also with

MAP 3  Paris and its suburbs, c. 1900.

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other suburbs: an electric tram completed in 1900 joined Boulogne in the west with the Porte de Vincennes in the southeast. Workers now used busses to get from homes in one section of the suburbs to jobs in another. As modern industry expanded and the suburbs grew, banlieusards were proletarianized, partly through ongoing de-skilling and partly through a rise in class consciousness. The Parisian banlieue became the Red Belt, which meant that the people who lived there tended to support parties on the Left of the political spectrum—for much of the twentieth century, the French Communist Party or the Socialist Party. The banlieue was becoming a truly dynamic factor in Paris’s economic, demographic, and political development.

3 Labor and capital The years from 1900 to 1914 saw an intense struggle between Parisian labor and capital. This local contest was part of a much larger, virtually global, contest that reached a culmination with the Revolution of 1917 in Russia. The struggle was over control of work, workplace, and standard of living. Sometimes Parisian workers looked for a political resolution; sometimes they took “direct action.” One form of direct action was the labor strike. The French term for strike is grève, which derives from the Place de Grève in central Paris. The term was probably first used in the 1780s when workers gathering at the square organized a work stoppage as they demanded a change in the tarif. After the end of legal prohibitions against trade unions (1864) and labor strikes (1884), workers often pressed demands against business owners and government. Waves of strikes affected Paris after 1898 that would prompt the government to revise the national labor code to improve pay, end marchandage (exploitative subcontracting), and provide a jour de repos (a guaranteed day off during the week). This period saw the emergence of a new kind of labor militancy, often under the guidance of the CGT (a national trade federation), in which trade unions and a working-class press became, for the first time, potent actors in public affairs. Some working-class leaders favored direct action and some favored political means: for instance, the Communist Jules Guesde favored direct action and the Socialist Jean Jaurès politics. This era witnessed the brief advent of Revolutionary Syndicalism, which called for a general strike that could lead to revolution. The extent and influence of syndicalism among Parisian workers has long been debated: 40 percent of building workers may except to accommodate to the reality have belonged to a syndicalist union by 1908, though this was the exception. Nonetheless, Parisian workers of the Belle Époque engaged in a great deal of strike activity. In spring 1906, a building workers’ strike lasted forty-two days and ended with the arrest of 1,200 masons and 370 jail terms. Another strike in the southern suburb

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of Draveil in 1908 saw three workers shot by government troops. The CGT organized the largest general strike of the era in 1906, involving more than 200,000 workers of all trades. The cumulative effect of the wave of strikes after 1900 was to compel business owners and politicians to make concessions. For the first time, Parisian entrepreneurs—themselves organized in patrons’ organizations (chambre patronales)—agreed to use arbitration to settle disputes with trade unions. Meantime, politicians responded to working-class voters. The Radical-Socialists adopted the doctrine of Solidarism, which meant state intervention to ameliorate class conflict. This inspired the creation of a national Labor Office in 1891 and a full-fledged Ministry of Labor in 1906, which looked to German and British models of labor legislation. An important figure here was René Viviani, the minister of labor from 1906 to 1909. Viviani had been elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1893 from Paris’s fifth arrondissement, which was home to many Creusois stonemasons and their families, including a large Creusois enclave along the Rue Mouffetard. Viviani took the lead in drafting labor legislation passed in 1911 that included a revived commitment to abolish the much-hated practice of marchandage. The contentious era of labor versus capital during the Belle Époque brought reforms that improved living and working conditions for the Parisian working class, but without rebellion or revolution. Things had changed.

4 Great Flood of 1910 Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris during the Second Empire and the ongoing improvements to the city’s sewer system of the Belle Époque created an illusion that the Seine River, which coursed through the capital and divided it into Right and Left banks, was safe and controlled. In January 1910, Mother Nature reminded Parisians that this was not necessarily true when an unusual weather pattern that began in late 1909 produced heavy rains across the river’s northern basin, saturated the soil, and sent the Seine out of its banks. The Seine is the third longest of France’s rivers, flowing east to west and draining an area of about 78,000 square kilometers. Winter-time flooding of the Seine is historically common, sometimes catastrophically. The Seine’s maximum high water mark at Paris was reached in 1658. But with the creation of canals and dams, flooding was mostly contained. Improvements to Paris’s sewers during the Second Empire were partly designed to further reduce the threat of high water (Figure 8.4). The Great Flood of 1910 thus came as a shock to the modern, seemingly well-protected city, with water reaching twenty feet above normal, inundating neighborhoods along the banks and disrupting the economic and social life of the capital for weeks. The Seine did not spill over the quays of central Paris in 1910, but it did flood neighborhoods by backing up water through the drainage and subway

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FIGURE 8.4  Sewer boat tour under the Quai de la Mégisserie. Today, visitors can take a short walking tour of a section of the sewer that departs near the Pont de l’Alma. Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images.

systems. The Quai d’Orsay train station was partly submerged and the Métro came to a halt. Some bridges were under water. The basement of the Louvre began to fill up. Electricity was cut off in many areas. Wealthy homes in the western arrondissements and poorer homes in the east suffered alike. The neighborhoods near the Seine were most affected, but the entire city felt the disaster. When, after a month, the flood waters receded, the destruction to streets, buildings, and homes became fully evident: almost 200,000 structures had been damaged.11 Ordinary Parisians responded to the disaster by helping each other as best they could, using boats to navigate flooded streets and transport the old and infirm to safety. Municipal authorities and the national government organized relief for the displaced and the cleanup that followed. Fortunately, because of the slow rise of the water and the assistance Parisians gave to each other, no one died. The spectacle of natural disaster in one of the world’s great cities brought out photographers and the global press to see how Parisians and city officials would cope. From the newspaper coverage two “narratives” about the Great Flood emerged: “Paris in ruins” and “Paris will endure.” Officials estimated the damage at 400 million francs (about 1.5 billion dollars today). The Great Flood of 1910 left lasting images testifying not only to the surprising vulnerability of modern Paris to natural disaster, but also to the resiliency of the city and its inhabitants.

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CULTURE 1 Avant-garde Fin de siècle—end of the century—was the sense of something ending and something beginning; good or bad, promising or foreboding. Developments in science in Paris seemed to promise improvements. The scientist Louis Pasteur (1822–95) had developed vaccinations against rabies and anthrax, and a method of purification to be known as “pasteurization.” The Pasteur Institute (1887) in Paris remains a leading international research center on disease. Marie Curie (1867–1934), born in Poland, was a pioneering physicist working on radioactivity. The first woman to win a Nobel Prize, she founded Curie Institutes in Paris and Warsaw, and is one of the few women in Paris’s Panthéon. Culturally, the fin de siècle was marked by innovations and free-thinking in art. “Avant-garde” was the cultural advance force, and Parisian artists made their city a world center for experimentation. Guillaume Appollinaire (1880–1918), born in Poland and of a cosmopolitan background, ended up making a life and career in Paris. As a writer and journalist, he was best-known as a poet and defender/definer of the avant-garde. A friend of Picasso and periodically a resident of Montmartre and Montparnasse, he was an early proponent of Cubism in painting. Appollinaire coined the term “Surrealism” (meaning above or beyond the “real”) in 1917. He joined the French army during the Great War, was severely wounded in 1916, and died during the influenza pandemic of 1918. He is buried at Père Lachaise. Erik Satie (1866–1925) was from Honfleur on the Normandy coast, but moved to Montmartre in 1887 and made Paris his home. An eccentric in his life and art, Satie pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable, and so virtually defined the avant-garde during his time. Satie was a composer, musician, and writer. At Montmartre he was a piano-player at the cabaret Le Chat Noir. His friends included Picasso and the composer Maurice Ravel, both of whom influenced his work. It was at Montmartre that Satie started drinking the absinthe that contributed to his death. Moving from Montmartre, he settled in the suburb of Arcueil, living in a one-room apartment, where he wrote many of the works that would make him even more influential after his death. It was mostly after the fact that the avant-garde works of Appollinaire, Satie, and other Parisian artists of the fin de siècle came to be fully appreciated. During their day, the challenges these artists posed to contemporary standards shocked, and sometimes angered, audiences and observers. Of course, this was often precisely what artists intended. One of the most memorable avant-garde “shocks” of the day in Paris came with the debut of the ballet “The Rites of Spring.” The event was staged by the Russian impresario Sergei Diaghliev (1872–1929), who first came to Paris in 1906 to exhibit Russian painting and dance. He followed this up by

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founding the Ballets Russes dance company. Diaghliev was a provocateur who worked with like-minded composers and choreographers to produce ballets and operas that were both innovative and designed to appeal to broad audiences. He teamed with two other Russians, the composer Igor Stravinsky and the choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, to stage the “The Rites of Spring,” which opened at the Théatre des Champs-Élysées in May 1913. The dance and music were exotic and offbeat, and caused a near riot between fans and others who expected to see and hear something familiar. The avant-garde in music composition, dance, painting, and poetry challenged the status quo and explored new forms. Paris during the fin de siècle was a center of this cultural maelstrom.

2 Pop culture crazes: Detective stories and bicycles The mass production of consumer goods that began at the end of the nineteenth century meant it was increasingly easy for manufacturers and promoters to create “crazes” or “fads” to sell their products. Paris was no less susceptible to this sort of thing than other places in the Atlantic World. Some of these crazes were ephemeral and some, like crime novels and bicycles, had staying power. Surrealism was a movement in the arts that sought to move beyond the “real,” to somehow join the conscious and unconscious. Surrealism exhibited disregard for convention. The movement took off in Paris in the early 1920s, but its origins came before the Great War. While an “elite” Surrealism of the 1920s mostly fit into high culture, a “Pop Surrealism” showed up in “pulp fiction” in pre-1914 Paris. An example was the popular “Fantômas” series of crime novels. Fantômas, the title character, was created in 1911 by the authors Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre. Fantômas was a sadistic, cruel, and ruthless criminal who dressed in sinister dark mask and gloves. He did awful things, though in ingenious sometimes humorous ways, often employing devious gadgets, all the while doggedly pursued by the policeman “Inspector Juve.” Paris was the setting for most of the stories. Fans loved the series, which was later translated to film and comic books (bandes dessinées).12 The exploits of the real-life Bonnot Gang (led by Jules Bonnot [1876–1912]), who were anarchist-inspired bandits in the Paris region and the first to use automobiles in their crimes, increased popular fascination with the crime world. The real-life model for Inspector Juve may have been the Parisian prefect of police Louis Lepine (1846–1933), who used science to track crime and even put flics (cops) on bicycles. Another craze that endured, and another reflection of the burgeoning consumer capitalism of the Belle Époque, was the bicycle. An early form of the bicycle showed up in Paris in 1818, the invention of a German engineer.

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By the 1860s, an updated form led to great popularity and usage, and to long-distance races: Paris–Rouen in 1869 and Paris–Brest in 1892. The capital experienced a full-fledged bicycle craze during the 1890s that led to the founding of bicycle clubs and increased circulation of newspapers devoted to sports. As horse-drawn transportation was starting to be replaced by the “horseless carriage” (the automobile), the bicycle was promoted as a vehicle of personal freedom. There may have been a quarter-million bicycles in Paris in 1914. In 1903, two rival Parisian sports newspapers conjured up the first Tour de France bicycle race as a promotional event. The race was staged over five days on the roads of southern and western France but beginning and ending in the capital. The winner of the first Tour was Maurice Garin (1871–1957), an immigrant chimney sweep from Italy. In 1910, Paris opened the Vélodrome d’Hiver (“Vel d’Hiv”) to host cycling competitions. Cycling and the Tour de France now became permanent parts of the Paris sports scene. Team and club sports came to Paris from Britain in the last quarter of the century. Even the English-language term “sport” was adopted into French. Rowing, foot racing, football, and rugby were mostly of interest to the sons of the upper classes. Douanier Rousseau’s painting of Joueurs de Football (1909) depicted rugby players who looked as though they had stepped directly out of Parisian lycées.

3 Film Modern cinema was invented by the Lumière brothers of Lyon, France, in 1895. The first “movie” showed workers leaving a factory. France, especially Paris, was an early and continuous world leader in film production and moviemaking. The first International Filmmakers Congress met in 1909 in Paris, where five of France’s seven film studios were located. Paris’s film industry settled in the suburbs. Working-class Parisians, especially youth, proved a more enthusiastic audience for film than upper-class Parisians, who still favored live performance. The first theater devoted entirely to showing film was the Casino-Cinéma in the La Plaine section of working-class Saint-Denis. The theater featured both film and live vaudeville. Cinema appealed to lower- and middle-class audiences because of inexpensive tickets and because the stories were often directed at them. The Gaumont Film Company was the world’s first film company. It was founded in Paris by Léon Gaumont in 1895 and is still operating. Initially, Gaumont produced film equipment, but by 1897 the company was also creating short movies at a studio in suburban La Villette. Another important Parisian film company was Pathé, which became one of the world’s great film and phonograph production companies. Pathé was founded in Paris in 1896 by four brothers. The main production facilities were at Vincennes in the southeast suburbs. Pathé expanded across Europe and then the world, building movie

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theaters and production facilities and producing short films, including the first “newsreel” in 1908. The Pathé logo of a crowing rooster—emblazoned on film equipment, newsreels, and movies—became world famous. The best-known Parisian filmmaker of the Belle Époque was Georges Méliès (1861–1938), a lifelong Parisian. Méliès came from a well-off family that gave him a superb education in Parisian schools. Drawn to filmmaking after meeting the Lumière brothers, the young Méliès brought a vivid imagination and boundless energy to his new vocation. He was an early innovator in special effects, with a fondness for magic and fantastical stories about adventure and travel. Méliès was the “Jules Verne” of cinema. Between 1896 and 1913, he directed more than 500 films, most of them just a few minutes long, at the studio he built in the suburb of Montreuil. Many of these were reproductions of magic shows Méliès had staged earlier at theaters in Paris, with special effects and sleight-of-hand more important than story or character. As he worked, he became more skilled and more experimental, developing techniques that would be widely emulated. His most famous production was the fourteenminute A Trip to the Moon (1902), a science fiction romp. Méliès worked briefly with Pathé studios, for which he produced the fantasy film Baron Munchausen’s Dream (1911). Méliès stopped making films just before the start of the Great War. The studio at Montreuil was used during the war as a hospital for wounded soldiers. Méliès and his oeuvre were rediscovered by a second generation of filmmakers after the war. He is buried at Père Lachaise cemetery. Paris became a center of filmmaking and of cinéphiles (film lovers) right at the start of the industry’s history and has retained that position ever since.

4 Montparnasse When Georges Méliès was rediscovered in the 1920s, he had fallen on hard times, selling candy and toys at a kiosk in the Montparnasse train station. There was something appropriate about Méliès ending up at Montparnasse, for Montmartre was not the only cultural hotspot in Paris of the Belle Époque and fin de siècle. Montparnasse, occupying a portion of the fourteenth arrondissement, drew artists and bohemians, too. Indeed, by 1920 Left Bank Montparnasse had supplanted Right Bank Montmartre as the capital’s artistic hub. The cultural transformation of Montparnasse was a little surprising, though perhaps no less so than the story of Montmartre had been for a previous generation. As late as 1900, Montparnasse remained off the beaten path, still a little rural, with wheat grown on farms in its southern sections at the turn of the century.13 In earlier times, the area was a site for the quarrying of stone used in Parisian construction, as well as the home of religious establishments, the most famous being the abbey of Port-Royal. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Montparnasse’s guinguettes

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and cafés were attractions to workers. The railway gare opened in 1840 to connect Paris with western departments. The completion of a Left Bank thoroughfare (the Boulevard Raspail) in 1911 helped tie Montparnasse to rest of the city. The migration of artists and bohemians from Montmartre began about this time as that area was turning into the tourist Mecca it would become for most of the twentieth century. Rent, food, and drink were inexpensive in the quartiers Plaisance and Montsouris, not far from the Montparnasse train station. Like Montmartre earlier, it was possible for financially struggling artists to thrive in Montparnasse’s supportive community. A building dating from the Expo of 1900 called “La Ruche” (the beehive) on the Rue Dantzig was converted into a communal living space for starving artists. The list of twentieth-century cultural luminaries who would call Montparnasse home for a longer or shorter period is impressive: Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Amedeo Modigliani, Jean Cocteau, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Blaise Cendrars, Ezra Pound, Juan Gris, Diego Rivera, Max Ernst, André Breton, Henry Miller, Salvador Dali, Marc Chagall, Erik Satie—to name just the best-known. Left Bank cafés in or near Montparnasse became gathering places where ideas germinated: Café de la Rotonde, La Coupole, and Le Dôme. New developments in art and culture were happening in Paris before the start of the Great War as artists moved from Montmartre to Montparnasse. In 1911, the Salon des Indépendants identified the Cubism of Picasso, Léger, and Braque as a distinct genre within painting. In another cultural sphere, the young Gabriel “Coco” Chanel (1883– 1971), who overcame humble origins to become a world-famous clothes designer, perfume maker, and entrepreneur, had arrived in Paris by the early 1900s as the “cocotte” (girlfriend) of a son of the British upper class. Chanel opened her first boutique in 1910 on Rue Cambon in the heart of the city; later, after her reputation and business had grown, she bought the entire building.

Conclusion Belle Époque meant the “beautiful time”—the years before the start of the Great War in 1914. The phrase might apply to all Europe, but it is especially about Paris. Of course, the era was “Belle” only in hindsight and with the knowledge of the awful human destruction that occurred during the First World War. In fact, there were enough troubling things happening in Paris to make Parisians who were there think of the period as anything but beautiful: the conclusion of the Dreyfus Affair, which seemed to restore a sense of justice to the story of Dreyfus himself, but which shook faith in the French military and courts, and which was a long-term contributor to the modern divide between political Right and Left; the crime spree of the Bonnot Gang, which

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also had political overtones and which introduced modern technology (the getaway cars used following robberies) to criminal culture; the endless labor strikes in the capital and the advent of Revolutionary Syndicalism, which sharpened the divide between social classes and between labor and capital; and the Seine River flood of 1910, which reminded Parisians that natural forces were sometimes no less predictable and damaging than human forces. Looking back, it is easy to focus on the political divisions of the Belle Époque’s that were a prelude to the contest between socialism and liberalism on one side and fascism on the other in the Interwar years, and the international tensions that would lead to war against Germany and the other Central Powers in 1914. But the Belle Époque also bequeathed to the world genuinely beautiful things, including much of the modern art that we still value or see as precedent-setting: Nijinsky’s “Rites of Spring”; the many famous painters who cultivated new ways of representation in Montmartre and then Montparnasse; and the Parisian filmmakers who would help make the city one of the twentieth century’s world centers for making movies. There seemed to be so many things that divided Parisians. What unified them? The Great War showed that Parisians stood together for the republic and the nation. “Mood” is a characteristic that is impossible for historians to quantify, but nonetheless it is something that many evoke in trying to describe the indescribable: a sensibility emerging from the sources that typifies a time and place. When historians write about the Belle Époque in Paris, the mood that often comes to mind is one of anxiety or nervousness—the sense that one era was coming to an end and another beginning; that something unique had been lost.

9 Paris from the Great War through Vichy

Chronology 1914

Assassination of Jaurès—start of Great War and Battle of Marne—Union Sacrée government

1919

Peace conference at Versailles—opening of Le Bourget airport— destruction of Thiers Wall—Sacré-Coeur Basilica consecrated

1926

Opening of Paris Mosque

1931

Colonial Exposition

1934

Rightist demonstrations—Prost Plan

1936–38 Matignon Accords—Popular Front government 1937

Paris World Exposition

1939

Second World War in Europe begins

1940

France defeated—Paris occupied by Germans

1942

Arrest and deportation of Paris Jews

1944 Liberation 1945

End of Second World War—execution of Pierre Laval

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Introduction The Interwar period (1919–39) and the Second World War (1939–45) were momentous times for France, Great Britain, the United States, Soviet Union, and Germany. Europe and other parts of the world had just endured an awful—for many, pointless—Great War that had left millions of people dead and redrew the political geography of much of Europe and the Middle East. The victory by France, Britain, and the United States left those countries unwilling to contemplate another “world war,” while Germany—defeated and humiliated in 1919—saw the rise of a political party, the Nazis, which among other things intended to un-do the Versailles Treaty and restore Germany to power through yet more war. The emergence of the catastrophic ideology of fascism was partly a product of defeat and unhappiness at the end of the Great War. Fascism used democratic tools to summon the darker human sentiments—Ultra nationalism, racial prejudice, and anti-Semitism—to mobilize populations for extreme actions: total war and genocide. It was shocking that the Second World War could happen in Europe only a generation removed from the First World War, and almost unimaginable that Europeans—Germans and others—could produce the Holocaust. The threat of fascism and the horrors it produced were enough to bring together the surprising alliance of Britain and the United States with the Soviet Union; their “War against Fascism” defeated Nazi Germany and quasi-fascist Japan. The rise of fascism in the Interwar years dominates our thinking of that period, but of course it is not all that occurred. The Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, and after 1921 the Russian Revolution became institutionalized. Stalin was in power by the late 1920s, and in the next decade would launch a “second Russian Revolution” to transform the countryside and turn the Soviet Union into a great industrial power. In Asia, China was enduring a long period of civil war and transition from empire to a modern form of government. The growing, ambitious Japanese Empire made war on divided China and then launched attacks on fellow European and American imperialist powers in Asia. The Ottoman Empire had been defeated in 1918 and then fell apart, its territories occupied by the winners France and Britain—which in turn helped set the stage for political and religious disputes that linger in the Middle East to the present. The economic catastrophe of the Great Depression helped prepare the ground for the politics of fascism and encouraged the United States to adopt “isolationist” policies. France was deeply affected by the ominous trends of the Interwar years. There was a variety of French fascism during these years that had roots in the Paris-centered Boulanger and Dreyfus Affairs at the end of the previous century. Shockingly, France was quickly defeated in 1940, and Paris was occupied by German forces until the Liberation of August 1944. Parisians both resisted and collaborated with the German Occupation, and with the implementation of the Holocaust.

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POLITICS 1 Great War and Union Sacrée In the build-up to the Great War, there was much concern that the political parties and working-class membership of the Parisian Left would not support a war. Jean Jaurès and the SFIO were active in international efforts to promote peace and in anti-militarist policies at home. The Socialist newspaper L’Humanité, published in Paris and edited by Jaurès, was adamantly against war. But Jaurès’s assassination in July—shot by a nationalist as he was having supper at a restaurant in Montmartre—did not mobilize anti-war sentiment. Germany’s declaration of war against France in early August 1914 was supported by the German Social-Democrats, which in turn helped bring the political Left in France to the side of war. Soon, Parisian workers would be fighting against German workers. The people of Paris, like those of Berlin and London, expected the war to be short. Within a day of the German declaration of war, the French President Raymond Poincaré called for a Union Sacrée (sacred union)—a truce among political parties until the war had been won. Party leaders across the spectrum responded positively. Even Jules Guesde of the Marxist Parti Ouvrier joined the Union Sacrée government. Édouard Vaillant (1840–1915) was an ex-Communard and longtime stalwart of the Parisian Left who was a representative in the French legislature. He was also one of the organizers of the annual march to Père Lachaise that commemorated the Commune. Now, Vaillant rallied to the Union Sacrée, supporting the government and suspending the commemoration at Père Lachaise. Labor strikes, too, would be halted. The parties of the Left were thus caught up in the patriotic frenzy, even as the decision to support war was also a repudiation of SFIO policy and of Jaurès’s legacy. German forces moved close to Paris in the first month of the war, forcing the national government to briefly evacuate to Bordeaux in the South (taking the gold from the Bank of France with them). But the German Schlieffen Plan was defeated by French and British forces at the Battle of the Marne, north of the capital. By the end of December, the fighting had settled into the murderous trench warfare that would characterize the struggle for the next four years. The fighting front, now about a hundred miles from Paris, seemed immobile, with no real strategy to win except for one side killing more of the other. Eventually, anti-war critics started to emerge in the SFIO and CGT. The Socialists withdrew from the government in September 1917, signaling the end of the Union Sacrée. Mutinies in the French army were kept quiet, but signs of demoralization cropped up in Paris. A May Day 1917 anti-war rally drew several thousand people. At this moment, a determined political leader stepped forward: Georges Clemenceau (1841–1921). Clemenceau had a long history in Parisian municipal and French national politics, beginning with the année terrible of 1870–71 when he was mayor of Paris’s eighteenth

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arrondissement. Later he was a Radical-Socialist deputy and senator, then minister of interior, and now, from 1917 to 1920, minister of war. An early critic of the government’s conduct of the war, Clemenceau, despite his advanced age (he was seventy-five in 1917), was picked by Poincaré to lead the country at this difficult time. In fact, Clemenceau proved a resolute and energetic wartime leader (“Tiger” was his nickname). Though Paris was bombed by German “Big Bertha” artillery shells in 1918 (killing 200 Parisians), the tide was turning. In the fall of 1918, German generals informed their government that the war could not be won, and in November an armistice was signed that brought the fighting to an end. The Treaty of Versailles was signed in June 1919, formally concluding the war, re-drawing the map of Europe and the Middle East, and ending the threat to Paris.

2 Fascism in Interwar Paris The Interwar struggle between political Right and Left—between varieties of fascism and socialist or communist parties—took place in Paris as it did in Berlin, Vienna, and London. Fascism stood in Paris, as it did elsewhere, for antiSemitism, xenophobia, nationalism, authoritarian leadership; for a rejection of the principles of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. The struggle played out in newspapers, elections, and the streets. In Berlin and Vienna, the German form of fascism, Nazism, triumphed in the Interwar period. In France, a native form of fascism or quasi-fascism lost out. But after the defeat of 1940, the quasi-fascist collaborationists Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval worked with German occupiers to remake the country in the fascist image. There were several fascist or quasi-fascist organizations in Paris during the Interwar years. The “first wave” of French fascism included the Jeunesses Patriotes (modeled after Mussolini’s Fascists), Croix de Feu, and Action française.1 All were descendants of the anti-Dreyfusards and represented a backlash against both Soviet-inspired communism and old-fashioned reactionary monarchism. This “wave” allied with some French conservatives and celebrated symbolic acts in Paris, including the consecration of the Sacré-Coeur Basilica at Montmartre (1919), and promoted a cult devoted to Joan of Arc. Statues of famous French figures were erected and politicized. A statue of the Renaissance era humanist Étienne Dolet, who had been burned at the stake, was idealized by the Left, while statues of Joan of Arc were put up at the Place des Pyramides in 1874, on the Boulevard Saint-Marcel in 1891, and at the Place Saint-Augustin in 1900. She has ever since been an icon of the political Right. Both the wartime Vichy government and the current National Front venerate Joan of Arc.2 A second wave of French fascism was partly a product of hard economic times brought on by the Great Depression. The second wave began in 1934 with the Stavisky Affair. Stavisky was a Ukrainian businessman, whose illicit deals implicated high officials in the French government. When Stavisky was found dead under mysterious circumstances in February 1934, the Right-

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wing press mobilized a huge demonstration in Paris. Veterans from the Great War, some with fascist and anti-parliamentarian ideas, joined. The PCF mobilized its own crowd, so that the scene was set for a confrontation. As the politicized crowds jostled near the Palais de Bourbon, police fired, killing thirteen. Hundreds of others were injured in the ensuing émeute (riot). The violence seemed to be sending Paris in the direction Berlin had taken earlier3 (Figure 9.1). There were two prominent fascist leaders in Interwar Paris. Jacques Doriot (1898–1945) was from the working class and was a decorated veteran of the Great War. He joined the French Communist Party after it was created in 1920, and quickly rose through the ranks, becoming the Communist mayor of Saint-Denis in 1931. Later he broke with the PCF and formed his own fascist political party: the Parti Populaire Française (PPF), whose newspaper was Le Cri du Peuple. After 1940, he worked with the collaborationist Vichy regime, and even fought with German forces against the Red Army in the east. Doriot was killed near the end of the war. Another “collabo” was Marcel Déat (1894–1955), also a decorated Great War veteran, who had been elected as a Socialist to represent Paris’s twentieth arrondissement in the 1932 legislative election. By the end of the decade, Déat had left

FIGURE 9.1  February 1934 riot by the political Right at the Place de la Concorde. Among the rioters were veterans of the Great War. Photo by Roger Viollet C ­ ollection/ Getty Images.

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the Socialists to create a middle-class fascist group headquartered in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. He supported the German victory over France in 1940, joined the collaborationist government of Pierre Laval and helped Doriot organize French volunteers for the German Wehrmacht before fleeing to Germany after the Allied landings of 1944. Condemned to death in absentia by the Fourth Republic, Déat lived in hiding in Italy until dying of natural causes.

3 Red Belt In Interwar Paris, as in other parts of Europe, fascists were opposed to parties on the political Left, particularly communists and socialists. The confrontation between the two sides heated up in the early 1930s during the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler. Earlier in the 1920s, France had had a Cartel des Gauches, which was an alliance of two parties of the political Left: the Radical-Socialists and Socialists. The Cartel des Gauches lasted from 1924 to 1926. Its most important accomplishments were in foreign policy, where it moved away from a hard line toward Germany and promoted European and international efforts at peace. There were political parties further to the Left than those of the Cartel. Following the success of the 1917 Russian Revolution, the SFIO, meeting at a national congress in Tours in late 1920, split, with most delegates separating to create a French Communist Party. The new PCF was headquartered in Paris, where it drew much of its membership and published the newspaper L’Humanité, which it inherited from the Socialists. Affiliated with the Comintern in Moscow, the PCF aligned with Soviet goals. The modern Revolutionary Tradition—born in Paris in 1789 and sustained there through the nineteenth century—now shifted to the Soviet Union. The PCF’s strength in Paris was in the Red Belt: the working-class and industrial suburbs ringing the mostly bourgeois city.4 Banlieusards were workers who tended to support either the PCF or the Socialists, but especially the former. A plan for a general strike in 1925 had failed, but thereafter party members built a base in the banlieue by focusing on education, health, and working conditions. They attracted younger members by hosting entertainments and festivals. In the meantime, Comintern policy meant that the PCF could not cooperate with other political parties, including the Socialists, and so did not run candidates for national office. This policy changed only when the Comintern initiated the Popular Front program in the 1930s, instructing Communist parties everywhere to cooperate with other parties of the Left to counter the rise of fascism. Communist politicians now emerged from Parisian suburbs: Maurice Thorez from Ivry; Jacques Doriot from Saint-Denis; and Jacques Duclos (1896–1975) from Montreuil. Duclos was a veteran who had fought at Verdun. He joined the PCF in 1920 and was a stalwart of the party for many decades, initially following the Stalinist line (Figure 9).

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FIGURE 9.2  Robespierre Métro stop. Robespierre was a controversial figure from the French Revolution. It was not until the 1930s that a subway stop—in the far suburban district of Montreuil—was named after him. © Casey Harison.

For the Socialists, the important political leader was Léon Blum, a successor to Jaurès. Like Jaurès, Blum had not been won over to Marxism. A native Parisian, as a young man, Blum was politicized during the Dreyfus Affair. He was Jewish, and this made him especially hated by the antiSemites among the fascists. Savagely beaten in 1935 by thugs from Action française, he led the Popular Front government from 1936 to 1938. After

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France’s defeat in 1940, Blum was arrested and tried by a Vichy court, but survived wartime imprisonment at Buchenwald in Germany.

4 Paris occupied France was defeated, and Paris occupied by German troops in June 1940. Adolph Hitler visited the French capital later that month; a wellknown photograph shows him with the Eiffel Tower in the background. The German Occupation saw Paris and most of northern France directly controlled by German forces, while the rest of country was ruled from Vichy by the collaborationist government of Philippe Pétain. But Paris, not Vichy, was the focus of German attention. The Occupation was a trying time for the capital. Resources were drained by the Germans and there were persistent shortages of food, clothing, and fuel. The city’s population declined. From the start, Parisians settled in for the long haul. Resistance built only after it became clear that Germany’s triumph in Europe was not complete. Indeed, liberation did not seem certain until the summer of 1944, when Allied forces landed in Normandy to the west of Paris. In the meantime, collaboration or reluctant cooperation— essentially, getting on with one’s life—was the normal course for most Parisians. The relationship between “occupied” and “occupiers” in Paris shifted over time. German troops consistently wanted two things from Parisians: food and sex. Shortages of basic goods led to the creation of a black market. Looking back, Parisians remembered the Occupation as “hungry years,” when food was expensive and dairy products, coffee, and cigarettes hard to find. But profiteers and prostitution thrived. Parisian authorities monitored restaurants and food distribution, where there was corruption. Municipal and German authorities occasionally organized “sweeps” to crack down on the black market: there were seventy-four sweeps between July 1942 and August 1943 of more than 17,000 restaurants, during which 3,000 violations were detected. After 1943, “contrôle” of this sort became less effective. After the Liberation of August 1944, there would be popular revenge in Paris against those perceived to have profited or cooperated too openly during the Occupation.5 The Occupation was a challenging time for Catholics in Paris, and for Jews it was terrible. Some Parisian Catholics harkened to the Vichy slogan of Travaille, Famille, Patrie (work, family, country). There were both collaborators and resisters among Catholics. For the Catholic Church in Paris, as elsewhere in France, there seemed few choices except to accommodate the reality of occupation. Paris’s Jewish population (around 160,000) did not have the option of accommodating. The Nazis brought policies of vehement anti-Semitism with them in 1940, and then the Final Solution after early 1942. Discriminatory ordinances were enacted against Jews, including the requirement to wear an identifying yellow star. Some Parisians joined in the

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attack on Jews with scurrilous newspaper articles and public humiliations of one sort or another. Among Parisian Jews, there was division about how to respond. Some, particularly those belonging to the PCF, resisted; others thought resistance would only provoke reprisal.6 In mid-July 1942, Parisian police directed by Prefect René Bousquet arrested nearly 12,000 Parisian Jews—including about 4,000 children—and held them at the Vélodrome d’Hiv in terrible conditions before they were shipped off to the death camp at Auschwitz. Many Jews lived in the Marais district, and the concentration of people there made the round-up (rafle) easier. Other areas of France, not Paris, took the lead in fighting against the Occupation. Some Parisians joined the Resistance after 1943—in total, perhaps 20,000 persons organized in secret cells across the city. The French counterpart to the German Gestapo was the Carlingue, and it worked along with the Germans to hunt down resistors. The Germans labeled resistors “terrorists,” and when those in Paris were caught they were executed at Mont-Valérien in the western suburbs. With the Allied landings of June 1944, the end of Occupation was in sight. As Allied forces approached, some Parisians launched a rebellion on August 18, and by the 25th the Germans were gone. Today, plaques mark the spots where approximately 1,600 Parisians (including 600 civilians) were killed in the August 1944 fighting that helped end the Occupation. Another plaque near Notre-Dame Cathedral memorializes the deportation of Parisian Jews to the Nazi death camps.

SOCIETY 1 Wartime Paris: 1914–18 and 1940–44 Paris was close to the front where armies clashed in the First World War (as it became after the start of the Second) and was occupied by foreign troops for most of the Second World War. French and Allied soldiers were in Paris from 1914 through 1918, and mostly German soldiers from June 1940 until the summer of 1944. In both wars, Parisians sought ways to make daily life as normal as possible; in August 1944, as Allied troops approached, some Parisians rose against the German occupiers. The Schlieffen Plan was Germany’s strategy in 1914 to do the nearimpossible: win a two-front war against the allied powers of France, Russia, and Great Britain. To do so, Paris had to be taken within the first four weeks of the fighting; German armies came close to doing just this: the decisive Battle of the Marne (September 4–10) took place only 50 miles north of the capital. Artillery exchanges from the fighting could be heard in the city, whose taxis were famously mobilized to carry soldiers to the battlefield. But the Schlieffen Plan came to a halt at the Marne, and after this there were no strategic successes to break the stalemate on the Western Front. By

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December 1914, the two sides—French and British on one, German on the other—had settled in for four years of bloody trench warfare. During the crisis of late summer 1914, tens of thousands of Parisians fled to other parts of France (most returned as the fighting stabilized) and tens of thousands of Parisians were temporarily conscripted for military-related duties under the authority of General Joseph Gallieni. Overall, perhaps a third of Parisian males served in the military during the Great War. Though the capital was close to the front, it suffered only about 1,000 war-related casualties. In 1915, there were German Zeppelin raids on the capital, and in 1918 some long-range artillery bombardment. Because of proximity, and because national rail and road transportation converged there, Paris was an important staging area for fighting all along the front: French soldiers streamed in and out of the capital for the duration of the Great War. Though the Belle Époque was definitively over, the war years were relatively normal for civilians inside Paris. The Second World War was a much different affair for Paris than the First World War, mostly because the city was occupied by foreign troops. The Drôle de guerre (Phony War) of 1939–40 came to an end in May 1940. As the German military moved swiftly across northern France, a flood of refugees headed south; and as French military resistance collapsed, hundreds of thousands of Parisians, along with their government, joined the exodus. German forces entered the capital in June 1940. Before the government of the Third Republic formally surrendered on June 17, perhaps two-thirds of Parisians had fled the city (the majority would return within weeks). A “collaborationist” government was established under Philippe Pétain (a famous general of the First World War) at Vichy—a middle-sized town in the center of the country—as Paris now became the headquarters of a large section of northern France ruled directly by German forces. There were approximately 100,000 German troops in the Occupied Zone that included Paris. German officers and soldiers took up residence in the city. Occupation headquarters was at the Opéra on the Right Bank and other German officials set up at the Hôtels Meurice and Lutetia. The Gestapo was headquartered at an office on the Rue des Saussaies. In 1940 and most of 1941, it seemed that the German presence might last indefinitely. But by the Liberation of August 1944, Allied soldiers had replaced German soldiers in Paris.

2 Interwar expats “Interwar” was the period between 1919, when the Treaty of Versailles formally brought the First World War to a conclusion, and 1939, when Germany launched the invasion of Poland that commenced the European theater of the Second World War. In hindsight, Interwar also coincided with a “postmodern” disillusionment brought on by the seemingly senseless destruction (especially, human destruction) of the Great War; anxiety about future wars; intense

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disagreement between political Right and Left; and continued artistic advances in the avant-garde. “Expats” played a role in all these developments. “Expat” is short for “expatriate”—a person living in another country without adopting the citizenship of that country. What drew expats to Paris more than other great cities? Mostly the city’s reputation as open and inviting to non-conformists, to artists wanting to experiment and looking for supportive communities, and to political refugees seeking a space to feel safe. Interwar Paris was a hub for “extra-European” expats: Americans from the United States escaping conformism and Russians fleeing the Revolution of 1917. A large number of African American soldiers passed through Paris after 1917. Among the almost 3 million people living in Paris in 1921 were hundreds of thousands of expats, including approximately 40,000 Americans. This was the Lost Generation of men and women, mostly in their 20s and 30s, disillusioned with the United States and distressed, like Europeans, with the senselessness and bloodshed of the recent war. Among the best-known were artists and writers: Gertrude Stein, E. E. Cummings, Ernest Hemingway, Henry and June Miller, Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, Man Ray, Hart Crane, Mary Cassat, and T. S. Eliot. Many lived a “bourgeois-bohemian” existence on the Left Bank, with the Café Le Dome their go-to spot. Hemingway was probably the most famous. A Moveable Feast (published posthumously in 1964) tells the story of his Paris days. Today, a plaque marks the residence near the Rue Mouffetard where Hemingway lived. Expats could rely on the omnipresent Parisian building manager (concierge), for advice about negotiating the city. In 1939, there may have been 85,000 concierges in Paris, the vast majority of them women. There were other Americans in Interwar Paris besides writers and artists. Sylvia Beach opened the iconic Shakespeare and Company English-language bookstore near Notre-Dame Cathedral in 1919. Charles Lindbergh made the first non-stop solo airplane flight between New York and Paris in 1927. Businessmen selling the “American way of life” operated on the Right Bank. African Americans fleeing segregation, poverty, and oppression found that Parisian attitudes contrasted favorably with the United States’ open racism; indeed, Paris seemed to extend a special welcome to African Americans. Ada “Bricktop” Smith (1894–1984) was one of many African American performers who worked at clubs in Montmartre and Montparnasse during the Interwar years, helping introduce American jazz and dance to Europe. Paris’s “Jazz Age” was partly a product of the African American expat community in the city. But the Interwar years in Paris also saw a reaction against the United States. The trial of anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti provoked demonstrations in Paris, and the welcoming of American artists contrasted with negative reactions to the “Americanization” of culture and commerce. Another group of extra-European expats—Russians—was active in Paris during the Interwar years. Russian expats had been numerous before 1914, too. The great difference was that the earlier group belonged to a revolutionary intelligentsia of the political Left determined to overthrow the

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autocracy; now that the Revolution of 1917 had achieved that goal, the new Russian expats were mostly from the other side of the political spectrum: reactionary “Whites” who fled when the Bolsheviks came to power, some of whom now were working to overthrow the new Soviet state. Paris during the Interwar years was a place of intrigue for both political Left and Right. A Russian expat killed the French President Paul Doumer in 1932, though this turned out to be the action of a mentally unstable person, not a political assassin.

3 Parisian intelligentsia Something like a Parisian “intelligentsia” emerged during the Interwar years. Intelligentsia is a Russian word dating from the early nineteenth century that describes an intellectual cohort opposed to the status quo. Foreign intellectuals, revolutionaries, and counter-revolutionaries joined Parisians after 1919 to create a unique intellectual climate reflective of the numerous, sometimes competing, political and artistic strains of the era. The physical setting of this intellectual ferment was the Left Bank, particularly cafés on the Boulevard Saint-Germain and in Montparnasse. Most of the Interwar Parisian intelligentsia belonged to the political Left: socialists, communists, anarchists, revolutionary syndicalists. But not all. After the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia in 1917, opponents—labeled Whites, since the traditional white color of the Bourbons had been associated with counter-revolution ever since the French Revolution—fled, many of them ending up in Paris. During the early 1920s, Paris was a center of White opposition to the new Soviet regime. Some of this was related to foreign policy, since the French government took the lead in creating a diplomatic and military cordon sanitaire of alliances with East European nations in the hope of preventing the spread of Bolshevism to the rest of Europe. Exiled Russians, many of them wealthy and sometimes working with elements of the French government, helped organize and finance plans from Paris to destabilize the Soviet Union in its early years. In the 1930s, Paris became the home of Trotskyist opponents of Stalin and briefly Trotsky himself. Leon Trotsky, one of the original makers of the Russian Revolution, lost out in a power struggle with Joseph Stalin following the death of Lenin in 1924. Trotsky was kicked out of the Communist Party in 1927 and the Soviet Union in 1929, setting the great revolutionary upon a peripatetic life that would end with his assassination in Mexico City in 1940. He lived in France from 1933 to 1935. Though Trotsky and his family were required to stay outside of Paris, Trotskyists—including Trotsky’ son, Lev, who later may have been murdered by Stalinist agents in Paris—were active in the capital during the 1930s, working against fascism and Stalinism alike.

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One person who met Trotsky while he was in Paris was Simone Weil (1909–43). Born in Paris to a family of Alsatian-Jewish background, Weil led a contemplative, activist, and ultimately tragic life. A brilliant student who finished first in her class at the École Normale Supérieure (Simone de Beauvoir was second), Weil was a profound and abstract thinker, but much more—moving from teaching in a provincial school to working at the Paris Renault automobile plant so that she could understand the working class, and then joining an anarchist military unit during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). She was unusual among the Parisian intelligentsia in turning away from political ideas and toward mysticism. After the defeat of 1940, Weil made it to England, where she hoped to return to France as part of the Resistance against the German Occupation. A personal history of selfdeprivation and poor health contributed to contracting tuberculosis. She died in England, where she is buried. Even through the Second World War and German Occupation, the ideas of the Parisian intelligentsia continued to ferment. The Existentialist philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir would become better known after 1945, but their ideas had roots in the Interwar and wartime years. Another Existentialist, Albert Camus, took part in the Resistance to the German Occupation.

4 Imperial capital Another group of foreigners in Paris in the Interwar years—exiles, mostly, rather than expats—were persons from the French colonial empire in Africa, Asia, and Caribbean. France’s empire had expanded to southeast Asia (Indochina) and across much of northern and western Africa by 1914, making her the second greatest imperial power after Great Britain. To this was added Syria and Lebanon, formerly part of the Ottoman Empire, but after 1919 “mandated” to France with the goal of future independence. During the Great War, soldiers from the colonies, particularly Africans, had fought for France, while others had arrived to work in Parisian factories. After 1919, Paris became a draw for Africans and Asians hoping to live and work or seeking ways to undermine or end colonialism back home. Emigration from the French colonies to Paris increased significantly after 1919. The foreign-born population of the city (including colonial and other populations) doubled by the 1920s, reaching a half million by the 1930s. Some of the arrivals would go on to wider fame: Ho Chi Minh, the future father of Vietnamese independence after wars with France and the United States, was a young activist and student from 1919 to 1923, living in Paris’s seventeenth arrondissement. Léopold Sénghor, intellectual and future president of Senegal in West Africa, was in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, graduating in 1935 from the University of Paris. Most of the colonial arrivals

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of the Interwar years came from the North African Maghreb (Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco) and sub-Saharan West Africa: Mali (French Sudan), Senegal, and other territories. The North African emigration was ethnically diverse—mostly, but not entirely Arabic speaking—and large: about 70,000 were in Paris in 1930. Many North Africans lived in the northern, relatively poor section of Goutte d’Or, where they opened restaurants and cafés and published newspapers catering to other immigrants.7 The presence of foreigners from the colonies led to surveillance by the police, who feared they might belong to nationalist or communist organizations that were seeking the breakup of the empire. In 1925, the Paris prefect of police opened an “Arab Bureau” which included a brigade of thirty officers to keep an eye on immigrants. Parisian authorities hoped job support, housing, education, and health care could distract Africans and Asians from nationalist and communist programs. A hospital for colonial emigrants built at Bobigny (a northeastern suburb) was closely monitored by the police and was rightly perceived by Africans to be a place of surveillance, control, and segregation. As many immigrants, like Sénghor, later recalled, racism was prevalent among Parisians and French. In fact, many immigrants left Paris for other places or returned home: by 1938, the North African population had declined to 31,000.8 A large Colonial Exposition publicizing France’s claim to a “civilizing mission” brought over 8 million visitors to Paris in 1931. But the Exposition exposed a central contradiction felt by many Parisians and colonials alike: France could not be both a democratic republic and an empire. The question of integration or multi-culturalism for Africans and other immigrants, which remains so important in contemporary Paris, had roots in the Interwar years.

Baguette

T

he “baguette” is the long, crusty loaf of bread associated with Paris and France; like the Eiffel Tower or Notre-Dame Cathedral, it has become an icon of the city. But more than a symbol, bread is omnipresent in the Parisian diet: a meal, at home or eating out, minus bread is almost unimaginable. The baguette is distinctive among bread shapes because it is long and narrow, providing more crust to crumb than other shapes. The “crust” is the caramelized outside and the “crumb” is the soft, offwhite interior. Baguette means “wand” or “stick” and though the loaf shape has been around a long time, the word “baguette” was not much used until the twentieth century. There are, of course, many other types

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of French bread (including the well-known round boule), some of them made from grains other than wheat. Like most breads, baguette dough goes through a process of fermentation, kneading, shaping, and baking. Baguettes not only accompany the main course at supper but are also cut to make lunch sandwiches, and in the morning, pieces are torn to dunk in coffee or chocolate. Steven Laurence Kaplan is the preeminent American historian of French bread—its production and consumption; role in culture and politics; decline and rise (no pun intended) in the twentieth century.9 Historically, the importance of bread to the Parisian diet can hardly be overstated. The breaking of bread was tied to Catholic ritual. Bread made up the bulk of daily consumption in the eighteenth century (which is the period Kaplan mostly studies). To some extent, French life revolved around bread: from the cultivation, harvest, and milling of grain in the hinterland; to its transportation to the capital, where it was transformed by artisan bakers into loaves; to its selling and distribution from shop to consumer. A bad harvest meant shortage and the potential for hunger or starvation. A bread shortage could lead to civil unrest, a possibility for which the Paris police were always on guard—one of their longstanding duties was to keep an eye on the cost and supply of bread. French governments have long tried to oversee bread-making and its distribution, periodically subsidizing production because bread is so central to the well-being of society and state. However, bread declined as a percentage of the French diet in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as other foods replaced it. After 1945, older artisanal baking methods began to give way to American-style conveyor belts, mass production, and big grocery stores selling a massproduced product. Among those who saw the bad turn bread was taking was the Parisian baker Lionel Poilâne, who became well-known for his round loaf (the miche), and who believed that bad bread was literally a threat to French well-being. Encouraged by provincial grain millers and given a push by the government, “good bread”—the baguette, along with the other loaves typical of the neighborhood Parisian boulangerie—began a comeback in the 1990s. Now “Bread of the French tradition” made without preservatives or frozen ingredients is widely available in both neighborhood shops and large bakery chains. “Good bread is back!” A properly prepared baguette should look just right, smell just right, and make a certain sound when a piece is torn off. Of course, it must have the taste that makes it an indispensable part of the Parisian daily menu. A baguette, a round of camembert cheese, and a bottle of wine is arguably the most basic and perfect Parisian meal.

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ECONOMY 1 Industry: New and old France suffered a demographic disaster during the Great War: almost 1.3 million soldiers dead; another million injured, including over 300,000 mutilés—persons too severely injured (many of them amputees) to work. Many of these were from the working class, and so the war had a tremendous impact on industry and economy. But by the mid-1920s, things were turning around: Paris’s economy, including industry, had recovered enough to exceed pre-war production levels. Inflation was high, but jobs were available. Yet the recovery was short-lived: the Great Depression of the 1930s, and then the Second World War, sent Paris into economic stagnation that would last through the early 1950s. During the First World War, millions of males were conscripted into the army and working-class women replaced them in munitions factories (where they were nicknamed “munitionnettes”). As it turned out, the movement into industry for women was temporary: after the end of the fighting, male workers returned to former jobs, as neither employers nor government were committed to a permanent integration of women into the industrial workforce. Meantime, the modernization of production, especially in the Parisian banlieue, continued. The automobile and airplane industries expanded: France was the second largest automobile producer in the world in 1929 (though still far behind the United States). In the fifteenth arrondissement, Citroën, shifting from wartime munitions production, joined Renault at Boulogne-Billancourt as a major auto manufacturer. Suburban iron and steel production grew, with most of the product going to the making of autos and planes. Paris was one of the birthplaces of modern aviation. Le Bourget in the suburbs was a military airfield during the Great War. The first airplane races began in Paris before 1914: 800,000 spectators watched the start of a 1912 Paris–Madrid air race. The first pontoon plane landed in the Seine in 1905. Another memorable event occurred in 1919 when an intrepid pilot flew a plane through the Arc de Triomphe. Other new industries thrived in Paris, including film production, the building of new cinemas, and radio broadcasting. Garment production in the Sentier district prospered. Workers from Eastern Europe—Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, and Russians, along with Armenians—were drawn to Paris’s industrial suburbs. About 10 percent of the city’s population in 1930 was foreigners, most of them workers. While wages and jobs beckoned, living and working conditions were not especially good: the decades-long housing crisis for workers persisted with high rents and poor accommodations. This led to support for the CGT and ongoing labor strife in the banlieue. The Great Depression began with the collapse of the American stock market in 1929, but the direct effects were not felt in France until 1931,

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and those were probably less dire than elsewhere in the Atlantic World. In the mid-1930s, the Popular Front government enacted a series of laws to improve working and living conditions for the working class. But by the start of the Second World War, the Parisian economy was back in the doldrums. The years of the Second World War and German Occupation were difficult economically for Paris. Manufacturing policy was set by the occupiers and the French government at Vichy to supply materials for the German war effort. Strikes were outlawed. In Paris, there were great inequities in food distribution, and the standard of living declined noticeably. The streets seemed silent. There was a thriving black market. Some restaurants remained open by catering to wealthy Parisians and German officers. Collaborators and profiteers cultivated connections with the German authorities. Prostitution flourished. A separate black market served other Parisians, including résistants. Still, Parisians periodically went hungry during the Occupation, generating anger at the Germans and at Vichy.

2 Suburban expansion During the Interwar years, the Parisian banlieue continued to expand and industrialize as the city center became a work setting for the professional classes. “Faubourg” now became a term associated with the past. Middleand upper-class Parisians lived in prosperous central and western districts, while workers and immigrants lived in the suburbs—parts of which were poverty-stricken. The contrast between center and periphery—already pronounced before the war—became stronger. Over the years, municipal and national authorities generated numerous “plans” to reduce the distinctions, while keeping industry going. Urbanisme was a vision to make Paris and its region economically whole and prosperous. In the long-run, there would be both successes and failures. Industrial labor characterized the banlieue during the Interwar years, while professional and service work marked the city proper. Paris was the national center for publishing, communications (including radio and newspapers), legal work, and sports. Fayard Publishing, founded in Paris in 1857, and headquartered in Montparnasse, produced history books for a mass market. Paris hosted the second modern Olympic Games in 1900, and another Olympics in 1924. Tennis became popular because of the success of the “Four Musketeers” (a group of French tennis professionals) and Roland Garros tennis stadium, which today hosts the annual French Open, was built in the southwest of the city in 1928. The innovative architect Le Corbusier (1887–1965), born in Switzerland but who adopted French citizenship and spent part of his professional career in Paris, designed forward-looking buildings in the city during the Interwar years: the Swiss residence at the Cité Universitaire and the Cité de Refuges, a housing project in the thirteenth arrondissement sponsored by the Salvation Army.

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From the banlieue during the Interwar years, big industry expanded into neighboring departments. The emerging economic region corresponded to the older geographic and administrative Île de France. The large automobile manufacturer Renault was already in Boulogne-Billancourt and the Citroën automobile factory, founded by the Parisian André Citroën (1878–1935), opened in the far northern suburb of Saint-Ouen. Citroën was an innovative car manufacturer that, in the 1930s, experimented with a variety of vehicles. The suburbs continued to attract industry because there were few regulations governing economic activity, and these were barely enforced. The Paris suburbs were characterized by commercial and residential sprawl. The Paris suburbs were also an ethnic melting pot, drawing workers from Eastern and Southern Europe, most of whom lived in substandard conditions. The crumbling thirty-five-kilometer Thiers Wall of the 1840s, which had long defined the Parisian periphery, was torn down after 1926. The area around it—the Zone—had long since become a place of slums with a marginalized population. Some sections were especially bad. Beginning in the 1890s, municipal authorities identified îlots insalubres as areas of the city plagued by poverty and disease that were to be improved. Eventually, seventeen îlots insalubres were identified, most of them in the banlieue. An outbreak of bubonic plague (!) in the seventeenth arrondissement in the early 1920s, though quickly contained, brought the point home. Everyone recognized the problems, and yet solutions were hard to find. Funding was one issue: as always, private investors shied away from building workingclass housing and government funding was difficult to secure. “Garden estate” allotments (lottissements)—an idea borrowed from Belgium and Britain—were a post-war experiment in working-class housing. But these residences were unregulated, and many turned into squalid hovels, the poverty of their residents (mal-lotis) a shock to visitors and a contrast with the splendid neighborhoods not far away. The Prost Plan (1934), named after the urban planner Henri Prost, was produced just before France’s Popular Front experiment initiated greater administrative control over the entire Paris region with strict commercial and residential zoning, the construction of healthier working-class housing (including space for courtyards and parks), improvements to sewer and other infrastructure, and expansion of transportation (especially roads, though not the Métro). But there was local resistance, and few of the initiatives of the Prost Plan were fully carried out. Suburban poverty and poor working-class housing in Paris remained problems through the twentieth century, contributing to political radicalization.

3 Colonial Exposition of 1931 Paris was the capital of a French Empire that was long in the making, and as of the Interwar period included extensive territories in North and West Africa and Southeast Asia, as well as smaller possessions in the Caribbean,

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and Pacific and Indian Oceans. The French Empire had in many ways been the product of violence and force, and yet it had also created a Francophone world joined by language and culture. It was the latter that was emphasized in the 1931 Colonial Exposition held in Paris, even as revolt was breaking out in Indochina and uprisings in Morocco and Syria were on the horizon. The 1931 Expo was not the universally acclaimed success of previous Parisian Expos. The Colonial Exposition opened in May 1931 at the Porte Dorée in the southeastern twelfth arrondissement, close to the Bois de Vincennes. Several countries placed exhibits, including Belgium, the United States, Japan, and the Netherlands. During its six-month run, the Expo attracted approximately 8 million visitors and left lasting physical structures, including the Museum of African and Oceanic Arts at the Porte Dorée and a refurbished Vincennes Zoo. The Exposition revolved around France’s self-proclaimed civilizing mission. A perhaps unintended message of the Expo was that France would not force assimilation: indigenous peoples could speak for themselves, though French language and culture were cast as a unifying force. For some Parisians, the Exposition generated interest in African and Asian literature and cuisine. But other French and colonials disagreed with the messages of the 1931 Exposition. The French Communist Party (PCF), working with the Comintern (an international clearinghouse for revolution that was headquartered in the Soviet Union) and the CGT, organized their own colonial counter-exposition titled “The Truth on the Colonies.” The counter-expo highlighted French abuses in the colonies, including the prevalence of forced labor (corvée). In the counter-expo, French imperialist policy was contrasted negatively with progressive Soviet “nationalities” policy. But the counter-expo attracted far fewer people than the official Colonial Exposition. International students visiting the Colonial Exposition could stay at the Cité Internationale Universitaire. The Cité Universitaire is located on the Boulevard Jourdan in the fourteenth arrondissement, across from the Parc Montsouris and close to the old Thiers’ wall. It is a campus with residence halls, administrative and education buildings, restaurants, sports fields, and other amenities for international students studying at Parisian colleges and schools. The Cité was created by a law of 1921 and the first residence opened in 1925. By 1939, there were nineteen halls with 2,400 beds. Some countries— Belgium, the United States, Japan, and others—had their own houses; the famous architect Le Corbusier designed the distinctive Swiss house. The Fondation des États-Unis for American students opened in 1930. The Cité Universitaire expanded after the Second World War, becoming well-known to generations of visiting students. Among them was the poet, author, and future president of Senegal, Léopold Sénghor, who stayed at the Fondation Deutsch de la Meurthe. Sénghor was a Francophone and Francophile. Even so, he was openly critical of French colonial policy—a typically ambiguous attitude of students and expats from the French empire staying in Paris.

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4 Matignon Accords and economic nationalization France had a Popular Front government from 1936 to 1938. This was an alliance of parties of the political Left—communists, socialists, and Radical-Socialists—designed to counter the rise of fascism and devise an economic program that would solve the economic downturn of the Great Depression. There were a handful of Popular Front governments across the world endorsed by the Soviet Union. France’s Popular Front was marked by important gains for the working class but also by crises and resistance that brought it down on the eve of the Second World War. The Popular Front was headed by the Socialist politician and Parisian-born Léon Blum (1872–1950) and came to power in elections of May 1936. The new government was immediately faced with a huge wave of strikes (more than 12,000 across France), in which 150,000 Parisian workers, organized by the CGT and PCF, took the lead. The strikers introduced the new tactic of occupying factories and work places. Strikes took place in the industrial banlieue, but also in other settings—restaurants, the grands magasins, and public services. The strikes were the culmination of years of grievances. They were accompanied by a surge of class-conscious and fraternal enthusiasm, even a festival air, that was long remembered by participants like Simone Weil. For a brief time in the 1930s, anything seemed possible (Figure 9.3).

FIGURE 9.3 Left Bank quay bookstalls, 1931. Notre-Dame Cathedral is in the background. (Alamy BOK708)

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Blum’s response to the strike wave of 1936 was to bring together industry and union leaders to talk and reach an agreement. The setting was Paris’s Matignon hôtel, an eighteenth-century aristocratic residence on the Rue de Varenne, that had been the Austro-Hungarian embassy from 1888 to 1914, and now under the Popular Front was a government building. Participating as spokesperson for the PCF was Maurice Thorez (1900–64), a former coal miner from the Pas-de-Calais region, who would lead the Communist Party until his death. The result of the talks was the ground-breaking Matignon Accords, which produced long-lasting and popular gains for the French working class, including reinforcement of the principle of collective bargaining, improvements in pay, a forty-hour workweek, and paid vacation. For Blum, part of the economic thinking behind the Accords was to hasten the evolution of workers into consumers—giving them more spending power and thereby stimulating the French economy. Initially, the government did not devalue the French franc, though rising inflation eventually forced it to do so. The Popular Front government nationalized the Bank of France and munitions industries, and brought the railroads under the aegis of the SNCF (Société nationale de chemins de fers français), a private-public entity that continues to operate the very efficient (as generally acknowledged) French rail system. Yet there was much political resistance to the Popular Front from conservative circles, as well as growing dissension from the PCF. A wave of Communist-led strikes hit the Paris automobile industry in 1938, and the Popular Front fell soon after.

CULTURE 1 Post-modern mood The image of twentieth-century Paris changed from the nineteenth century. The city was no longer the Capital of Revolution—that distinction now shifted to the Soviet Union—and she was no longer the Capital of Modernity—that distinction probably belonged to New York City. Paris after 1918–19 negotiated a path between tradition and progress. Yet problems related to urban planning—the unsettled suburban Zone and the inner streets becoming clogged with automobiles—were telling. A “postmodern” mood came with the disillusionment produced by the Great War’s senseless slaughter, and nowhere was this felt more intensely than Paris. Paris in the 1920s and 1930s was not dangerous in the way that the Chicago of Al Capone was (Parisians have shown a fascination with this era of American history), but there was nevertheless a criminal underworld known as the “milieu.” The familiar Parisian flic (cop) walked the beat with his képi cap and short cape (pelerine), reassuring locals and visitors that things were okay. Paris attracted outsiders, and one of the things that drew them were museums, libraries, and archives. Paris had had great museums

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for more than a century: The Louvre was opened to the public in 1791, and more public museums opened in the nineteenth century: the Musée Carnavalet (the museum of the city of Paris) in 1880 and the adjacent Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris (a research destination for scholars) in 1898. In 1937, the Trocadéro across the river from the Eiffel Tower was remade into the Palais de Chaillot, which included a Museum of Mankind with an emphasis on ethnography. The 1920s and 1930s saw a wave of museum-building for the Legion of Honor, Public Assistance, Police, and Airplanes; and for the works of individual artists, including Rodin and Monet. Some of these were established by the national government, others by bequests from individuals. All enhanced Paris’s place as a world center of art and learning, and a magnet for tourists and scholars. By 1919, artistic and intellectual ferment had shifted from the Right Bank and Montmartre to the Left Bank’s Montparnasse, Boulevard SaintGermain, and Latin Quarter. Surrealist writers Louis Aragon and André Breton, taking up the Dadaist rejection of bourgeois values, looked at the shadowy, irregular corners of the city. Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris of 1926 (Peasant of Paris) is a flâneur who prefers the odd, manmade terrain of the Buttes de Chaumont to the chic boulevards of the upper bourgeoise. The native Parisian Jean Renoir (1894–1979), son of the Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, produced classic films prescient of the coming Second World War and France’s defeat of 1940: Rules of the Game (1937) and Grand Illusion (1939). His La Marseillaise (1938) offered a realistic story of the French Revolution and a message of national unity as the shadows of the war against Nazi Germany deepened. Cosmopolitan artists were very much a part of the Interwar Parisian ambiance. The bohemian Anaïs Nin (1903–77) was born in Paris to an artistic family but lived abroad much of her life. By the 1920s, she was back in Paris and in the thick of the Left Bank artistic excitement, writing about her relationship with the American expats Henry and June Miller in scandalous multi-volume diaries. Expat Germanic writers delved deep into the history and culture of Paris in these years. The Jewish writer and journalist Joseph Roth (1894–1939) loved Paris—the great vistas and idiosyncrasies alike, where everyone (“even the cabdrivers,” he thought) were witty and worldly.10 Roth died in Paris in 1939. Another famous German in Paris during the Interwar period was Walter Benjamin (1892–1940). Benjamin was a writer and thinker of great sensitivity who fled Germany as the Nazis came to power. He spent his last years in Paris, befriending other exiled intellectuals and working to complete his long, erudite study of nineteenth-century Parisian arcades (the Arcades Project, which was published posthumously). As German forces approached in 1940, Benjamin fled. He committed suicide while trying to cross the border into Spain. The Vichy government, which collaborated with the German Occupation during the Second World War, rejected virtually all the Interwar artistic strains coming out of Paris.

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2 Pop culture and the “little people” of Paris Artistically, Paris has been a place of both high and low culture, or what we might today call pop culture. It was the Parisian pop culture of the little people—music-hall, theater, and café-concert—that was especially distinguished during the Interwar years, even sending a handful of Parisian performers on to international fame. There were several well-known popular female singers (chanteuses) in twentieth-century Paris. Fréhel (1891–1951), nicknamed “Queen of the Apaches” because of her association with the young hooligans, had a memorable voice and a sad personal ending. Damia (1889–1978) was another beloved female entertainer. But the most popular chanteuse during the twentieth century was Edith Piaf (1915–63), “La Môme Piaf,” whose career began in Paris in the Interwar period. Piaf (her original surname was “Gassion”) was born in Belleville to a family of circus performers. She grew up on the streets of working-class neighborhoods, singing to earn a little money, but also because she seemingly was born to do nothing else. A slight figure—“Piaf” was slang for “sparrow”—she had a big voice that drew upon personal experience, much of it tragic. Piaf was discovered by the promoter Louis Le Plée (he was later murdered by mobsters) and began her performing career in 1936. She moved from music-halls to the stage, recording studio and film; and from Paris to London and New York. Piaf was a tireless performer who gave everything to her fans. Among her most famous recordings were “La Vie en Rose” (1946) and “Non, je ne regrette rien” (1960). The many traumas and tragedies born of a poor working-class Parisian background came out in her music, but also contributed to an early death. Piaf is buried in a modest grave at Père Lachaise.11 Edith Piaf was part of a Parisian Interwar pop culture triumvirate that included two others from humble backgrounds with voices that came from and spoke to the people, and who went on to fame: Mistinguett and Maurice Chevalier. Jeanne Bourgeois, known as “Mistinguett” (1875–1956), started as a popular singer and “café-concert” performer in Montmartre before the Great War. She moved to revues at famous concert halls like the Moulin Rouge in Pigalle. Mistinguett was the quintessential Parisian music-hall performer. Maurice Chevalier (1888–1972), like Piaf, began as a kid from the workingclass, singing and dancing in the streets. He was born in Ménilmontant (like neighboring Belleville, in the twentieth arrondissement) and began performing at “café-concerts” at age twelve. Discovered two years later by Mistinguett, Chevalier went on to have a long career in music-halls, revues, stage, and film. He became a beloved figure with a trademark jaunty smile and cocked straw hat—the classic argot-speaking Parisian “titi” made good. Later in his life, Chevalier would add a Hollywood film career to his accomplishments. Piaf’s and Chevalier’s careers continued during the Occupation, and both performed in Germany during the war. There were accusations of collaboration, but both resumed their careers once the war was over.

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3 Jazz Age Paris had a curious relationship with non-French and non-European migrants. The habit, the ethic, the overall philosophy was that the city was open to all; Parisians themselves welcomed new ideas, new forms of art and expression. Yet, Parisians have also long been protective of the city’s and of French culture. When others came to Paris, the expectation was that they assimilate into the Parisian “way of doing things.” The civilizing mission emanated from Paris, not the other way around. Some Parisians and French were especially adamant: the political Right during the Interwar years spoke of “Frenchness” and “France for the French.” A politics of “True France,” with hints of fascism and an emphasis on national “heritage,” played out during the 1931 Colonial Exposition.12 Despite the ambivalence, visitors and migrants from Africa, Asia, and the Americas were drawn to Paris. Hundreds of thousands of colonial Africans had served in the French army during the Great War, and over 100,000 African American soldiers were in France during the United States’ participation, producing important interactions for both sides. Among the African American performers who made a career and life in Paris during the Interwar period, the most famous was Josephine Baker (1906–75). Baker was born in Saint Louis, Missouri, and in 1925 was a member of the Revue Nègre that danced in clubs along the Champs-Élysées. A unique, uninhibited performer, she took up singing and performing on her own and became wildly popular in her new home. As she sang in “J’ai deux amours” (I have two loves), Baker loved Paris and Paris loved her back. She left the capital during the Occupation, worked for the Resistance (for which she received the Croix de Guerre after the war), and returned with the Liberation. Many African Americans seemed to have a true affinity for Paris. While African American performers were becoming the rage in Paris, black university students, mostly from West Africa and the French Caribbean, worked at creating an intellectual culture in the French capital, forming associations and formulating ideas that became the roots of post-war Négritude. American jazz music and jazz musicians were enthusiastically received in Paris in the early 1920s. Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington toured Paris during the Interwar years and again after the end of the Second World War: jazz seemed amenable to both the Surrealistic artistic movement of the 1920s and the Existentialist mood in philosophy and literature of the post-1945 era. Another jazz aficionado who made Paris his home, though he was not from the United States, was the guitarist Jean “Django” Reinhardt (1910–53), who was born in Belgium to a family of Romani background. In Paris in the 1930s, Django played a unique style of jazz guitar that continues to influence musicians through today. Paris welcomed these performers and their new music from outside France. But during Vichy, which emphasized cultural nationalism, they no longer felt welcome. Baker left Paris while working for its liberation, and

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Django spent the war years “laying low” and trying to escape occupied France. Romani, like Jews, were targeted for deportation or execution by the Nazis, and Django was fortunate to survive the war.

4 Anneés folles The anneés folles were Paris’s “crazy years”—the “Roaring Twenties” as they were known across the Atlantic. A desire to celebrate the end of the Great War and to forget its disasters, combined with the arrival of foreign contributions like jazz, made Paris a capital of fun and frivolity during the Interwar period. Josephine Baker was not the only beloved American in Paris. George Gershwin devised the scenario and music for “An American in Paris” while visiting in the 1920s. Ada “Bricktop” Smith arrived from West Virginia to open clubs in Montmartre that served as a welcome center for African Americans. For Bricktop, raised in an atmosphere of naked racism in the United States,“Paris was definitely unlike home—in a good way.”13 “Hot Jazz” was the improvisational style brought by the New Orleans-born Louis Armstrong. In the 1920s, jazz bands and clubs dotted the streets of Montparnasse and Montmartre where many African American expats lived. Some Parisians showed an inclination to intellectualize the new cultural form: Hugues Panassié’s Le Jazz Hot (1934) was a testimonial to the avidness of local music fans.14 The obsession with jazz diminished a bit by the late 1920s, partly because of labor tensions, as Parisian musicians protested foreigners taking jobs. In 1925, Paris may well have been the music capital of the world. It was not just American jazz; there was also music from Spain, Russia, and Mexico coming out of neighborhood cabarets, café-concerts, and music-halls. Paris was a mecca for French and foreign composers during the Interwar period including Gabriel Faure, Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, and Francis Polenc.15 Alice Prin (1901–53), known as “Kiki de Montparnasse,” was part of the popular avant-garde during the anneés folles. Kiki was born into poverty in rural France, arriving in Paris in 1913 at age twelve. She became a successful artists’ model, and then friend and confidante of many in the bohemian crowd that frequented Left Bank café’s like La Coupole and Café Rotonde: Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti, Henri Matisse, and Joan Miró. The American photographer Man Ray was her companion in the 1920s. Kiki performed on the stage and opened her own café on the Left Bank.16 Films about Paris of the 1920s and 1930s were also part of the pop culture genre: Maurice Chevalier and Edith Piaf both went from the cabaret to the film studio, while the movies of the filmmaker René Clair (Le 14 juillet [1933] and Hôtel du Nord [1938]) delved into the extraordinary lives of ordinary Parisians set in the streets and Métro stops rather than the familiar postcard

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settings of touristic Paris. The most popular French film actor of the day was the native Parisian Jean Gabin (1904–76), who, like Chevalier and Piaf, came from the little people. Gabin brought his Parisian background to “tough guy” roles in films like Le Quai des brumes (1938) and Le Jour se Lève (1939). A little later, Zazous were young wartime Parisians copying the flair of screen actors like Gabin who dressed in outlandish style, with dark glasses and dyed hair in defiance of German occupiers and French collaborators.

Conclusion The twentieth century saw a shift in strategic relationships across Europe. Germany and the Soviet Union replaced France as the great Continental powers. This shift in the relative place of nations had an impact on the French capital, which was near the front lines of fighting against German forces during the First World War and was occupied by German soldiers for most of the Second World War. The indignity of defeat in 1940, the Occupation years marked by shortages and collaboration, and the assistance that some French gave to the Germans in carrying out the Final Solution left a deep psychological mark on Paris, as it did on the rest of France. Similar to another traumatic moment in the city’s history—the Commune of 1871—Parisians seemed for many years after 1945 to try to block out or forget the German Occupation of 1940–44. But Paris interacted not only with Germany and Germans in the first half of the twentieth century, but with many persons coming from other parts of the world. The city continued to draw working-class populations, especially from sections of Eastern and Southern Europe ravaged either by poverty or war. Jewish immigrants arrived in large numbers, along with Poles and Italians. Many of these new immigrants ended up in the workingclass neighborhoods of Belleville or Ménilmontant or in the banlieue, living close to the factories where they worked. Parisian workers from the banlieue were politicized, mostly joining parties on the Left. By the Interwar years, a mostly bourgeois Paris was surrounded by a working-class Red Belt in the banlieue. Cultural trends came to Paris from elsewhere, too, including jazz brought from the United States by African American artists. Paris continued to attract artists of all sorts from across the world who found the city inviting and open to new ideas and styles. Paris was a cosmopolitan center: capital of both the French republic and the French empire—a paradoxical condition that would have ramifications through the remainder of the twentieth century, when the empire ended and the republic encouraged immigration from the former colonies. Paris seemed to welcome the outside world even as hints of xenophobia showed up in the words and programs of the French government, and then in the varieties of the French fascism that emerged during the Interwar period. This paradoxical condition—Paris as Capital of the World even as some Parisians voiced anti-immigrant ideas—would persist into the twenty-first century.

10 Paris: Post-War through de Gaulle

Chronolgy 1944 Liberation 1945

Execution of Pierre Laval

1946–58 Fifth Republic 1954–62 Algerian War of Independence 1958

Charles de Gaulle elected president of Fifth Republic— development of La Défense begins

1961

Creation of Paris region—massacre of Algerian protesters— RER launched—OAS terrorist bombings

1962

Malraux law

1964

Seine department reorganized

1967

Peripheral highway completed

1968

Student rebellion and labor strikes

1969

Suburban market established at Rungis—de Gaulle leaves office as president

Introduction By the end of the Second World War, Germany was defeated, physically devastated, and divided into two occupied zones. Japan, too, was defeated

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and occupied. France and Britain—the dominant imperial powers of the world since the eighteenth century—were on the winning side in 1945, but now were much diminished, ready to see their empires come to an end and in a second rank behind incipient “Superpowers” the United States and Soviet Union. If there was a Capital of the World in 1945, it was no longer Paris, but probably either New York or Washington, D.C. France and many other countries were caught between the Cold War-era Soviet and American models of modernization. The year “1945” was a watershed moment that saw the global balance of power shift from Western Europe to the extra-European powers of the United States and Soviet Union. The disorientation produced by this shift in global power showed up culturally in Existentialism—a “mood” that questioned the meaning and direction of modernity and found expression in philosophy, literature, music, and film. Existentialism’s home was Paris. The post-1945 years were a period of recovery for much of Europe, Asia, and the Soviet Union from the devastation of the Second World War. Marshall Plan money from the United States helped Western and Central Europe rebuild, but also contributed to the Cold War rivalry. China followed her own version of Marxism-Leninism. The United States, especially, but also the Soviet Union fostered a “neo-imperialism” even as the older, European empires across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East fell apart, and new or renewed nations came on the world scene. Some of the colonial separations were relatively amicable: India and Britain remained friendly. But some of the colonial separations were difficult and violent—Algeria’s War of Independence from France especially so. Vietnam and other nations that were part of the French territory of Indochina became independent, too, but only after decades of wars of liberation against France and the United States. Where Europeans had earlier gone to live in colonial territories in Africa and Asia, now Africans and Asians emigrated to France, Britain, and the Netherlands. Decolonization and the Cold War ran parallel for most of the second half of the twentieth century, complicating global and regional affairs and dividing the world into camps. And yet, the decades from the end of the Second World War through the 1960s—the Trentes Glorieuses (thirty glorious years)—saw tremendous economic recovery in France, Europe, and parts of Asia, including Japan. Improving living standards and greater educational and material resources produced healthier populations with extra money to spend and extra time to devote to leisure. “Youth” and youth culture assumed an unprecedented prominence by the 1960s. The year 1968 was an especially significant moment, politically and culturally, in many countries. It seemed like young people everywhere were at the forefront, perhaps most famously in Paris in May 1968. For France, the United States, Mexico, and Vietnam, “’68” was a watershed politically and culturally that had long-term consequences.

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POLITICS 1 Fourth Republic France’s Fourth Republic (1944–58) followed the Liberation and fall of Vichy. Its first two years saw a Provisional Government headed by Charles de Gaulle. In 1946, de Gaulle left the government as a new constitution was approved by national referendum. Like the Third Republic, the Fourth Republic was dominated by the legislature and its political parties. Internationally, the Fourth Republic’s main task was to preside over the often-hesitant decolonization of the French Empire; domestically, the task was to modernize the economy and improve the standard of living. Some of the political parties of the Fourth Republic had roots and a strong base of support in the capital. Among these was the French Communist Party (PCF), which was born in 1920 in the wake of the Russian Revolution when the French Socialist Party split. One wing remained the Socialist Party and the other attached itself to the Soviet-dominated Comintern to become the Parti Communiste Français. The PCF won control of Jean Jaurès’s newspaper L’Humanité, which after 1945 became one of the most influential communist newspapers in the world. L’Humanité moved its offices to the working-class suburb of Saint-Denis. Like other communist parties, the PCF adhered to policies formulated in Moscow. This loyalty began to fade among party members (less so among party leaders) after the death of Stalin in 1953 and the advent of “de-Stalinization” in 1956. The PCF leader during the Fourth Republic continued to be Maurice Thorez (1900–64), who had spent the war years in Moscow. In most respects, Thorez had been a hardline adherent to both the Comintern, until its demise during the war, and to Stalinism. After the Liberation, the PCF allied for the time with the SFIO, even as de Gaulle worked assiduously, with American support, to weaken the party. Citing its wartime role as résistants to German Occupation, the PCF did well in national elections in 1945, winning just over a quarter of the vote. Thorez moderated the party platform, even allowing party officials to sit with the government. But by the end of the decade, the Left coalition had split, while a new labor organization with strong support in Paris emerged: the CGT-Force Ouvrière (or FO). For the remainder of the Fourth Republic under Thorez’s leadership, the PCF stayed out of government and in competition with the FO. Paris’s Red Belt remained a special source of support for the PCF through the Fourth Republic. An immediate concern in Paris after the war was curbing popular retribution—“épuration”—against persons suspected of having collaborated with the Nazis. Some of this effort was channeled into official trials. But with the Liberation in August 1944, there were also spontaneous acts of popular vengeance in Paris, as elsewhere in France, against suspected collaborators. Members of the Vichy state police, the Milice, along with former administrators and a handful of political leaders were arrested,

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tried, and in some cases executed. Businesses whose owners had cooperated with the Germans were seized, including the giant Renault auto factory in the Parisian banlieue. Persons suspected of being collabos were publicly harassed and beaten. The author Robert Brasillach and the Vichy Prime Minister Pierre Laval were executed on charges of treason, and the actress Arletty was sent to prison for having had an affair with a German officer. The head of Vichy, the former general Philippe Pétain, was imprisoned at Fort Montrouge in the southern suburb, tried at Paris’s Palais de Justice, and sentenced to death in 1945, though this was commuted by de Gaulle.

2 De Gaulle and Paris Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970) strode into Paris and post-war politics as France was liberated from the German Occupation. Defying British and American wartime allies, de Gaulle returned to liberated Paris (only just liberated, as there was still fighting on the outskirts of the city) on August 25, 1944, making a triumphal march down the Champs-Élysées where he ceremonially relit the flame to the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. This was followed the next day by a procession to Notre-Dame Cathedral. Arrogant and proud, de Gaulle seemed determined to bend France and Paris to his will. Among his first acts were to clamp down on the PCF—he feared the possibility of another Commune—and to bring the popular revenge against collabos under control. A long-time rival of Pétain, de Gaulle pardoned the old general from execution, but did not interfere in his imprisonment. De Gaulle was from Lille in northern France, and over a long career in the military had had a mostly distant relationship with Paris and Parisians. After the Liberation, he headed the Provisional Government of the Fourth Republic until, disgusted with political stalemate, retreated to his home, the village of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, in 1946. In the 1950s, the Algerian War of Independence brought demonstrations and acts of terrorism to Paris. A full-fledged crisis developed in the spring of 1958 when army officers staged a coup in Algiers and threatened to send paras (colonial soldiers) to Paris to overthrow the government and keep Algérie française. Tanks were parked around the National Assembly, and there were demonstrations by the political Left on the boulevards. Civil strife seemed imminent. In this situation, de Gaulle returned, once again, to Paris. He faced down the rebellious officers in Algeria and presented himself as a savior to the Assembly and the republic. A national referendum in September endorsed de Gaulle’s call for a new constitution, and on January 1, 1959, he was inaugurated as the first president of a Fifth Republic. In office, de Gaulle was more attuned to foreign than to domestic policy, turning over Parisian affairs mostly to his ministerial appointees. Under de Gaulle, Paris saw important structural and cultural developments. Building projects abounded under Georges Pompidou, who was prime minister from

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1962 until 1968. Pompidou wanted to make Paris as modern—or more so— than other European capitals, and thought the automobile was the (literal) vehicle for this. In 1957, just before de Gaulle came to power, Paris had more than 3,000 streets, 314 avenues, 139 public squares, 108 boulevards, 52 quays, and 30 bridges spanning the Seine.1 New high-speed highways were built connecting Paris with other French cities, including Lyon and Lille. The automobile périphérique circling the city was completed in 1967. Construction of the RER (Réseau Express Régional) regional commuter rail line was begun, and improvements made to the Métro. The novelist André Malraux was appointed the minister of culture and he implemented policies to beautify the city and preserve historical landmarks. Tourism increased, even during a period of demonstrations and terrorism in the early 1960s. Paris was host to numerous international events in these years. France was a member of the United Nations Security Council, and Paris became headquarters for the UN’s cultural agency, UNESCO. The modern UNESCO building was designed by an international team and opened at Paris’s Place de Fontenoy on the Left Bank in 1958. A UNESCO conference of 1968 started the global conversation on what we would today call “sustainable” development. In the momentous year of 1968, talks between North Vietnam and the United States were begun in Paris, and would eventually lead to the Paris Peace Accords of 1973 and the end of the war in Indochina.

3 The Algerian War and terrorism Terrorism has a long history in modern Paris. The term was first used during the French Revolution to describe a government policy enacted to frighten enemies and as a survival strategy during the first French Republic. There were numerous assassination attempts against King Louis-Philippe during the July Monarchy, and bombings and other terrorist acts in the 1890s by anarchists trying to unravel society from the top down. Terrorism returned to Paris during the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62). Support in Paris to keep Algérie française was always limited and declined over the years. The PCF was against the war and French colonialism in general; party leaders and intellectuals—including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus (who was born and raised in Algeria)—spoke and demonstrated against the war from Paris. In 1961, a “Manifesto of the 121” signed by intellectuals and film stars urged French soldiers to desert rather than carry on an “immoral” war in which torture was used. In Algeria, the independence movement was led by the Front Libération Nationale (FLN), which did not have a regular army and so employed a strategy of guerrilla tactics and terrorism—the latter including bombings and assassinations of official and civilian targets. Quickly, the war in Algeria became bitter and bloody on both sides. The FLN carried some of their strategy to Paris, using plastic explosives that produced civilian casualties and public anxiety. The

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Paris police responded aggressively under the prefect Maurice Papon. Some of the “dirty war” tactics used by the French military in Algeria came to Paris. Algerians living in the capital were placed under surveillance and arrested on the slightest suspicion. In October 1961, a demonstration of 25,000 North Africans (most of them from the banlieue) produced hundreds of arrests and as many as 200 killed, their bodies dumped in the Seine under cover of night. It took decades before the massacre was uncovered and Papon—who had also contributed to the Final Solution during Vichy—brought to account. Earlier in April 1961, there had been a national crisis as de Gaulle forestalled an attempted coup by members of the army who hoped to keep Algeria part of France. Sunday, April 23, 1961, saw tanks surrounding the National Assembly, Parisian streets deserted, and de Gaulle calling upon French citizens and soldiers to oppose the brewing rebellion of army colonels and generals. His personal appeal won the day. The final escalation in the terrorist violence began when disaffected army officers and ultras (diehard colonists of European descent) took up terrorist tactics in an effort to keep Algeria French. The Organisation armée secrète (OAS) resisted the French departure from Algeria with bombings and assassinations, including as many as thirty attempts (!) on de Gaulle. The main OAS campaign in Paris lasted from August 1961 through February 1962, during which sixteen police were killed and many others wounded. The terrorists launched attacks with plastic explosives against PCF headquarters and against celebrities opposed to the Algerian war, like Sartre and Malraux. The OAS outrages led to massive demonstrations by Parisians, as well as heavyhanded police responses that left eight protestors dead during a February 1962 demonstration. By this time, Paris and France had turned almost unanimously against Algérie française. De Gaulle had already initiated peace talks with the FLN, and in the Évian Accords of March 1962, Algeria won her independence. Algerian colons and Harkis (former Soldiers) were already fleeing, many of whom would make new homes in Paris.

4 May 1968 The year 1968 was momentous for France, beginning with a student revolt in Paris that turned into a nationwide general strike of workers. It was a time of generational shift and a turning away from the political consensus fashioned by Charles de Gaulle. Internationally, the events in Paris coincided with a student revolt in Mexico, a rebellion in Prague against Soviet hegemony, the ongoing American war in Vietnam, and political assassinations and civil strife in the United States. Years later, participants in the events of May 1968 mostly remembered the moment of euphoria and the sense that, for a brief time, anything seemed possible. The student revolt of 1968 began at Nanterre-Paris X, a relatively new suburban campus of the University of Paris system with 13,000 students, most of whom came from bourgeois families living in Paris’s sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth arrondissements. Buildings and dormitories at Nanterre

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were cold, lifeless, and poorly built. Classes were large and anonymous. Students regarded themselves as being groomed for a professional or service “proletariat” they did not like. Nanterrisme, meaning youthful disaffection, migrated to the Latin Quarter and the “Boul Mich” (the northern end of the Boulevard Saint-Michel that was close to the university district). A large student demonstration at the Sorbonne in the first week of May 1968 was followed by more demonstrations, arrests, and media coverage. The Sorbonne was closed. On May 10, barricades appeared in the Latin Quarter and crowds took to the streets. Students labeled police and authorities “fascists.” Some professors, especially in sociology, urged the students on. The attitude of student rebels was guided by slogans written as graffiti on walls and buildings: “Under the paving stones, the beach”; “Even if God existed, he would have to be abolished”; “Be realistic: ask for the impossible”; and the most famous: “It is forbidden to forbid.” The best-known student leader was Daniel Cohn-Bendit (born 1945; nicknamed “Dany le Rouge” because of his red hair). Their heroes were Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, Leon Trotsky, and Jimi Hendrix. Cars were burned, and there were some injuries, but no deaths. Striking workers joined the student revolt in mid-May. In Paris, a police force—the CRS (Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité), which had been founded in 1944—was dispatched to control the crowds. Most CRS recruits came from working-class families. They were poorly paid, but had an esprit de corps. The two—CRS and students—now became combatants on the streets of Paris. There were also reactionary student groups opposed to the rebels, including one called “Occident” that included former members of the OAS. In other parts of the city, some Parisians seemed mystified by the May events. The government’s initial response was confused. President de Gaulle was mysteriously out of the country for several days. Finally, he made a national television address on May 30, announcing elections for a new National Assembly. This was followed by a pro-Gaullist demonstration on the Champs-Élysées that may have attracted a half-million of the French “silent majority.” On June 14, the Sorbonne was cleared by police and cleaners sent in to “disinfect” the space. The elections to the National Assembly would be dominated by Gaullists (Figure 10.2). May 1968 had a profound long-term political and cultural impact. The French university system was de-centralized and made less impersonal. Workers won numerous concessions. Looking back, many see “’68” as the birth of the French women and gay rights movements. Some of the student leaders would write memoirs creating a virtual mythology about the events of May. One of the students, Guy Hocquenghem (1946–88), became a prominent writer and gay activist. Cohn-Bendit was elected to the European Parliament in 1994. But others viewed 1968 negatively: the politician Nicolas Sarkozy portrayed the students as spoiled malcontents and denounced the cultural influence of 1968 when he ran for president in 2007. The generational and cultural divide that sprouted in Paris in May 1968 lingers through today.2

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FIGURE 10.1  Immigrants, probably from Algeria, 1950. “La Ville d’Oran” is named after a city in northern Algeria. Many North African migrants rented rooms at places such as this. Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images.

SOCIETY 1 Colonial immigration Paris’s population reached a peak of 2.9 million after the First World War. In 1936, the city’s population stood at 2.8 million but by 1990 it was down to 2.1 million. The decline occurred even though overseas emigration, especially from territories in the fading French Empire, accelerated after 1945. The suburban population grew tremendously as the population of Paris proper stabilized. African, Asian, and Caribbean immigrants were joined by Eastern and Southern Europeans, many of them leaving warscarred territories. A worker shortage led to active recruitment by French firms in South and Eastern Europe and in North Africa. Tens of thousands of Portuguese, including women hired as domestic help, arrived in the early 1960s. Working in the city during the day, these women returned at night to apartments or rented rooms in the banlieue (Figure 10.1). The Fourth Republic (1946–58), which succeeded the collaborationist Vichy regime and a post-war Provisional Government, presided over the dissolution of the French Empire. French territories in North and West Africa—Senegal, Madagascar, Morocco, and others—underwent processes

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FIGURE 10.2  A police officer faces a crowd probably made up mostly of students during the May 1968 “mini-revolution.” Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/ CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images.

of independence jointly managed by African and French officials. Most territories saw an amicable separation, with promises to maintain ties through a French Community (resembling the British Commonwealth). However, some of the separations were very difficult: Vietnam, where the French military was decisively defeated at the battle of Dienbienphu in 1954 (though the Vietnamese struggle for independence subsequently would go on for years against the United States) and especially Algeria, where a sizeable minority of persons of European descent (colons or Pied Noirs), working with supporters in France, insisted on keeping Algérie française (French Algeria). The terrible Algerian War of Independence lasted from 1954 until 1962. At the end, Pied Noirs fled Algeria. Most made new homes in Southern France, but many went to Paris. Vietnamese immigrants arrived in the French capital in two waves: the mid-1950s following the French military defeat and the late 1970s after the defeat of the Americans. Immigrants from French colonies, perhaps with ties to the colonial administration or having served in colonial forces, were among those who moved permanently to France and Paris. Harkis were native Algerians who served in the French military during the Algerian War of Independence. Many Harkis and their families fled after 1962. Eventually, about 100,000 Harkis settled in and around the capital. In Paris, the immigrant Arabic population, always an object of police surveillance, was now watched even more closely. The Arab Bureau of

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the 1920s was gone, but the policy of keeping tabs on people in cafés and hôtels garnis persisted after 1945.3 Many immigrant North Africans— Algerians, Tunisians, and Moroccans—lived in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth arrondissements, including the Goutte d’Or section of northern Paris, where, during the Algerian War, there were some organizing and agitation, especially by young people sympathetic to the Algerian independence movement (the FLN) (Figure 10.2). When Maurice Papon (1910–2007) became Paris prefect of police in March 1958, the surveillance of North Africans intensified. The tactics used by Papon’s police bordered on “counter-insurgency”: there were identity checks and persons were arrested and held in detention without being charged. Relations between immigrant North Africans and Paris police became tense in the late 1950s and early 1960s. A demonstration by Algerians in October 1961 led to a massacre by police—subsequently, long disregarded by the public and government—of at least 200 Algerians, whose bodies were dumped in the Seine under cover of night. A cover-up was put in place, until it was finally exposed in the 1990s. Papon, who had also aided in the deportation of French Jews during the Vichy regime, was tried and sentenced to a prison term.

2 Suburban housing A shortage of affordable working-class housing had plagued Paris since at least the mid-nineteenth century. Commentators, city officials, planners, politicians, and workers had long lamented the problem. The rebuilding of central Paris by Baron Haussmann during the Second Empire included strategies to erect affordable working-class housing, but these did not work because private contractors did not consider it profitable and the government would not subsidize the construction. The “HBMs” (habitations à bon marché) of the pre-war years became the “HLMs” (habitations à loyer moderé) of the post-war years. Former working-class sections of Paris like the Rue Mouffetard on the Left Bank (to cite one example) had by the 1960s become bourgeois preserves, with workers driven out by high rents and residences converted into apartments for students attending nearby universities. With the expansion of industry to the banlieue in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, there was an expectation that entrepreneurs would build housing for workers laboring in adjacent industries. But as became quickly clear, that housing was often sub-standard. As the city center evolved into a mostly bourgeois enclave, slums cropped up in the banlieue. “Bidonvilles” (from bidon—can) were the post-1945 shantytowns whose immigrant residents, mostly from North Africa, lived in a state of poverty that shocked observers. An ethnic and racial element was now added to the distinctions of social class that separated central from peripheral Paris. As the Parisian suburbs grew in the 1960s, they increasingly became dominated by first- and second-generation immigrant communities.

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Banlieusards more-and-more were working-class North and West African immigrants and their children. Many were employed in suburban industry or commuted by bus or foot to jobs in central Paris. Unemployment for this sector of the population became a problem by the 1960s. In the mid-1950s, Parisian officials worked with urban planners and architects (Le Corbusier was one influence) to initiate a program of modern, affordable housing for the banlieue. In 1960, the planning agency SARP (Service d’aménagement de la région parisienne) produced a plan—PADOG (Plan d’aménagement et d’organisation générale)—that called for suburban high-rise apartment complexes surrounded by green spaces and commercial zones for groceries and other goods. A national reorganization of departments and regions in 1964 accelerated the development. New, tall residential buildings started to go up in the suburbs, and Paris’s peripheral skyline changed dramatically. As these grandes ensembles (large clusters of buildings) sprouted, prospective working-class tenants, including mothers concerned about accommodations for young children, were given a chance to express their views on design and amenities. Other structural developments for the suburbs were in the making, too. In 1961, construction began on a peripheral highway around Paris and on the RER to provide commuter train service to link the suburbs with the Paris Métro. This would be the first time that banlieusards could use the subway to get quickly to central Paris.4 The new housing developments were an improvement over the bidonvilles and mal-lotissements of the past, though they brought problems of their own, generating political unrest that erupted in the 1980s.

3 University students A global youth movement developed in the post-war period, in Paris as elsewhere. The Parisian youth movement reached a crescendo during the student revolt of May 1968. Demographic change was part of the story. After more than a century of stagnation, France’s population began to expand after the Second World War due to immigration and natural growth: from 41 million at the end of the war to more than 60 million by the turn of the century. At the same time, more-and-more French were living in cities—in Paris, especially the banlieue. In France, as elsewhere, there was a relationship between the end of world war, urbanization, population growth, and the youth movement. In Paris, universities played a paramount role as a place where young people matured intellectually and where they could organize. The University of Paris had a long history dating from the twelfth century, and the Sorbonne—its powerful college of theology—from the thirteenth century. Napoleon detached the University from its relationship with the Catholic Church, and over the next two centuries it expanded its curriculum and facilities. By the post-1945 years, the University had grown very large—300,000 students in 1970—and had become unwieldy

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and unresponsive to students and faculty alike. The May 1968 revolt was a sign that change was overdue. Two years after the revolt of May 1968, the University was broken up into thirteen autonomous units distributed across Paris and her suburbs. Overseas cultural and political ideas impacted Parisian youth, too. Many students rejected the American model of laissez-faire and crass commercialism (“Coca-Colonization”) that was spreading across the world, even as American music (rock and roll), films, and blue jeans won them over. Politically, Parisian youth seemed sympathetic to social democratic ideas, but leery of Soviet-style authoritarianism. The PCF cultivated Parisian youth with annual festivals and rock music concerts. Socially and demographically, the Parisian youth movement was dominated by young men born in Paris or the departments, most of them from the middle classes. Some foreign students, including Africans, participated in the events of 1968. Female students were active, though it was more difficult for them to assume leadership roles. The best-known leader of the student revolt was Daniel Cohn-Bendit, of mixed German-French and Jewish heritage, and twenty-three years old in 1968. Like many of his generational cohort, Cohn-Bendit came from an affluent background, a quality that made it difficult to ally with militant workers when student radicals tried to influence the labor strikes of summer 1968. The physical setting of barricades and demonstrations in May 1968 was Paris’s Latin Quarter—on the Left Bank, stretching along the river to the Boulevard Saint-Germain; this had been the center of student life in Paris for centuries. But May 1968 was the Latin Quarter’s “last hurrah.” Since the breakup of the University in 1970, the Latin Quarter is no longer the center of student life, but rather a spot for tourist hotels and artisan boutiques.

4 Embourgeoisement “Embourgeoisement” means to become bourgeois. The term has mostly negative connotations: culturally middle-brow, politically supportive of laws that might restrict the rights of others, and economically egoistic (i.e., looking out only for one’s self). But embourgeoisement also meant an improving standard of living and better education. These qualities started to take hold in central Paris during the Trentes Glorieuses. Embourgeoisement also implied safety, regularity, and the notion that money offered “entrée”; that culture, tradition, and ambience were marketable goods no less than cars and groceries. Tourism was part of the process. Bourgeois Paris opened itself up to tourists in remarkable ways in the post-war decades. The native Parisian André Malraux (1904–76)—acclaimed novelist, author of Man’s Fate (1933), and of an adventurous life—was appointed minister of culture by President Charles de Gaulle in 1960. Malraux accomplished a great deal before leaving office at the end of the decade,

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including a long overdue cleaning (blanchissage) of the facades of landmark buildings that were covered with years of grime and soot made worse in the twentieth century by automobile exhaust. In 1962, Malraux oversaw the passage of a powerful law designating “Conservation Areas” for historical or aesthetic reasons. The purpose of the law was preservation of urban treasures, but with an eye toward the tourist trade. Conservation Areas could be buildings or entire neighborhoods. On Paris’s Left Bank, the Rue Mouffetard and Butte-aux-Cailles were cleaned up and rebranded to make them more appealing. Malraux’s office planned new road tunnels along the Right Bank of the Seine. The crowning success of the Malraux Law was improvement of the Marais, the Right Bank neighborhood near the river, just west of the Bastille, which had been wealthy in the seventeenth century, but had become dilapidated by the nineteenth century. Now under the new law, buildings were refurbished, streets repaved, and a campaign launched to draw in wealthy residents and the businesses to cater to them (this had the effect of driving out former working-class residents unable to keep up with rents). The great aristocratic hôtels of the district were returned to their former glory. The Picasso Museum and the Carnavalet (the museum of Parisian history) were established in former aristocratic hôtels. The Marais was gentrified, and by the 1980s was becoming one of the “coolest” parts of Paris, for both residents and tourists. Today, the Marais stands for fashion and trendiness. Paris in the post-war period became the capital of high fashion. Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel (1883–1971) endured suspicion of collaboration with the Germans during the Second World War to resume her career in parfumerie and clothes design in the post-war years. Her fashion house on the Rue Cambon had closed in 1939 but reopened in 1954. Chanel’s “little black dress” design was adopted by European and Hollywood film stars and became a sensation in the early 1960s. The clothes designer Christian Dior (1905–57) was a Parisian rival of Chanel. Dior’s New Look of the late 1940s for women’s clothing helped make Paris the post-war fashion capital of the world. Other important designers operating from the French capital were Hubert de Givenchy (clothing and perfume) and Pierre Cardin (clothing).

Carnavalet Museum

P

aris has a multitude of museums devoted to the products of human energy and imagination: art, history, literature, film, and more. The city’s first public museum was the Louvre, which opened during the French Revolution in the spirit of civic education and popular culture of the period. Other museums devoted to the army, navy, and natural

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world were created during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic years. One of the biggest and today most popular museums is the Invalides, which is France’s national military museum, adjacent to which is Napoleon’s Tomb. The Invalides and Louvre are enormous buildings, but there are also smaller, more intimate museums or maisons dedicated to the work of individual artists and writers: for instance, to the painter Pablo Picasso in the Marais district, the sculptor Auguste Rodin on the Left Bank’s seventh arrondissement, and the novelist Honoré de Balzac in one of his former residences in western Paris. The founding of Parisian museums took off in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as it became evident that they were a draw for visitors and as the city was taking on the mantle of tourist destination extraordinaire. By the First World War, there were museums dedicated to the Far East, decorative arts, the French Empire, “mankind,” and many other themes. The post-1945 period saw additional new museums open as Paris re-established her position as a tourist mecca. The Carnavalet is one of Paris’s most stimulating museums, especially for those with an interest in history. It is the only Parisian museum devoted solely to the city’s past: from her beginnings in Antiquity as “Lutetia” right up to the near-present. The Carnavalet is located on the Rue de Sévigné in the Marais district. It occupies an hôtel and courtyard built in mid-sixteenth-century Renaissance style. The famous architect Pierre Lescot may have worked on the building, and some of the sculptures probably came from the artist Jean Goujon. A century later, additional work to the hôtel was done by the architect François Mansart. Over the years, the building had several owners from the noble and wealthy classes. The word “Carnavalet” is a distortion of the name of one of the owners (the Breton noble François de Kernevenoy). The Marquise de Sévigné, famous for her letters detailing the lives of the French nobility, lived there in the late seventeenth century. In the first half of the nineteenth century, schools occupied the building. The city bought the structure in 1866 with the idea that it would become a museum devoted to Paris’s history. There was a delay following the Commune, and finally the Carnavalet was opened in 1880. As the collections grew, the neighboring Hôtel Le Peletier Saint-Fargeau was purchased and joined to the Carnavalet. Today, the collections and exhibits occupy multiple floors and include documents, maps, photos, drawings, blueprints, sculptures, and other items. Managed by municipal authorities and easily accessible from a Métro stop, the Carnavalet is a fascinating, must-see stop for those interested in the history of Paris.

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ECONOMY 1 Trente Glorieuses The Trente Glorieuses were the roughly thirty years (1945–75) during which France recovered from the Second World War, modernized her economy, and resumed a leading place in European affairs. Where the French economy in the past had seemed to “lag” compared with Britain and Germany, now there was a “take-off” and the sense that perhaps all along France had simply followed a “different path” toward modernity. Ordinary Parisians seemed to rededicate themselves to improving the appearance of the city. As the capital of France and one of the largest cities in the world, Paris was a main driver of the Trente Glorieuses. After 1945, French planners worked with other Europeans, especially West Germans, to integrate economic production, increase output and thus, presumably, prevent future conflict. France received Marshall Plan money from the United States to help rebuild and modernize (and to counter popular support for the PCF). Jean Monnet’s economic plan of 1946 emphasized heavy industry and infrastructure. Some large industries and businesses were nationalized, including banks, gas and electric companies, and public transport. The railroad system (SNCF) had already been nationalized during the Popular Front. France now had a centrally directed, if not exactly controlled, economy. Along with changes to industry, French citizens were guaranteed a range of social and economic rights that created a generous and still popular social security and national health system. In Paris, urban planning and development were part of the Trente Glorieuses. In 1964, the departments of Seine and Seine-et-Oise were dissolved and replaced by seven new departments. Large corporations set up headquarters in Paris and its suburbs even as sections of the banlieue started to de-industrialize. Smaller universities expanded across the region after the breakup of the University of Paris in 1970. By the end of the century, nearly a quarter of all French university students were in the Paris area, contributing to the development of advanced industries in science and technology. Paris remained the national center for publishing and newspapers, and the municipal government worked tirelessly to maintain the city as the world’s foremost tourist destination. In 1967, officials initiated the Front de Seine plan for riverside residential and commercial re-development of former chemical factories in the less-developed Grenelle district of the fifteenth arrondissement. Three building developments highlighted Paris’s Trente Glorieuses: the construction of Montparnasse Tower, Charles de Gaulle Airport, and removal of the central market of Les Halles. Paris had never been won over to tall structures; building ordnances had long decreed that buildings not exceed seven stories. An exception was made for the Montparnasse Tower,

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which was begun in 1959 and finished in 1973. This was a fifty-eight-story American-style skyscraper. But unlike the Eiffel Tower and skyscrapers in other countries, the Montparnasse Tower lacked style and was almost universally disliked. Since 1973, no more skyscrapers have gone up in Paris. Airports were another sign of the future. Le Bourget in the northeast was an early Parisian airport, launching the very first commercial flight (to London) in 1919. Orly Airport on the southern side of the city opened for intercontinental flights in 1945. Charles de Gaulle Airport (named for the former president after his death) was built in the distant northeast suburb of Roissy between 1966 and 1974. Today, it is one of Europe’s busiest airports. Paris’s central market of Les Halles had origins in the twelfth century. In the 1840s, the old merchant stalls were replaced with iron and glass pavilions. In 1963, these structures were taken down and wholesale food distribution was shifted to a vast new complex at Rungis in the southern suburbs, which opened in 1969. The former site of Les Halles in the heart of the city was turned into a construction zone marked by a big hole (le grand trou) that would become the sprawling Châtelet-Les Halles Métro-RER hub and shopping mall. After its completion in 1977, anyone using the subway in and around Paris would pass—repeatedly—through the maze-like ChâteletLes Halles.

2 Standard of living and material culture By the end of the 1940s, Paris’s economy began to recover from the privations of the war years. The clearest sign of recovery was that cars, which had almost vanished during the Occupation, returned to the streets with a vengeance. But the recovery was neither swift nor total. Paris was no longer the industrial hub for France it was in 1900. Nor was it a financial center like London, New York, or Tokyo to attract money and a financial class from across the world. A post-war austerity policy in France, as elsewhere across Western and Central Europe, remained in place through the end of the decade. Rationing persisted until 1949. Many Parisians relied on produce from the kitchen gardens of relatives in the countryside; apartments went unheated during the winter; clothing was stitched rather than replaced; shop owners had little to display in their store windows. The very cold winter of 1953–54 produced real hardship. Visitors to Paris were struck by the gap between the lively, prosperous capital city of their mind’s eye and the dingy post-war metropolis. The scholar and writer Raymond Aron (1905–83) was appalled by the grimy, dull offices and lecture halls of the Sorbonne when he returned to his native Paris in 1955 after years at American and British universities. But at least the war and the Occupation were over. The year 1945 was, in that sense, “Year Zero” for Paris, and the expectation was that things would get better.5 Paris during the Trente Glorieuses became the capital of high culture and home to famous designers like Chanel, Dior, Givenchy,

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Ricci, and Cardin. In fashion, American cultural influence began to extend to clothing. The young girl “Zazie” of Raymond Queneau’s popular novel Zazie dans le Métro (1959) craves a pair of “blue jeans” (“bloudjinnzes” according to Queneau’s neo-argot). Zazous were the sons and daughters of the affluent bourgeoisie who greased back their hair, wore outlandish clothing, and patrolled the street corners, first acting out against the German Occupation, and now after the war as a public display of ostentation, not unlike the Gilded Youth of the 1790s. As a sign of middle-class decadence, the Zazous might also become objects of harassment by communist youth. Prostitution—female and male—was a timeless occupation in Paris, and in the post-war period it operated at all levels of society: from the women plying a working-class clientele on the streets near the Place de la Bastille to those at the expensive maisons de passe portrayed in Luis Buñuel’s film Belle de jour (1966). After 1945, Parisian officials recommitted themselves to public welfare, which meant poor relief and public hospitals. There was a long history of public welfare in Paris dating to the early Middle Ages. Napoleon Bonaparte had set up relief boards in each arrondissement, and a hospital General Administration was created by Louis-Napoleon in 1849. The system was reorganized in 1961 as the city’s forty-nine public hospitals holding more than 40,000 beds were brought under central control. The reorganization of public welfare, along with the French government’s commitment to social security and a national health policy, led to an improving standard of living during the Trente Glorieuses. Other public services got better, too: Napoleon had established the first uniformed and professional firefighting service, and by 1967 there were 5,000 firefighters in Paris.

3 Tourism Since the nineteenth century, tourism has been a big part of the Parisian economy, and even more so since the end of the Second World War. The modern age of tourism began in the first half of the nineteenth century when Europeans traveled abroad to Egypt, Rome, and Greece to see the remnants of Antiquity. Soon, Parisians recognized that Paris and French culture were themselves a draw for visitors. Other Europeans and Americans (North and South) began to arrive in the nineteenth century, spending money and laying the groundwork for the profitable tourist industry of the next century. American and Canadian universities have sent students to Paris for a “summer abroad” since the 1950s.6 Today, approximately 15 million tourists visit Paris each year, with almost 20 percent of the city’s working population employed in a tourism-related industry. The Malraux Law of 1962 protected and cleaned up old structures, both for historical preservation and to make them more appealing to tourists. Many refurbished buildings now became part of the Parisian “tourist trail” that included museums (Louvre, Invalides), Eiffel Tower, Marais, Tuileries Garden,

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Champs-Élysées, along with out-of-town excursions to Chartres Cathedral and Versailles Palace. By the late 1970s, the tourist trail also included the Pompidou Center, the Gare d’Orsay Museum, and Père Lachaise cemetery. Tourists visited the big department stores along the boulevards and strolled the boutique-lined streets of the Right Bank and the Île de la Cité. One section of Paris that became a favorite with tourists was the quartier Saint-Germain-desPrès in the sixth arrondissement on the Left Bank close to the Latin Quarter. The Saint-German church and abbey date from the sixth century—Frankish kings were interred there and the abbey was sacked by Vikings in the ninth century. The monastic buildings were sold during the Revolution and today Saint-Germain is a simple parish church. The surrounding quartier began to take on some distinction at the end of the nineteenth century when writers were attracted by its proximity to the Latin Quarter and nearby publishing houses. Then after 1945, Existentialist philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who lived in the neighborhood, made it famous simply by “hanging out” at some of its cafés, which became famous, too: Les Deux Magots, Brasserie Lipp, and Café de Flore. Nightclubs and jazz clubs arrived, and then media attention and American tourists. Existentialism evolved into Pop Existentialism. The ambience had already changed by the end of the 1940s as Sartre, Beauvoir, and others of their group began to disperse, and as Saint-Germain-des-Près underwent gentrification. Further west along the Seine, even the city’s sewers (at least a small section) were opened for tourism. Through the twentieth century, Paris’s sewer system had expanded and modernized. By 1970, there were four main sewers scattered across the city, with almost 1,300 miles of sewer line discharging nearly 2 million cubic yards of water every day. Most sewers followed the street above, with manholes spaced every 160 feet or so to allow access and maintenance; altogether, Paris had about 26,000 manholes. Sewerage was treated and cleaned at filtering plants before being sent into the Seine. About 1,000 sewer workers maintained the system. Paris’s sewers had drawn interest even before they were made famous by Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. The first sewer tours began during the 1867 World Exposition, and since 1972 there are guided tours to a small, very clean section of the system, with departures from the Left Bank side of the Pont de l’Alma. The Paris sewer tours became part of the tourist trail, too.

4 1968 labor strikes “May ’68” in Paris began with student protests, but soon expanded into a national strike movement affecting a large portion of the Parisian and French working class. The events of May 1968 began and ended quickly but left a profound long-term impact. Workers, like students, were ready to take a stand on a variety of issues in 1968. Paris had many industrial workers, but there was a large body of service workers, too. There were, as always, gaps in pay and status between

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skilled and unskilled workers, as more-and-more immigrants from foreign countries filled the latter category. In 1968, Parisian workers were prepared for militancy. Many belonged to the Communist Party, and both it and the CGT were fixtures in the capital’s Red Belt. Another trades federation that was strong in Paris, and a potential rival to the CGT, was the new Confédération française démocratique du travail (CFDT), which had roots in Catholic social welfare, though the religious element had mostly faded. The CFDT appealed to younger workers and immigrants, partly by adopting a less confrontational stance toward capitalism and the government than the CGT. The CFDT favored a strategy of “autogestion” by which workers would manage factories themselves. Paris’s Red Belt seemed to present a natural alliance with student rebels. It was the Red Belt that most worried the government of President Charles de Gaulle and his Prime Minister Georges Pompidou during the revolt of May 1968. In mid-May 1968, workers at factories and civil servants in offices, partly inspired by the protests of students in central Paris, stopped work and occupied their work places. These were spontaneous events that gained momentum as word spread. Eventually, 10 million French workers joined what became essentially a general strike. Initially, there was public support for students and striking workers. For a time, work and ordinary life across Paris came to a halt. Workers, like students, engaged in discussion and dialogue about changes they felt were necessary for society and work: the need for less hierarchy and bureaucracy, for more control and participation in decision-making by workers. But workers and students did not unite. L’Humanité, the newspaper of the PCF, was critical of the student protests. A cultural gap between the two sides proved difficult to bridge. Students tried to join striking auto workers at the Renault factory in Boulogne-Billancourt in the southwestern part of Paris but were rejected by the workers. This was partly a function of generational and social distinctions between older workers belonging to the CGT and younger students raised in bourgeois homes. Sometimes, there was open disdain between working-class leaders and student radicals. Meantime, political leaders, including de Gaulle and the head of the PCF fumbled the initial response to the crisis. At the end of the month, de Gaulle summoned France’s “silent majority” for support, and the strikes and student protests subsided. In the end, workers accepted an increase in wages, more say in running workplaces, a guaranteed forty-hour work-week, and returned to their jobs.

CULTURE 1 Left Bank and Saint-Germain-des-Près As with so many eras in Paris’s history, the post-war years were important culturally, taking art and philosophy in new directions. This was one of the first occasions that Parisian philosophy had a clear international impact. The

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places where these developments occurred was not so much the universities, as had been the case, for instance, for recent Interwar German philosophy, but the cafés, bookstores, and apartments of the Saint-Germain-des-Près district on the Left Bank. This area became famous for incubating the Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86), and Albert Camus (1913–60). Existentialism had roots in 1930s Germany but flourished and gained international fame in Left Bank Paris after 1945. Existentialism held that, as Nietzsche wrote in the 1880s, “God was dead” (the terrible world wars and the Holocaust of the first half of the twentieth century seemed to confirm this), and so humanity had no option but to understand and make the best of its one and only existence. For some, this raised the question of how to act morally or ethically, but most Existentialist thinkers—Beauvoir perhaps most explicitly—developed “ethics of Existentialism.” Their method was multi-dimensional: Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus were adept as philosophers, playwrights, novelists, journalists, and activists. None shied away (at least permanently) from politics. All engaged with the big events of their day, whether the Algerian and Vietnam wars, the youth rebellion of the 1960s, or the Cold War contest between the United States and Soviet Union. They talked, wrote, and agitated from favorite spots—including cafés—in the Saint-Germain-des-Près neighborhood: Les Deux Magots, Brasserie Lipp, and Café de Flore. The latter had opened during the Second Empire and over the decades was frequented by personalities including J. K. Huysmans, Guillaume Apollinaire, Charles Maurras, Lawrence Durrell, Truman Capote, and Jean Dutourd—the latter whose post-war novels exposed Parisian guilt about the recent war. Sartre and Beauvoir, both of them native Parisians, became habitués of Saint-Germain around 1939. But by the late 1940s, the Existentialist café “scene” fell apart. International fame had turned Saint-German-des-Près into a tourist destination, even as Sartre and Beauvoir grew aware of its becoming a caricature. The two philosophers had an on-again, off-again personal relationship. As they became famous, they started to travel. Meantime, Existentialism was appropriated by novelists, filmmakers, and musicians. Camus was killed in a car accident in the prime of his life. Sartre and Beauvoir lived to relatively old age and are buried together at Montparnasse Cemetery—like the famous cafés, on Paris’s Left Bank. Other influential intellectuals and artists frequented Saint-Germaindes-Près in the post-war years. These included the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, the novelist André Gide, and the photographers Robert Doisneau and Henri Cartier-Bresson (the latter two native Parisians). The historian of ideas Michel Foucault was there as a student at the École Normale Supérieure, as was the “revisionist” historian François Furet. During the post-war years, Saint-German-des-Près was an intellectual garden that cultivated ideas that continue to bear fruit.

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2 Youth culture of 1960s There was a generational change in the 1960s in Paris as in many places across the world. France, like the United States, experienced a “Generation Gap.” Influences from across the Atlantic and Europe played out in Paris, with young Parisians contributing to the cultural mix in their own ways. This was the Parisian generation of “Marx and Coca-Cola”—sympathetic to ideas of social democracy, interested in new forms of pop culture originating in the United States, and ready to experiment. For Parisian youth of the 1960s, the politics and culture around them seemed to belong to an earlier generation. Camus (who died in 1960) and Edith Piaf (died 1963) were still lionized; the minister of culture, André Malraux, was nearly sixty years old when he took office; and the president, Charles de Gaulle, had been born in the previous century. Those born just after the Second World War were the generation of the Trente Glorieuses, a period of economic revitalization coinciding with decolonization and continental European cooperation. Meantime, university education encouraged, directly and indirectly, rejection of the status quo. A broadened social security or “safety net” meant extra money to spend on “pop” culture and consumer goods. Young Parisians were starting to feel themselves to be as much European as French. Some of the extra money went to watch New Wave films; some for music, live at Left Bank jazz clubs or via rock and roll records coming from the United States or England. Rock music originated in the United States in the 1950s, and soon became popular with British and European youth. British youth took the American form and gave it a distinctive twist. The British Invasion of electrified, loud rock and roll landed in Western Europe, including Paris, before it touched down in America. “Mod,” a youth subculture of music, dress (some styles taken from Paris), and an aggressive attitude, moved from London to Paris by 1965. One of the Mods’ favorite bands was The Who. The British group went to Paris on their first overseas visit in June 1965 after the band’s managers had been contacted by a Parisian fan club. During their three-day tour, The Who performed at music clubs and made television and radio appearances. There was coverage from newspapers and the Parisian rock magazine Internationale des Rockers. The Who returned to Paris later in the year and again in 1966, when they performed on the television show Music-Hall de France. Other British and American rock music acts made Paris part of the regular touring circuit. One of the Parisian venues where rock acts played was the Olympia, a famous Right Bank club that dated from the 1880s, but which had fallen on hard times before being revitalized in the 1950s. A newer Parisian rock and roll venue was Le Golf Drouot, originally designed for miniature golf (thus “Le Golf”), which became the city’s premier “temple du rock.” Built in 1951 in the ninth arrondissement, Le Golf Drouot was converted to a music venue in the early 1960s. Le Golf had a small stage with a low ceiling and walls covered in graffiti and images

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of Elvis Presley and other famous rock and rollers. The stage was raised off the dance floor, with fans pressed against it. Le Golf Drouot was a genuine American- or British-style rock and roll club. To accommodate the growing rock music crowds, the venues got larger and were moved to the banlieue. When The Who played at the PCF-sponsored Fête de L’Humanité in 1972, the concert took place at a suburban La Courneuve outdoor site before a crowd of tens of thousands.

3 New Wave film Movies and Paris have had a long history together. One of the world’s first film industries began in Paris in the 1890s. Numerous studios were built through the 1920s, and more were added in the suburbs of La Courneuve and Neuilly-sur-Seine after production of sound films started in 1930. Following the Second World War, filmmaking remained profitable and more studios sprouted in the suburbs. Some of the films produced in Paris had European-wide or global appeal. Parisians love going to the movies, and so cinemas were built in every neighborhood of the city—1954 was the peak year in Paris, with 354 theaters holding 240,000 seats. The largest was the Cinéma Rex on the Boulevard Poissonière, built in 1932 with 3,300 seats and two balconies. The city itself has been the setting of countless films. The Parisian film industry was given a boost in the 1950s and early 1960s with New Wave (La Nouvelle Vague) films that had a tremendous influence on filmmaking across the world. New Wave began with a Parisian magazine: Cahiers du Cinéma, founded in 1951 by film enthusiasts and which was to become one of the preeminent publications of its type. New Wave film makers François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, and Claude Chabrol began as editors, writers, or critics for Cahiers. New Wave films chronicled individual lives; youth; evolving social relations; psychology; the self. The style was self-conscious and unconventional—some directors, for instance, liked using handheld cameras and hiring inexperienced actors. New Wave films pondered over the Holocaust and Cold War. François Truffaut (1932–84) was a native Parisian who began as a critic for Cahiers. One of the first New Wave films was his exploration of adolescent angst in Quatre cent coups (400 Blows, 1959), which he followed with the romantic drama Jules et Jim (1962). Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) was a complicated love story with nuclear holocaust as the back story and a screenplay by the novelist Marguerite Duras. Earlier, Resnais had produced the first film exploration of the Final Solution with the black-and-white documentary Night and Fog (1955). Jean-Luc Godard (1930–), another Parisian, graduated from the University of Paris and wrote for Cahiers. His À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960), about a youthful criminal and his American girlfriend, was immediately recognized as a powerful new statement in movie-making. Raymond Queneau’s novel Zazie dans le Métro, about a young girl and her encounter with a wild cast of

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Parisians, was turned into a popular film (1960) by the director Louis Malle. Most of the characters in these films were from the lower-middle and middle classes, but René Clair’s Porte des Lilas (1954) was set in the slums of the Zone. New Wave directors enlisted a new generation of actors. One was the native Parisian Jeanne Moreau (1928–), who starred in Truffaut’s Quatre cent coups and Jules et Jim. Some New Wave films found receptive audiences across Europe and the Americas; and as a genre of filmmaking, it would be widely analyzed in film studies classes across the world. Other filmmakers who were not part of the New Wave came to post-war Paris to make movies, and in which the city itself got top billing. The American director Vincente Minnelli’s An American in Paris (1951) and Gigi (1958) were “box office hits.” With the spread of television, Parisians could stay home to watch programs and movie-going declined in the 1960s.

4 Americanization France and the United States have had a long, ambiguous relationship. The two are “sister republics” sharing a history coming out of the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment and Atlantic Revolutions. The French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59) wrote one of the most incisive, and still relevant, commentaries on Americans and their democratic form of government. Americans had been falling in love with Paris since the eighteenth century, and this continued in the post-war period with the arrival of tourists, fans of Existentialism hoping to have an audience with Sartre or Beauvoir, and veterans from the Second World War—now graduate students funded by the “GI Bill”—returning to Paris as young scholars. But throughout the long Atlantic affair, there had sometimes been tension and misunderstanding. Part of this had to do with “Americanization” (or “Coca-Colonization,” as it was sometimes called in the post-war years) and the trepidations Parisians had about American-style consumerism undermining their own culture. French “anti-Americanism” began in the nineteenth century but grew more pronounced during the post-war years as the United States became a Superpower; the threat of being caught between an American and Soviet nuclear war did not help. From the perspective of many French, American military, economic, and cultural influence was simply too pervasive. One result was Charles de Gaulle’s decision to withdraw France from elements of the NATO defensive alliance and to begin building an independent French nuclear arsenal (force de frappe). The American wars in Indochina—Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, which had been French colonies until 1954—from the early 1960s until the Paris Peace Accords (1973), were widely criticized in France; in Paris, there were periodic demonstrations: the student rebellion of May 1968 was in part a protest over the American war in Vietnam. The intrusive tide of American

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culture—music, movies, language, dress, food—rankled many Parisians. The arrival of “fast food” restaurants (the first McDonald’s opened in the Parisian suburb of Créteil in 1972) was met with disgust and apprehension that overly processed American food would replace la cuisine de Paris. The term “fast food” seemed to symbolize everything distasteful about American consumer culture. The Académie Française, located at the Institut de France on the Left Bank, periodically purged the French language of AmericanEnglish words (“franglish”). Still by the 1960s, some American “things” had gained a foothold in Paris, mostly because they were adopted by Parisian youth: blue jeans, films, and rock and roll music. Black Americans continued to arrive. The novelists Richard Wright and James Baldwin found Paris more inviting and safer than the United States. Wright, author of Native Son, lived in Paris from 1946 until his death in 1960, and is buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery. There was a fruitful exchange at the level of pop culture beyond music: comic book artists on both sides of the Atlantic, for instance, had long absorbed influences from the other. The Parisian satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which first appeared in 1970, took its name from the character “Charlie Brown” in the popular American series “Peanuts.” A treasure of Paris remains the American Church, located on the Quai d’Orsay, which hosts classes, exhibits, and services, and acts as an everyday cultural bridge between Parisians and Americans.

Conclusion Paris, like the nations of France and West Germany, made a remarkable recovery after the Second World War. The Trentes Glorieuses brought new technology and industry to the Parisian banlieue. After 1945, Parisians seemed united in the determination to put aside the war years and work hard to rebuild. Post-war Paris soon resumed her place as a capital of high culture and design, and as the world’s leading tourist destination. Students from the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa went to Paris to attend her universities and institutes or to take summer courses in language and culture. By the 1950s, Paris was a leader in philosophy, literature, fashion, and film. France may have fallen from a position as global military or imperial power after the Second World War, but Paris resumed her place as a world capital for other things. Of course, the old political order, represented by a generation that had witnessed so much—including the two world wars, the Russian Revolution, Great Depression, Decolonization, and the Holocaust—was not gone: Charles de Gaulle, who epitomized the earlier France, was president— perhaps fittingly—when youth rebellion erupted in the streets of Paris in May 1968. The French Empire, which disintegrated through the 1950s and 1960s, may have seemed for some French necessary in order to maintain

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France’s prestige. But once the empire began to come apart, post-imperial Africa and Asia sent people to Paris with talents that only enhanced the city’s contributions to world culture and the arts. Africans and Asians from the former empire also came to Paris in large numbers to work and live. The character of Paris inevitably changed because of the influx of immigrants, though it is hard to say whether Paris changed the immigrants more than the immigrants changed Paris. It was not just immigrants who were adding a new flavor to post-war Paris. One of the long-term results of the economic prosperity brought by the Trentes Glorieuses was a generation of middleclass youth who typically went to university, and while there learned to question the authority of their parents and the government; indeed, of the status quo. The youth rebellion of 1968, like so many rebellions and revolutions in Parisian history, seemed to come out of nowhere. And yet in 1968, as in 1789 or 1871, there were underlying causes to the profound changes wrought by that year. In many cultural and political ways, the seeds of ’68 are still bearing fruit in Paris.

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11 Paris from de Gaulle to Mitterrand

Chronology 1968

Student rebellion and labor strikes

1969

De Gaulle leaves office—suburban market established at Rungis

1969–74 Pompidou serves as president 1970

Reorganization of Paris universities

1973

Montparnasse Tower completed

1974

Charles de Gaulle Airport opens at Roissy

1976

Inaugural flight of Concorde

1977

Office of mayor re-established—Jacques Chirac elected mayor— Pompidou Center opens

1979

Forum des Halles opens

1981

First TGV rail line (Paris-Lyon) opens—President Mitterrand announces Grands Projects

1986

Gare d’Orsay museum opens

1989

Bicentennial of French Revolution—Louvre Pyramid, Grande Arche, and Bastille Opera open

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Introduction The 1970s saw the end of the long period of economic recovery in Europe and Japan that began a few years after the end of the Second World War. Economies, especially in the Atlantic World but elsewhere, too, stagnated as inflation rose and as Middle East crises sent oil prices soaring, even threatening to cut off the supply. In a world that had become utterly dependent upon petroleum, this threat was de-stabilizing. Along with the economic malaise, there was a kind of post-1960s cultural and political hangover, perhaps best represented by the cynical and illegal actions of the American president, Richard Nixon, which forced him from office in 1974. Political stalwarts of the post-war era, including Charles de Gaulle, Nikita Khrushchev, and Mao Zedong passed away during the decade.

FIGURE 11.1  Montparnasse Tower viewed from Montparnasse Cemetery on the Left Bank. This modern skyscraper was the last of its kind in Paris. The vast majority of Parisian buildings are four to seven stories high, giving the city outline a remarkably uniform appearance. © Casey Harison.

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Other global processes with origins in the post-war years were reaching a conclusion: most of Africa, Asia, and Oceania were now made up of independent nations as Decolonization reached a conclusion; and in 1975 Vietnam was finally united as a single country after the United States completed its withdrawal. As countries gained their independence, they often felt compelled to make a choice between the Cold War models of the Soviet Union and the United States, or perhaps now with the People’s Republic of China, which was less isolated following the death of Mao in 1976. Détente—a relaxation in Cold War tensions between the two Superpowers—came to an end with the Soviet invasion of neighboring Afghanistan in 1979. Zealous Muslim warriors (mujahedeen) would defeat the Soviets and their Afghan allies in the 1980s, as the Muslim world saw the emergence of Iran into a regional power with the overthrow of the Shah and the creation of a religious republic in 1979. Meantime, Paris continued to draw immigrants from the former French colonies in Africa and Asia. In many ways, the ideas of the 1960s became accepted and functional in the new decade. The Civil Rights Movement in the United States had paid heavy costs but also had achieved successes; the demands of women and gay people for equal treatment were part of the ’60s mobilization, too, that laid the groundwork for achievements in the coming years. At the same time, the struggle for equal rights and the end of apartheid were still building momentum in South Africa. Culturally and stylistically, the 1970s saw continued innovation. The Montparnasse Tower in Paris—an American-style skyscraper sitting alone in the southwest of the city—was mostly judged to be not a success (Figure 11.1). But the Pompidou Center, right in the heart of Paris, and with bright colors and a quirky, ultra-modern design that seemed to many critics a brazen affront, nonetheless worked and was accepted. A lot of the pop music that the world listened to still came from the United States, but rock music was also becoming more universal, even helping to undermine Stalinism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union through its subversive messages. Rock music itself was subverted by the arrival of punk, which rejected what it regarded as the phony utopianism of the 1960s. Sid Vicious of the seminal British punk band the Sex Pistols came to Paris in the 1970s to film his version of the Frank Sinatra classic “My Way.”

POLITICS 1 Après mai—post-1968 In hindsight, the enthusiasm and anything-is-possible spirit of May 1968 were fleeting. The student radical “Dany le Rouge” (Daniel Cohn-Bendit) left for West Germany (he later returned to French politics by joining the Green Party and becoming a representative to the European Parliament). Other students who had gone to the barricades in 1968 went back to their

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studies or moved on to jobs. Some members of the political Left of the Parisian intelligentsia had wholeheartedly supported the May revolt and now there was some disillusionment. Yet the events of 1968—and the ’68ers (soixante-huitards) themselves—had truly changed Paris in ways that may have been imperceptible in the immediate aftermath, but that emerged culturally and politically in subsequent years. During the 1970s, despite the disillusionment of après-mai (post-May 1968), the Left political parties remained strong in Paris. Socialist and Communist ideas held sway with the intelligentsia, and the Red Belt remained a bastion of the PCF and of radical trade unionism under the CGT. But change was happening. The working-class Red Belt was starting to transform into a banlieue that was home to a first- and second-generation immigrant population. Parisian workers of European and North African descent had similar economic interests as other Parisian workers, but there was a cultural divide. There were also changes within the Communist and Socialist parties. French Communists had reacted ambivalently toward the events of May 1968. In the 1970s, the PCF began to distance itself from the Soviet Union. In Paris as elsewhere, the “Solzhenitsyn Effect” produced by the revelations of The Gulag Archipelago (1973) turned some communists away from the Soviet model and the “cult of revolution” that was so pronounced in France. In the middle of the decade, the PCF leader Georges Marchais (1920–97) helped shift the party toward “Eurocommuism”—which meant adherence to Marxist principles, but without uncompromising loyalty to the Soviet Union. Meantime, the Socialist Party led by the long-time politician François Mitterrand began to score electoral wins in Paris and other parts of the country, supplanting the PCF as the main Left-wing political option and setting itself up for a presidential victory at the start of the 1980s.1 Intellectuals and former members of the PCF like François Furet and Bernard-Henri Lévy now came out against what they saw as institutionalized, repressive Stalinism. The historian-philosopher Michel Foucault published books about how institutions and cultural norms oppress individuals. The post-modern critique of the 1970s effected both political Left and Right. A long documentary on the Vichy years, The Sorrow and the Pity (released 1971), undermined heroic myths, including those on the political Left, about the wartime French Resistance. Terrorism returned to Paris in the late 1970s and 1980s. The radical group Action directe was formed in Paris in 1977, modeling itself partly on contemporary Italian anarchist and communist cells. Action directe would carry out multiple assassinations and bombings in Paris between 1979 and 1987—a hint of things to come after the turn of the century.

2 Pompidou Charles de Gaulle—stalwart French political leader of the twentieth century—left office in 1969 following the failure of a national referendum that he supported. De Gaulle died of natural causes a year and a half later.

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The second president of the Fifth Republic came from de Gaulle’s political party but was younger and looked more to the future than the past. This was Georges Pompidou (1911–74)—a long-time aide to de Gaulle who served as prime minister for most of the 1960s. Pompidou was a political conservative, but a moderate, who consolidated the Gaullists into a formidable political party (the UDR—Union des Démocrates pour la Ve République) without the browbeating style of his predecessor. Originally from central France, Pompidou was highly cultured, with a degree in literature from the École Normale Superieure. In the 1950s, he taught at Paris’s prestigious Lycée Henri IV. Pompidou died from cancer while in office (April 1974) and since then has been considered one of France’s most effective post-war political leaders. In Paris, Pompidou presided over the after-effects—for some the “malaise”—of May 1968. The process of de-industrialization and demographic change in the Parisian banlieue continued. There were difficult economic times stemming from the Middle Eastern oil crises of the early 1970s. France depended upon the import of oil from the Middle East to fuel her industries and automobiles, and the shock of OPEC’s oil embargo of 1973 hit the country hard, Paris in particular. Between 1971 and 1973, the city lost more than 42,000 industrial jobs. And unemployment rose dramatically in the banlieue.2 Inflation and a lack of credit for business expansion made the economic situation even worse. Pompidou tried to reassure the country, and in Paris embarked upon the construction of modern buildings that would create jobs and transform the face of the city: the Montparnasse Tower, Centre Beaubourg (later renamed in his honor), and the Les Halles project. Pompidou also oversaw the expansion of the automobile road network around Paris. He responded to the oil crisis by helping to build up the nuclear industry, so that in time France would rely upon nuclear energy more than any other nation. Pompidou also initiated planning and production for France’s successful high-speed train: the TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse), for which Paris would be the hub. The first TGV line opened between Paris and Lyon in September 1981.

3 Giscard Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (1926–), a graduate of the École Polytechnique, was the Gaullist candidate in the 1974 presidential election, defeating the Socialist François Mitterrand (who won the presidency the next time around) in a close affair. At the start, Giscard affected a populist style— walking down the Champs-Élysées rather than riding in a motorcade during his inauguration and inviting ordinary people to have supper in the presidential residence at the Élysée Palace. After a while, the populism gave way and Giscard developed a reputation for aloofness. Even so, he oversaw important social and political changes for Paris and France. In a kind of delayed follow-up to May ’68, eighteen-year-olds were given the right to vote and Paris was allowed to elect a mayor for the first time since

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the nineteenth century. Government control of radio and television was loosened, so that teenagers could hear more rock and roll and watch a greater variety of television programs. Despite his conservative background, Giscard supported women’s rights. Simone Veil (1927–2017), a survivor of the Holocaust, joined his government and became a forceful advocate for women. Abortion was legalized, divorce made easier, and there was government support for birth control and greater access to contraception. Economically, the Trentes Glorieuses came to an end during the presidency of Giscard. Inflation drove up the cost of living. Oil supplies were erratic because of crises in the Middle East and the cost of gasoline soared. Elsewhere, Giscard’s government continued Pompidou’s program to build TGV superfast trains and tried to persuade the country to adopt the Minitel—an early version of the internet. The supersonic jet, the Concorde, made its first commercial flights from Paris and London in 1976. Giscard realized that many Parisians felt there had been too much change, too fast, and so an additional theme of his presidency was an emphasis on quality of urban life. Louis Chevalier’s critique of 1977 (The Assassination of Paris) was a manifesto for those crying “Halt” to the changes that had seemed non-stop since the late 1950s. A new urbanist view emphasizing livability and concern for social groups—the elderly, for instance—now came to the fore. Giscard stopped the construction of skyscrapers and tall buildings and suspended the extension of automobile expressways around and through the city. But other projects continued. Giscard supported the Pompidou Center and launched the conversion of the old Gare d’Orsay train station into a museum of modern art. He encouraged the creation of more green spaces across Paris and built “maisons de culture” in the suburbs. The renovation of the magnificent Basilica of Saint-Denis—burial place of French kings—in the northern banlieue began.3 Ongoing improvements in the Marais district continued, while new work was undertaken at Bercy in the southeast of Paris. A law of 1977 created OPAHs (Operations programmées d’amélioration de l’habitat) charged with regenerating neighborhoods (this included the power to expropriate property), but with the input of residents, and emphasizing both historical renovation and functionality. The warehouse districts of Bercy were turned into modern, comfortable apartment blocks on streets that included restaurants, bars, and stores. Neighborhood indoor swimming pools were opened.

4 Chirac In 1977, during the presidency of Giscard d’Estaing, Paris elected a mayor for the first time in more than a century. The new mayor was Jacques Chirac (1932–). Paris, of course, had long had municipal government. Before the Revolution of 1789, the city governor was the provost of merchants, who worked with royal officials and guild leaders to administer affairs related to commerce and policing. Some provosts were active; others were not.

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The last provost was Jacques de Flesselles, who was among the handful of persons killed during the taking of the Bastille in July 1789. For their part, French kings had almost always had a say in how Paris was governed because they were usually resident there and because the city was such a large and important place. The close relationship between city and monarch was undermined in the seventeenth century when Louis XIV moved his court to the new palace at Versailles. The monarchy was returned to Paris in 1789, but the relationship between city and king would remain fraught. During the Revolution of 1789, Paris saw her first elected mayor: Jean-Sylvain Bailly (1736–93). But with the end of the Terror in 1794 and the beginning of the reactionary period of Thermidor, the office came to an end. Beginning in the Napoleonic era, Paris had an appointed prefect. The institution of mayor returned briefly in 1848 and 1870–71, but when the revolutions of those years came to an end, so did the office. French governments kept Paris as the capital but fearing revolution and recognizing the city’s outsized role, they exercised direct control through the prefect. This is the tradition that Giscard changed in 1975, when he announced the re-creation of the office of mayor and an election for it in two years, which was won by Chirac. Jacques Chirac was from the department of Corrèze in central France; with degrees from the Institut d’études politiques de Paris (“Sciences Po”) and Harvard University, he was part of the professional class that has dominated French governance since the 1950s. Politically, he was a Gaullist who served in various offices during the 1960s. As an ally of Giscard, he was appointed prime minister in 1976, and with Giscard’s support, was elected mayor of Paris in March 1977. Paris already had a city council, which the energetic new mayor used to buttress his own power. Chirac’s style was different from Giscard: more forceful; more municipality-centered in the tradition of “dirigisme” (state control, rather than political and economic laissez-faire). Chirac served as mayor of Paris until 1995, when he was elected president. The office of mayor of Paris remained, with Chirac followed by Jean Tibéri.

SOCIETY 1 Parisian consumers Paris, like France and much of Western Europe, bounced back from the austerity of the early 1950s. One way Parisians did this in the 1960s and 1970s was to spend on consumer goods. They could do so because there was extra money available during the Trentes Glorieuses and because the prices of new conveniences recently considered luxuries, like televisions, washing machines, and cars, now were affordable enough to place them within purchasing power of persons in the middle- and lower-middle classes. By the mid-1960s, there were 2 million personal automobiles in Paris, and half the homes in the city had a washing machine—a big jump from just

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five years earlier. The many new buildings that went up in central Paris and in the middle-class outer suburbs during the de Gaulle, Pompidou, and Giscard years begged to be furnished with modern conveniences. There was advertising on television, shop windows, and in the corridors and cars of the Métro. But by the mid-1970s, growing unemployment and an increasing rate of inflation slowed down the consuming frenzy of Parisians. Even during the Trentes Glorieuses, Paris kept her flea markets (marchés aux puce) and open-air markets, some permanent and some weekly, selling produce, cheese, sausages, and olives. Les commérçants were small shopkeepers, and there were still plenty of them in Paris in the 1970s. But the big department stores catering to middle- and upper-middle class Parisians also attracted well-off consumers and free-spending American tourists. Specialty stores sold items for the rich, like Hermès handbags. Thierry Hermès had started in Paris in 1837 as a maker of saddles for notables. His descendants turned to other high-end goods, including women’s handbags and the silk scarves used by film actresses in the 1930s. The original Hermès store is still located on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Another famous Parisian store for the rich customer was Cartier jeweler, opened by LouisFrançois Cartier in 1847 on the Rue Montorgueil; it moved to its present location on the Rue de la Paix in 1899. During the Second Empire, Napoleon III’s spouse, Empress Eugénie, was one of Cartier’s first customers. By the 1960s and 1970s, Parisian consumers came from all social classes—André Courrèges (1923–2016) designed trendy clothing and accessories for working women that fit the fashion sensibilities of the day. With extra income, Parisians seemed to become more materialistic. The American-English term “shopping” was in use in Paris by the 1970s. Still, consumerism in Paris did not quite reach the level of the United States (or later Japan). Even as Parisians continued to buy, there was a reaction, sometimes bordering on revulsion, against the new materialism. Some of this was tied to a persistent thread of anti-Americanism that was particularly acute among the intelligentsia. But many ordinary Parisians were also against the inclination to conspicuous wealth. The events of May 1968 were partly a revolt against the consumer society that was most pronounced across the Atlantic, but which also had gained ground in Paris.

2 Population patterns Today, the twenty arrondissements of Paris occupy an area of 10,540 hectares (one hectare equals 100 acres). The city’s population in 1968 was 2,590,771 and in 1975 it was 2,290,852, continuing a downward trend from the peak of 2.9 million reached just after the Great War. In 1975, the approximately 2.3 million Parisians were living in 1,238,732 residences— an average of about two persons per residence. This was a comparatively low ratio of resident per home and was the product not only of a decline in population, but also of the construction of an enormous number of new

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dwellings—more than 200,000 of which went up in Paris between 1954 and 1974, and even more in the banlieue. A kind of “neo-Haussmannization” seized Paris in the 1960s and 1970s. As we have seen, urban renewal is an old idea in Paris. For a long time, the main impetus for this had been the desire to improve housing for the poor and the working class, now made up largely of immigrants from former colonies and their second-generation children. It was not hard to see which sections of the city needed refurbishing. The politician and urban planner Paul Delouvrier and Charles de Gaulle’s successor as president, Georges Pompidou, were urban modernists. In 1969, poorer neighborhoods were designated as ZACs (zones d’aménagement concerté) to be improved through public-private partnerships. Commercial entrepreneurs were given wide latitude to build. This led to a flurry of construction, not only in the sections of the city that obviously needed it, but all across Paris. The style of architecture was different from the uniform Haussmann-era apartment and commercial buildings. Now, there were sharp lines and prefab building materials. Building codes were rewritten so that structures could be taller than the standard four to seven stories of the nineteenth century. Some really tall structures were given the go-ahead: at La Défense on the western periphery, an American-style urban landscape mushroomed; elsewhere, the Maison de Radio (sixteenth arrondissement) and UNESCO building (seventh arrondissement) were tall, modern structures that stood out in their neighborhoods. A block of high buildings with mixed residential and commercial property was the Front de Seine development (fifteenth arrondissement). Other IGHs (immeubles de grande hauteur) were built near the Place de l’Italie and in Belleville.4 The most startling exception to the uniform height of Parisian buildings was the Montparnasse Tower (finished 1973), which was a New York City-style skyscraper. Part of the idea of urban renewal was to improve lower-income housing, but in central Paris the opposite happened: the price of residences crept up in the 1970s and 1980s, keeping less wealthy populations away. Some of this occurred with the arrival of wealthy foreigners who bought property and drove up housing costs. The neo-Haussmannization and Americanization of the urban landscape of the 1970s prompted the historian-demographer Louis Chevalier (1911–2001) to write The Assassination of Paris (1977), attacking the “triumvirate” of de Gaulle, Malraux, and Pompidou, and lamenting the changes happening in his (Chevalier’s) city. In the same year as Chevalier’s work, the most extravagant emblem of architectural modernization was opened right in the heart of Paris: the Pompidou Center.

3 Young Parisians Young Parisians living in the years from the presidencies of Charles de Gaulle through François Mitterrand were the first generation to have extra money to spend on consumer goods and the first to have extra time away

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from school and work. It was the New Wave generation, psychologically distanced from the Second World War, not terribly aware of France’s role in the war or the Holocaust, and probably less attuned to political struggles than were their parents during the 1930s and the rise of fascism. As the colonial war in Algeria began to wind down (the Évian Accords gave Algeria her independence in 1962), young males subject to conscription and their parents felt relief. It was a generation drawn to new things and to cultural developments initiated in the United States, even if the model offered by United States itself was not especially persuasive. This generation’s values were illustrated in the films of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. It was a generation conscious of itself as a generation. Young Parisians in the 1960s and 1970s (sometimes referred to as “yéyés” from the yelling they did when their favorites musical groups played) were drawn to rock music coming from the United States and Britain; they also began to develop their own bands, along with a popular culture of magazines and clubs favoring the new music. They watched television and dressed in black, tight-fitting clothing, wore sunglasses, and smoked Gaulois cigarettes. The New Wave generation affected an attitude. Television productions and shops began to reflect their tastes. Parisian youth also had a more carefree attitude toward sexual relations than did their parents and grandparents. The introduction of a pill for birth control in 1967 symbolized what an older generation sometimes considered an irresponsible lifestyle. This seemed to be the case at least for middle- and upper-middle class Parisian youth. In truth, working-class and immigrant or second-generation immigrant Parisian youth had a less carefree time of it. As industry declined in the banlieue, good factory jobs became scarcer by the early 1970s. Unemployment among Parisian youth crept up in the 1970s and has remained high—periodically, extraordinarily high—ever since. In reality, there never was a single category of “Parisian” or “Parisian youth.” Different social classes of Parisians, in the post-war years as at other times of Paris’s history, often lived very different kinds of lives.

4 Legacies of immigration and new arrivals By the 1970s, the North African, Caribbean, and Asian immigrants from France’s former empire who had arrived in Paris in the 1950s or 1960s were having children. This generation of immigrant background would struggle economically in the coming years. Meanwhile, there were new arrivals from North and West Africa, and from the former French colony of Indochina following the collapse of the American-supported government of South Vietnam in 1975. Families with roots in Southeast Asia and North and West Africa tended to stick together in the sections of the city where they lived. As the banlieue de-industrialized and the old working class began to leave, French governments adopted policies that directed these persons toward suburban housing projects. The integration of persons of African ethnicity

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would be an ongoing, sometimes problematic challenge for Paris and France through the end of the twentieth century and beyond. First- and second-generation families, all of them French citizens, and new arrivals from North and West Africa mostly lived in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth arrondissements. Most persons of North African descent in Paris were Muslims. The government adopted policies encouraging integration, but the process was difficult. One effort to recognize the changing cultural landscape had roots earlier in the century. This was the construction of a Paris Mosque at the Place du Puits-de-l’Ermite in the fifth arrondissement. The Mosque had been commissioned by the National Assembly in 1920 in recognition of the 100,000 Muslims who fought for France in the Great War. It was built in Spanish-Moorish style, complete with minaret and an Institute for Study of the Koran; it opened in 1926. The Mosque remains a cultural landmark in Paris. For a long time, it was the only mosque in the capital, but today there are hundreds in the Parisian region, most of them in the banlieue. Many large cities across the world have a “Chinatown”: a district hosting Asian immigrants and acting as a kind of cultural enclave with stores, restaurants, and an atmosphere all its own. Paris was late in getting a Chinatown, which only began to develop around the Porte de Choisy in the thirteenth arrondissement with the arrival of Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian “boat people” in the late 1970s. Boat people were refugees, many of them ethnic Chinese from southern Vietnam who fled in the wake of the American defeat of 1975. France and Paris were a natural destination because of the French colonial legacy. The new immigrants lived and worked together in neighborhoods, setting up stores, businesses, restaurants, newspapers, and places to worship. They bought property in adjacent streets, so that Paris’s “Quartier asiatique” expanded toward the Avenue de Choisy and Place d’Italie. New arrivals from East and Southeast Asia often went automatically to Chinatown, which has now become the largest in Continental Europe. Paris’s Chinatown retains its unique flavor—part of the city, yet distinct.

The quays on the Seine River

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uays are the paved banks and walkways along the Seine River. They offer wonderful views of Paris and a way for pedestrians to amble from one length of the city to the other. On the way, one passes through the heart of Paris, past many of its great architectural and cultural monuments. Stalls selling used books occupy part of the quays. There were no quays along the river until the fourteenth century, when the first was built by King Philip the Fair. Thereafter, more were constructed along the Right Bank near important structures like the Louvre and Hôtel de Ville. Over time, the quays were connected by walkways. More work

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was done on the quays in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in order to beautify the city, make the river more accessible to pedestrians, improve access from the river for merchants, and protect against flooding. Louis XV oversaw work in the eighteenth century that included taking down decrepit housing (subject to periodic fires) on the bridges spanning the river. After the 1780s, no new housing was allowed on bridges crossing the Seine. At the same time, several new quays were built, including the Quais Saint-Michel and Aux Fleurs. There was more improvement under Napoleon, including rebuilding the Quai du Louvre and Quai de Grève (later called Quai de l’Hôtel de Ville), the latter of which was the place on the river where boats carrying grain, timber, and goods unloaded their wares to be sold at Les Halles. Interestingly, Baron Haussmann, who oversaw so much work that transformed the look and layout of Paris in the 1850s and 1860s, did little to refurbish the quays. However, he did have trees planted to make the riverside a better place to stroll and have picnics. In the 1960s and 1970s as automobile traffic began to take over the city, some quays along the Right Left Banks were lost to construction. The quays began to look unkempt and unappealing. There was a reaction among Parisians and municipal authorities responded by reclaiming riverside space for walking and small parks. Today, the quays are among the city’s many treasures. It is possible to walk the length of the Seine on both sides of the river for almost its entire course through the central city. The quays offer grand views of Paris—indeed, among the best. One of the beloved details of the quays is its bouquinistes: sellers of used books at distinctive green stalls along both sides of the river from near the Pont Marie to the Louvre. The first book stalls opened in the sixteenth century. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the trade began to be regulated by the city. Today, approximately 200 bouquinistes rent their stalls. They are open rain or shine during the daylight hours; passersby are free to thumb through the collections, which go at cut-rate prices. Walking the quays and perusing the wares of the bouquinistes is among the daily pleasures of Parisian life.

ECONOMY 1 Film industry Film enjoys a special status in Paris and France, where governments have endeavored to protect it against competition, especially from the virtual tidal wave of film coming out of Hollywood. The French state began to protect films and the Parisian filmmaking industry as early as 1928. In 1946, the ministry of culture created the Centre national de la Cinématographie (CNC)

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to provide guidelines and financial incentives for the native film industry. In the 1980s, the government of François Mitterrand was determined to help the industry, as well as to creatively set French films apart from competitors (again, especially from the United States). Part of the plan was to market French films to broader European and international audiences. The drive toward a united Europe and a “Common Market” after the end of the Second World War encouraged Parisian filmmakers to co-produce movies with counterparts in other nations. After 1945, the French ministry of culture negotiated bilateral film-making arrangements with film boards in West Germany, Argentina, Spain, Austria, Australia, the Soviet Union, Poland, and other East European nations. As of the early 2000s, France has bilateral filmmaking agreements with forty-four nations. Just to cite one example, by 1957 over 230 French-Italian films had been made. Some filmmakers coming out of Paris in the 1960s and 1970s tended saw themselves as making European, rather than French movies. Under Jack Lang, the minister of culture during the Mitterrand presidency, the government lent considerable financial support to both French and other European directors. Polish filmmakers Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Kieslowski, British filmmaker Ken Loach, and Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky all benefitted from French support in the 1980s. And foreign filmmakers have returned the affection: Wajda’s Danton (1983) was a kind of biopic of the title character and his relationship with Maximilien Robespierre set during the Terror; and Kieslowski’s troika of tricolor-themed films (Blue, White, Red [1993–94]) are personal dramas set in contemporary Paris. French films of this period often targeted a niche market unserved by Hollywood that, culturally and aesthetically, set them apart from American films. French governments since de Gaulle have also assisted blossoming film industries in former French colonies, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Parisians and French love going to the movies. France has more film festivals than any other country, while Paris is “probably the most international, cinéphile city in the world.”5

2 Big urban projects The large urban projects begun under Charles de Gaulle were continued by Georges Pompidou—the Montparnasse Tower was finished in 1973— and then by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who followed as president when Pompidou died in April 1974 while still in office. Like Pompidou, Giscard was attuned to modern buildings and willing to take on critics. At the same time, He was also sensitive to issues of overcrowding and quality of life that were of special concern to working-class Parisians. A complex of modern buildings on the western edge of Paris took the name of “La Défense” (from a military confrontation during the Prussian Siege of 1870). Construction at the spot began in 1958. A skyscraper was

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added and then a shopping center in 1981. A Métro connection to La Défense (Line 1, which cuts east-west across the city) was opened in 1992. The most striking addition to the complex at La Défense is the Grande Arche—a modernist version of the classic Roman arch and the western twin, though larger, of Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe at the Place de l’Étoile. The Grande Arche was completed in 1989 to coincide with the Bicentennial of the French Revolution. The striking structure became one terminus of an east-west “axis” linking the Arc de Triomphe, Champs-Élysées, Tuileries Gardens, and Louvre to the Bastille Opera.

FIGURE 11.2  The Pompidou Center in the heart of the Right Bank. Most of the building is devoted to museum space, but there is also a large public library, places to eat, and an open square at the front. © Casey Harison.

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But the Pompidou Center (as it was renamed from Centre Beaubourg after the death of President Pompidou) may have been the most controversial new building in Paris in the 1970s. This was partly because of the setting chosen for it: The Rue Beaubourg, right in the heart of the fourth arrondissement, close to the Marais district and to famous historical sites. The project was launched in December 1969 by the new president, Georges Pompidou. It was designed both as a cultural marker for central Paris and as a setting for exhibitions, movies, and other entertainments. The design was provocative, and there were objections from the start. The architects were the Briton Richard Rogers and the Italian Renzo Piano, both determined modernists—indeed “ultramodernists.” It was not just that the design was so unusual, it was that the building was so big—an immediate rival (some thought an affront) to nearby medieval structures like the Tour Saint-Jacques and the quaint Saint-Merri Church; Notre-Dame Cathedral itself was within walking distance. The multi-story design featured exposed supports, plexi-glass walls, and colored tubes. It was ostentatiously modern, yet functional; for a while, there was nothing else like it in the world. There was also a large, sloping open space at the front where people could gather. The building opened in 1977, and as it turned out was popular with Parisians and tourists right from the start. Visiting its exhibits of modern art and the BPI (Bibliothèque public d’information)—an open-stack library that drew thousands of students—became part of a regular routine for many Parisians. Despite the apprehensions, the Pompidou Center was a success. Subsequently, city officials and architects were more willing to take chances in disrupting the urban landscape with innovative designs (Figure 11.2). Over time, the critics of modernity in Paris have become more accepting of the new designs—with the Montparnasse Tower perhaps the enduring exception.

3 RER and Charles de Gaulle Airport Huge numbers of workers living in the near and far suburbs made their way into central Paris each work day. The city’s infrastructure and transportation were modernized during the 1970s to accommodate the flow of people across the ever-expanding Paris region. The subway system—the Métro— which dated from the turn of the century, was integrated with a new regional commuter train service, and a new international airport was built at the distant suburban commune of Roissy. Orly Airport in the south of the city had served Paris since 1945, but by the 1960s, as European and global airline travel expanded, it was clear that the airport was too small and with virtually no room to expand. There was general agreement among Parisians and city officials alike that a new, larger airport was needed and so construction began in 1966 at Roissy-en-France, a commune several miles northeast of central Paris. The site was selected

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because it was relatively close to the capital and yet had room to expand. The new Charles de Gaulle Airport was opened in 1974. Like other structures of the era, the design of the three main terminals by the architect Paul Andreu was modern. It quickly became one of the busiest airports in Europe and the hub for Air France, the national airline. The area around the airport was built up with hotels, shopping areas, and business complexes. Today, domestic and international flights in and out of both “CDG” and Orly are coordinated through an umbrella organization—the Aéroport de Paris. Travelers arriving at Charles de Gaulle Airport can get to Paris via automobile, taxi, bus, or on the RER (Réseau express régional)—the regional commuter train service that is integrated with the Métro. There had been plans to create a regional commuter train service linked with the Métro since the 1930s, but the Second World War interrupted this. The idea was revived in the 1950s, and in 1961 the RATP (Régie autonome des transports parisiens) drew up plans to link the Métro with new regional commuter trains and, eventually, the national rail service (SNCF). In time, the RER would have stops at Parisian train stations (Gares Montparnasse, du Nord, and de Lyon). Construction began on Lines A and B in 1969, and by 1977 the two were operating and connected to the Métro. Over the coming years, new lines (C, D, and E) were added and tracks extended in all directions through the outer suburbs. In 1976, there were seventy-six kilometers of RER track and by the turn of the next century 274 kilometers, carrying millions of passengers each year. The color-coded RER lines intersect with the Métro at the sprawling Châtelet-Les Halles hub in central Paris. The financial costs of CDG and RER have been high, but together the two have modernized post-war Parisian transportation. Their success may be judged by the enormous number of people—Parisians and visitors—who use them every day.

4 City center and Châtelet-Les Halles As Paris’s suburbs expanded and their populations ballooned in the 1960s and 1970s, turning the French capital into a megalopolis by the end of the century, the city center underwent renewal. The old central market of Les Halles was torn down and in 1969 the city’s food distribution hub moved to Rungis in the suburbs. In place of the old Les Halles, there sprouted an enormous, mostly underground shopping center and Métro/ RER transportation hub. The surrounding (above-ground) neighborhoods transformed into a commercial district as young people were drawn to the area. With the changes happening in the nearby Marais and Beaubourg (where the Pompidou Center was located), central Paris was modernized and commercialized in the 1970s so that it became, like Notre-Dame Cathedral or the Louvre Museum, a draw for Parisians and visitors—though of a different cast from the latter two.

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As the old Les Halles market was coming down, there were plans to replace it with something new: perhaps an international trade center or shopping mall; it was the latter idea that won out. Shopping malls were new to Paris as they were in much of the world in the early 1970s. Traditionally, shopping had been done at individual shops—in Paris, perhaps situated side by side in one of the arcades built in the nineteenth century. Big department stores, which Paris helped introduce to the world in the second half of the nineteenth century, centralized shopping. Malls were late 1960s innovations: large, covered buildings where many individual shops and restaurants were placed side by side to make the experience more convenient and to protect the shopper from the elements. Partly in reaction to the regrets already being felt about how skyscrapers like the Montparnasse Tower altered the Parisian landscape, it was decided that the new Les Halles shopping mall would be placed underground. A great hole (le grand trou) was dug at the site of the demolished Les Halles to accommodate several floors of shops and, below that, an intersection for Métro and RER subway lines crossing the city. The work began in 1971, and the great hole remained an eyesore for most of the decade, detracting from the nearby sixteenth-century SaintEustache Church and leaving Parisians to wonder what was to come of all the digging. The Châtelet-Les Halles subway hub was finally ready for use in 1977 and the shopping mall—dubbed “Forum des Halles”—opened two years later. Inevitably, the work at Châtelet-Les Halles transformed the nearby neighborhoods, which had previously been of a mixed social character. Much of the older population now vacated the area, as younger people were drawn to the shopping mall and to shops in nearby streets selling blue jeans, inexpensive jewelry, and music tapes. In the coming years, city authorities continually monitored and altered the area around Les Halles, pedestrianizing the streets, creating urban gardens, and trying to bring in affordable housing. Yet more renovations have come to Châtelet-Les Halles in recent years.

CULTURE 1 Gare d’Orsay Museum and BPI In the 1970s, Paris continued to draw tourists from across the world. Changes to the city’s landscape and new constructions were made not only with the needs and wants of Parisians in mind, but also those of the tourists who injected so much revenue into the economy. The Gare d’Orsay art museum (Musée d’Orsay) has become one of the most popular attractions in Paris, partly because of its central location on the Left Bank’s Quai d’Orsay. Originally, this was the site of the Orsay Palace, which burned during the Commune of 1871. The property was

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purchased in the 1890s by a railroad company and a magnificent new train station was built. It opened during the World Exposition of 1900 offering electric tram and regular train service to Orléans and other cities in the south and southwest. These rail lines were shifted to the Gare d’Austerlitz in 1939, and thereafter the Orsay station was barely used until Giscard d’Estaing’s government decided to convert it into an art museum covering the second half of the nineteenth century. The conversion began in 1980, and the Gare d’Orsay Museum of Art opened in 1986. The art on display, including paintings from the Barbizon and Impressionist schools, was already much loved, and so the Musée d’Orsay quickly became popular among Parisians and visitors. Today, the Gare d’Orsay museum is a regular stop on the touristic itinerary. The Pompidou Center, which opened in 1977,   included a museum showing exhibits that drew Parisians, visitors, and tourists. But the Pompidou Center also welcomed large crowds of students, researchers, and the reading public to use the BPI (Bibliothèque publique d’information)—a library open to all. A public, open-stack library was not common in Paris. Many of the largest and most famous libraries in the city—the National Library (Bibliothèque Nationale), the library of the city of Paris (Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris), and the library of the Hôtel de Ville (holding municipal records)—required an identity card, which itself might necessitate an interview and fee. Books and other resources had to be requested and delivered to a reserved seat. Usually, there was a limit on the number of books a reader could see in one day. Reading rooms and accommodations in these libraries are magnificent, but they are not places where one can just wander the stacks, pick out a book, and read it on the spot. Situated on three floors above the Pompidou Center and open six days during the week, the BPI was such an open-stack library, and quickly became popular with Parisian students and the public.

2 Film, television, and literature In the late twentieth century, Paris continued to be both a major film production center and a setting for movies. Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci’s controversial Last Tango in Paris about an ex-pat American and his affaire with a young Parisienne was released in 1972. Produced by an international team and directed at a worldwide audience, Last Tango was filmed at locations including the Pont de Bir-Hakim in the western section of the city that most tourists and far-off fans of Paris had never seen. The filmmaker Marcel Ophüls’ epic documentary The Sorrow and the Pity tried to make sense of French collaboration and the Vichy era—a history many Parisians and French were still reluctant to grapple with a generation after the end of the Second World War. The documentary was released in 1969 but was not shown in its entirety on French television and

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in theaters until 1981. The experience was eye-opening for many viewers and contributed to the willingness of Parisians to look again at the Vichy years and to countenance the trials of collaborators like Maurice Papon that were to take place in the coming years. France has a history of government oversight of television, but the popular channel “TF1” was privatized in 1987, and subsequently other privately owned channels began airing programs. TF1, which had an early history in radio and is the oldest station in France, is the most viewed television channel in France. Its studios are in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt. The Algerian-born writer Mehdi Charef’s Tea in the Harem (1983) is a short, gritty novel about late twentieth-century immigrant life in the Paris banlieue. Unlike the United States where poorer urban populations tend to live in the “inner city,” the population of central Paris is made up of the mostly well-off middle- to upper-middle classes. It is the suburbs (the banlieue) where a poorer population, often composed of immigrants from the former French empire and their children and grandchildren, resides. These first- or second-generation families from West Africa, North Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean—now overwhelmingly French citizens— have had difficulty integrating into French political and economic life. Tea in the Harem is an exposé written by a young French man of Algerian descent about the difficulties of life in a world that seems to sit half-way between France and North Africa. A little like the New Wave films, this genre of literature challenges the reader to find meaning in characters with ambiguous stories to tell. Tea in the Harem is the tale of friends and kin of North African immigrants struggling to maintain a cohesive family and forge an identity on the urban and cultural periphery—simultaneously, North African, immigrant, Parisian—as they deal with school, religion, intermittent jobs, criminal past-times, drugs, the suspicions of police, and the pervasive racism of French society. There is not much of a future for the novel’s characters, and like so many young people in the banlieue, the main actors do not all end well. In 1985, Charef turned the novel into a film, which he directed. There is now a well-established genre of literature that comes out of the Parisian banlieue. The 1995 film Hate (La haine) directed by Mathieu Kassovitz shows the dysfunctional lives of three friends of immigrant descent in the Paris banlieue—a setting of little hope or economic opportunity, according to the movie.

3 Post-modernists and other thinkers From the 1950s through the 1980s, Paris produced some of the world’s most influential thinkers and scholars: philosophers, historians, sociologists, and linguists. Where Germans seemed to dominate higher thinking for part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, French—especially Parisian— thinkers did so after 1945.

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The Parisian Existentialists—Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre—had captured the world’s attention after 1945, making their Left Bank cafés famous as the settings where questions about the relationship of individuals and society to the great, often terrifying events of the twentieth century were explored. The Existentialist mood persisted in literature and film through the 1960s, but as a trend in philosophy it began to fade years earlier. Postmodern ideas came from graduates of the Parisian grandes écoles: École Polytechnique, École des Hautes Etudes, École Normale Supérieure, and École National d’Administration. These were elite schools where admittance was restricted, and most of whose graduates were men from important families. The grandes écoles produced engineers, civil servants, business leaders, and scholars in the social sciences and humanities. Among the latter were writers and thinkers, many of them affected by the events of May 1968, and whose ideas as a whole—“French theory”—would have tremendous impact in universities across the world in the second half of the twentieth century. Some belonged to the PCF or were sympathetic to communism, but in the wake of the revelations of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago had become disillusioned by the Soviet experiment. Michel Foucault (1926–84), a philosopher and historian of ideas, was a product of the École Normale Supérieure who wrote about how institutions dominate everyday life. The psychiatrist Jacques Lacan (1901–81) taught at Parisian universities in the post-war years. His writings and lectures about Freud undermined conventional assumptions about rationality. François Furet (1927–97) was an historian who moved away from Marxism to offer a revisionist take on the French Revolution, emphasizing the role of language—rather than economics or politics—to make sense of the Terror. The philosopher and critic Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) received a degree from the École Normale Supérieure and became a proponent of “deconstruction,” which argued that multiple meanings could be found in any text. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009), a product of the University of Paris, was an influential sociologist who held that the structures of human thought could be understood. Deconstruction, structuralism, and post-structuralism all seemed to come out of Paris, and all seemed terribly complex, with ambiguous meanings that were difficult for the general public to understand—perhaps purposely so. The French theory coming from Paris signaled a turning away from political commitment and from the Left/Right divide that dominated much of the twentieth century. Not all Parisian thinkers came out of the grandes écoles. Roland Barthes (1915–80) was already deconstructing modern life and exploring the structure and myths of literature in the 1950s even without a prestigious degree. Others participated in the intellectual ferment, but kept a distance: Julia Kristeva (1941–), born in Bulgaria, was much influenced by the Postmodern thinkers. A feminist, linguist, literary critic, and philosopher of language,

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Kristeva examined the sources of oppression within ordinary speech. After receiving a law degree from Sciences Po, the Holocaust survivor Simone Veil served in the ministry of justice under de Gaulle and the ministry of health under Pompidou, where she was an advocate for legalized abortion. Veil did not retreat from politics, and indeed went on to become a member of the European Parliament from 1979 until 1993. Recently, she was appointed to the French Constitutional Council, which has functions of constitutional oversight similar to the American Supreme Court.

4 Popular music While French theory infiltrated universities and college faculties on the other side of the Atlantic, pop culture from North America and Great Britain drew fans in Paris, especially among young people. Rock music, which began in the United States in the 1950s and then took on a new form in England in the 1960s, came to Paris in the 1960s mostly through the touring of individual performers and bands. Most of the acts that young Parisians listened to were from Britain or the United States, since initially there were fewer French who played the music. The best-known French rock and roller was Johnny Hallyday (1943–2017), born Jean-Philippe Smet in Paris, who had come to rock music like many other young Europeans: after having heard the American Elvis Presley on the radio in the 1950s. Through the 1960s and 1970s, Hallyday was the main force for home-grown rock and roll in Paris and France. But over time, other young Parisians began to perform or to create their own rock bands. In the 1960s and 1970s, Parisian fans patronized music clubs and published magazines devoted to rock and roll. Even older, established Parisian music clubs began to schedule rock and roll acts. One of the most famous Parisian music venues was the Olympia. Located on the Right Bank in central Paris, the Olympia dated from the late 1880s. Many famous entertainers had performed there over the decades, both French and foreign. Among the American and British rock bands to play at the Olympia were the Beatles, Beach Boys, Jimi Hendrix, Grateful Dead, and Rolling Stones. The Olympia, which can hold about 2,000 people, has gone through numerous incarnations and renovations. Another well-known Parisian music hall is the Bataclan located on the Boulevard Voltaire in the Right Bank’s eleventh arrondissement. The Bataclan was built in the 1860s, and like the Olympia has undergone many changes over the years. By the 1970s, it was being used as a venue for rock and roll, including avant-garde acts like the American Lou Reed. The Bataclan music hall and its offbeat fare would be the site of a terrible terrorist attack in November 2015. At the Olympia, Bataclan, and Le Golf Drouot (another music club), Parisian audiences could see cuttingedge acts like David Bowie and Iggy Pop. Punk music, which had origins in New York and London in the mid-1970s, arrived in Paris by the end of the

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decade. Sex Pistol Sid Vicious’s version of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” was recorded in Paris in 1978. Sub-Saharan African (Mali, Cameroon, Senegal, Ivory Coast) and Caribbean (Martinique and Guadeloupe) performers also found a home in Paris, influenced by native sounds and music from African Americans like Aretha Franklin. Griot was music coming from Africa and, by the 1970s, from Paris. The Senegalese brothers Touré Kunda were popular performers in Paris, selling lots of albums. An African music festival still takes place annually at Saint-Denis.6 Taking their cue from momentous cultural moments like the Woodstock (1969) and Isle of Wight (1970) outdoor rock music festivals, the PCF sponsored huge outdoor rock concerts at the northern Parisian suburb of La Courneuve as part of its annual Fête de l’Humanité. Among the big-name British and North American performers at the festival in the 1970s were Pink Floyd (1970), Joan Baez (1971), The Who (1972), Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis (1973), the Kinks and Leonard Cohen (1974), Deep Purple (1977), and Genesis (1978).

Conclusion The office of mayor finally returned to Paris in 1977 after an absence of … well, almost forever. Paris had had a mayor in the modern era (since 1789) only intermittently and briefly. French rulers—whether kings, presidents, or legislatures—had considered the capital both too important and potentially too tumultuous not to be ruled directly by the central state. But in the twentieth century, this seemed an anomaly. Since 1977, Parisian mayors beginning with Jacques Chirac have become normal elements of the governing structure. Parisians have welcomed the return of city mayors. At the same time, most Parisian presidents have continued to devote a good deal of attention to Paris. De Gaulle remained somewhat aloof from the city, but his presidential successors through François Mitterrand did not. Since the 1970s, Paris has been an architectural and design showcase for French presidents, culminating in the Grands Projets undertaken by Mitterrand, some of which were part of the Bicentennial of the French Revolution. The Grands Projets had other purposes, too: to improve transportation and communication across the city; as further inducements for tourists and visitors (and, indeed, Paris enhanced her position as the world’s great tourist destination in the last quarter of the twentieth century); and as a sign that the Revolution of 1789, and the political and cultural transformations it ushered in—including, foremost, the Republic—had won out. And yet, typically, there was paradox: Paris was the universal and cosmopolitan city, the birthplace of human rights, formally the capital of the French empire and, accordingly, a draw for persons across the world; and yet Paris found it difficult to integrate immigrants, and then their children and grandchildren.

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The difficulties associated with integration gave rise to virtually segregated sections of the city and to the rise of a new political Right, particularly the National Front; these are issues that remain important in Parisian and French politics through the present. One unifying development occurred in 1984 when the French national football team (nicknamed “Les Bleus”) won the European championship played at Paris. Many of the players for Les Bleus were of African or non-French European descent: the team, if not exactly Paris or France, were “multi-cultural” and a successful model of integration. The post-May ’68 (après mai) mood saw Parisians begin to slowly move away from the dominant political parties of the Center and Left. The students and activists of May 1968 moved in to the universities, business, entertainment, or politics. Post-modern theories coming from Parisian institutes and universities spread across the Atlantic World, and with the help of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, persistently questioned the intellectual structures of the existing world order. What some in the humanities and social sciences across the Atlantic World called the “disease” of French theory mostly came out of Paris.

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Chronology 1981

First TGV rail line (Paris-Lyon) opens—President Mitterrand announces Grands Projects

1983

Minitel widely available in Paris

1986

Gare d’Orsay museum opens

1989

Bicentennial of French Revolution—Louvre Pyramid, Grande Arche, and Bastille Opera open

1992

Euro-Disneyland opens in suburb

1995

Paris’s first large gay parade

1996

Opening of new National Library at Bercy

2005

Riots and demonstrations in suburbs

2007

Introduction of Vélib bicycle rental

2015

Terrorist attacks at Charlie Hebdo office, Bataclan Theater, and Stade de France

2018–19 Yellow Vest movement 2019

Notre-Dame Cathedral severely damaged by fire

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Introduction The 1990s brought tremendous political and technological change to Paris and the world. There was a wave of revolutions across Eastern Europe in 1989–90, and the Soviet Union came to an end in 1991. With the Soviet Union gone, the Cold War with the United States concluded, too. It seemed to some like the “end of history,” with the capitalist model triumphant. In fact, this was not the case. The economic rise of India and, especially, China, both of which saw phenomenal growth in this era, offered alternative models. Periodic widespread economic crises—the most severe in 2008— along with persistent inequality, even in richer areas like Western Europe and North America, forestalled a consensus around any modernizing model. Political groups on the Left, but especially on the Right, raised objections, ran candidates for office, and kept the post–Cold War political equilibrium unsettled. In the 2000s, neo-fascism appeared in Europe and the United States, awakening memories of the rise of fascism in the first decades of the previous century. Much of the political turmoil of the first years of the new millennium was directed at “globalization” (which for some, including many Parisians and French, meant “Americanization”) and in defense of national sovereignty. The spread of the internet both made the universe seem smaller and accelerated the spread of information, or misinformation, that often set people against each other. The European Union, which emerged from the disastrous world wars of the first half of the twentieth century and sought to bring together European nations politically and economically, started to fray in the 2000s; other international organizations created as antidotes to world war and revolution—some of which were created in Paris—showed signs of coming apart, too. In the Middle East, from the 1990s through the early 2000s, there was periodic war and revolution. The United States and its allies launched two wars against Iraq, and in the second of these overthrew the regime, occupied the country, and set in motion a chain of events that would keep the region unstable. Terrorist acts directed at the United States and its allies were launched in the name of a radical version of Islam. Most of the terrorists were young, disenfranchised men—sometimes second-generation immigrants from the Islamic diaspora attacking the countries in which they had been born. At the same time, underlying popular displeasure with authoritarian regimes led to an “Arab Spring” across the Middle East and North Africa in 2011. Some of the revolutions were successful in bringing about new governments and change; most were not. Western wars and involvement in Middle East politics (partly driven by the desire to protect oil reserves) and acts of terrorism in the Atlantic World were intertwined. A terrible civil war in Syria beginning in 2011 unleashed a wave of refugees toward other countries of the Middle East and Europe. Among the most awful acts of terrorism in these years were two that took

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place in Paris—one of the great cities of the world and an attraction for millions of tourists, but also now a symbol for what some corners of the world deeply resented.

POLITICS 1 Mayors The long dormant office of mayor of Paris was revived during the administration of President Giscard d’Estaing. There had briefly been Paris mayors during the Revolutions of 1789, 1848, and 1870–71. Otherwise during the modern era, French national governments have exercised direct control of the city through the prefects of the department and police, both of whom were centrally appointed: French rulers long considered the city too important and too tumultuous to have its own elected government. But by the 1970s, partly as a reckoning following the events of May 1968, there was consensus that Paris needed, indeed deserved, her own mayor just like every other “commune” in France. The first to be elected in 1977 was Jacques Chirac (1977–95), a strongwilled figure who dominated the city council and stood his ground against French presidents. A Gaullist, Chirac supported the Socialist President Mitterrand’s Grands Projets and, following national elections in 1986, briefly served as prime minister during a period of political “co-habitation.” Chirac’s office was at the Hôtel de Ville, which has long been the seat of municipal governance. Like all modern mayors, Chirac was concerned with making Paris more livable. This meant adding pedestrian walkways, green space, and reducing automobile traffic and smog. Chirac also added new neighborhood gardens under the principle that every Parisian should live within 500 meters of a place of recreation. One way to reduce car traffic was to use underground garages, several of which were built in these years. Chirac also oversaw completion of the big Les Halles project in central Paris. Re-elected in 1983 and 1989, Chirac used the office of mayor as a stepping stone to the presidency, which he won in 1995. He was followed as mayor by Jean Tibéri (1995–2001), a long-time municipal official and city councilor from the fifth arrondissement. Like Chirac, under whom he had served as deputy mayor, Tibéri was a Gaullist. What was the difference between a mayor of the political Right, like Chirac and Tibéri, and a mayor of the political Left, like their successors Bertrand Delanoë and Anne Hidalgo?—nothing overwhelming. Chirac and Tibéri were arguably more supportive of the Grands Projets, while Delanoë and Hidalgo have been vocal about social issues, including high unemployment and development of the banlieue. Tibéri left office under a cloud of corruption. He was followed by Delanoë (2001–14), a member of the Socialist Party and similarly a long-time politician. One of Delanoë’s first acts was to acknowledge the

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1961 police massacre of Algerian protestors—a tragedy other politicians had ignored (see below). He continued to increase green space, opened up pedestrian zones, and introduced the popular bike-sharing Vélib program. In October 2002, there was an assassination attempt on Delanoë by an assailant who disliked the mayor’s politics and the fact that he was gay (which Delanoë had announced before running for office). Delanoë recovered from the injury, finished his term, and was elected to a second term in 2008. In 2006, widespread student demonstrations and occupation of university buildings pointed to disaffection among young people. Anne Hidalgo, also a member of the Socialist Party, was elected mayor in 2014. In 2015, she introduced the Paris Respire policy that prohibits automobile traffic in the city on the first Sunday of each month; late in the same year, she devoted much of her time to restoring calm following the November 2015 terrorist attacks on the Bataclan Theater and other sites.

2 Trials of Papon and Bousquet Among the issues that have lingered over Paris was a reconciliation with the city’s history during the Second World War. Trials of French officials who collaborated with the occupying Germans, including assisting in the roundup and deportation of French Jews that was part of Hitler’s Final Solution, brought the issue into the open in the 1980s and 1990s. Parisians and French had seemed almost willfully to push aside, distort, or forget the history of collaboration with German occupiers between 1940 and 1944. By the 1960s, archivists were uncovering and historians were beginning to write about the Vichy era, and the next two decades saw court trials that compelled the country to come to grips with its recent past. The first of the trials was in southern France, where the German Klaus Barbie, head of the Gestapo in Lyon who had ordered the torture and killing of the French Resistance leader Jean Moulin, was convicted and imprisoned in 1987. In Paris, two notable figures came before the courts for their actions during the German Occupation, and whose arrests and trials generated tremendous publicity and coverage in the Parisian press. One of these was Maurice Papon (1910–2007) who was prefect of the southern department of Gironde during Vichy. Like many collaborators, Papon had escaped punishment and resumed a career in the French bureaucracy after the war. Finally discovered, he was tried in Paris in 1998 for crimes against humanity, convicted, and imprisoned at the city’s La Santé prison; he was released for health reasons after a few years. Papon had a controversial personal history even aside from Vichy, having helped to cover up the killing of Algerian protestors in October 1961, during urban protests that accompanied the Algerian War of Independence. At that time, protestors were rounded up, beaten, tortured, and their bodies thrown into Seine from locations including the Saint-Michel Bridge. An inquiry of 1999 found 48 Algerians had been drowned, and altogether well over 100 (perhaps several hundred) killed. Police and politicians long kept

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quiet about the affair, but activists and persons of conscience did not. In 2001, Mayor Bernard Delanoë had a memorial placed at the Saint-Michel bridge. In retrospect, it is ironic that in 1962 President Charles de Gaulle had created a memorial for French Jews deported during the Second World War (Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation) on the Île de la Cité near NotreDame Cathedral—very close to the time and site of the “Battle of Paris” that had seen young Algerian protestors arrested and killed. René Bousquet (1909–93) was the prefect who ordered the 1942 roundup of almost 13,000 Parisian Jews sent to Vel d’Hiv and from there to the concentration camp at Drancy, where they were kept in appalling conditions before being dispatched to German death camps elsewhere in Europe. Bousquet managed to escape punishment for his role in Vichy, and resumed a career in the bureaucracy and politics, partly through a friendship with future president François Mitterrand. But Bousquet’s past caught up with him. In 1989, investigators presented evidence about his wartime activities, and two years later he was indicted by the French government for his role in the Vel d’Hiv roundup. Before the trial started, Bousquet was shot and killed by a person upset about France’s muddying of its history.

3 Challenge of the National Front Another issue that has hovered over Paris from the presidency of François Mitterrand to the present has, like the trials of former collaborators, echoes in France’s past: the rise of the National Front (Front National, founded 1972), a political party that has overtones of extreme nationalism and antiSemitism. The National Front opposes both new immigration and efforts to integrate or assimilate persons of mostly North African descent, even those who were born in France. The National Front took off in the early 1980s, echoing the themes of fascists from before the Second World War, while adding a new element— anti-immigrant and anti-immigration. The party was headed by a contentious figure: Jean-Marie Le Pen (1928–). Along with being stridently nationalist and anti-immigrant, the National Front was statist and protectionist in its economic outlook. The National Front was, and remains, stronger in the rest of France than in Paris, although it has drawn some support from Parisian workers abandoning the PCF. The National Front first won local elections in 1983, and thereafter fielded competitive candidates in national and European parliamentary elections. However, the National Front chose not to cooperate with other parties of the political Right, making it very difficult to advance beyond the first round of elections. The National Front won 10.4 percent of the vote in the first round of presidential elections in 2007 and 17.9 percent in 2012. Marine Le Pen (1968–) took over the party leadership from her father in 2015, toning down the racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric before stumbling in the presidential campaign of 2017, which was won by the centrist Emmanuel Macron.1

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As the National Front gained support and became a fixture in France’s political arena during the last thirty years, support for the PCF and the trade unions federation, the CGT, declined—even in Paris, where both had long been powerful actors. Some former supporters of the PCF, especially young people, shifted to other parties of the political Left, including the Greens, which organized in 1984 around environmental issues. Meantime, the challenge of assimilating first-, second-, and thirdgenerations of North African descent sometimes worked to the advantage of the political Right. In 1989 and 1994, there was intense debate about the wearing of headscarves or veils by Muslim women—a requirement of Islam that went against the French legal tradition of laïcité forbidding the public display of religious symbols. The first “l’affaire du voile” (veil affair) began in 1989 in the Parisian suburb of Creil when female students were suspended for wearing Islamic garb. This set off a national debate, and in 1994 the government issued a memo distinguishing between “discreet” and “ostentatious” religious symbols. The hijab was classed with the latter and forbidden in all public establishments. The issue remains contentious. Also fueling support for the political Right was rioting that erupted in the Parisian banlieue in October and November 2005. It began in the suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois when two teenagers chased by police hid in a power station where they were electrocuted. Subsequent rioting in northern and northeastern Parisian suburbs spread to other cities. Almost 3,000 persons—mostly young French of North African descent—were arrested, and there was considerable property damage, especially to cars. Though the rioting was set off by the deaths of the two teenagers, tensions had been building between police and youthful “beurs” for a long time. High rates of unemployment and a feeling of disenfranchisement were the dry tinder to rebellion.

4 Terrorism There is a long history of terrorism in modern Paris. The term “Terror” was used in 1793–94 during the French Revolution to describe laws and decrees designed to protect the Revolution and Republic and frighten opponents. If political assassinations or assassination attempts count as terrorism, then Paris certainly has its share with the numerous attempts on the life of LouisPhilippe in the 1830s and against Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s. Paris was one of the European settings for anarchist bombings and assassinations during the 1890s. There were numerous bombings in the early 1960s by the Organisation armée secrète (OAS) during the Algerian War of Independence. But a new kind of terrorist attack began in Paris in the 1980s. Generally, these were not directed at specific persons but rather were designed to inflict indiscriminate harm and create mayhem. Paris was a target partly because of her international reputation. The unpredictability and seeming randomness of death and injury produced by the attacks were calculated to induce a

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sustained dread. Most of the terrorist attacks were bombings, and most were related to issues in the Middle East. Some were carried out by foreign radicals espousing versions of Islamic ideals, but there were also native-born terrorists. In the 1980s, Action directe was vaguely anarchist and prepared to use violence, modeling its tactics on Italian groups of the 1970s. Most leaders of Action directe were arrested in 1987, but not before murdering the president of the Renault car manufacturer. An Armenian terror group killed eight persons in a shootout at Orly airport in 1983. Bombs were planted in 1985 at a Paris department store and bookstore. In 1986, there were bombings at a popular technology store and on the Paris-Lyon TGV, including one that killed eleven and injured 160. Terrorist attacks in Paris since the 1980s often are related to France’s involvement in Middle Eastern politics and wars—whether French assistance during the American-led Gulf War of 1990–91, in Libya in 2011 following the overthrow of the Quaddafi regime, or more recently against “ISIL” in Iraq and Syria. France and Paris sympathized with New York following the terrorist attack of “9/11.” France did not support the subsequent American invasion of Iraq in 2003, and yet suffered in the terrorist “blowback” after that event. International affairs in the Middle East contributed to homegrown radicalization that was already occurring among young French of North African or Middle Eastern descent. Some of the persons involved were embittered young Parisian banlieusards who had spent their lives feeling disenfranchised, were unemployed, and perhaps had spent time in prison. Such persons proved susceptible to radical ideas. The most dramatic episodes occurred in recent years. Twelve persons were killed and several others wounded in a January 2015 attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine that poked fun at everyone and everything, including Islam and the terrorists themselves. The Charlie Hebdo attack in eastern Paris’s eleventh arrondissement was followed by additional killings and injuries in the Paris suburbs. The most terrible event took place in November 2015, when young radicals attacked sites around Paris that included the Bataclan Theater, cafés, and the Stade de France in Saint-Denis where a football match was being held. Young people, and the Right Bank locations where they were likely to gather, were the targets. Altogether, 130 people were killed, including 89 at the Bataclan, and almost 400 injured. Seven of the attackers died.

SOCIETY 1 Troubles in the banlieue Complexity and a gulf of misunderstanding marked the economic and cultural relationship between Paris and its banlieue—the suburban zone surrounding the capital. The two were together and yet separate, with a

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million banlieusards traveling each day from their “zone” into Paris to work, shop, and seek entertainment. There had been apprehension between Parisians and banlieuesards since the nineteenth century, and this did not abate after 1945 as the suburban population grew and Paris’s population stagnated (9.5 million in the banlieue compared with 2.2 million in Paris in 2008). For many decades, the banlieue included the Red Belt of workingclass suburbs posed in a potential class struggle against the bourgeois city.

FIGURE 12.1 Plaque dedicated to Algerian protestors killed by police in 1961. The event was long covered up. The plaque is located on a bridge connecting NotreDame Cathedral and the Boulevard Saint-Michel. It was placed in 2001. © Casey Harison.

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Since the end of the Second World War, the banlieue has increasingly become a ring of immigrant (first-, second-, and third-generation) communities struggling to integrate into French and Parisian life. The banlieue was the area where most migrants from North and West Africa settled as they moved to France in the 1950s. The migration was the product of a colonial relationship created by the spread of the French empire after the sixteenth century. As the empire broke up following the Second World War, some Africans, Asians, and Caribbean peoples left for France, either because they were tied in one way or another to French interests or because they sought better opportunities. Many went to Paris, where they found inexpensive housing in the suburbs and jobs that were often in the city proper. A second generation born in the 1970s and a third generation after 2000 faced great social and economic difficulties, along with racism. Children of the banlieue were raised in de facto segregation, tended to work menial jobs, and felt excluded from mainstream politics and culture. Unemployment rates, especially for young men, were extraordinarily high in the Paris area. Disenfranchisement and disillusionment bred discontent that erupted into riots and collective violence in 2005 and 2009. Beur (or rebeur) and beurette were the terms coined to describe persons of North African descent who were born in France. The terms implied a generation of young people, disappointed with their lives and resentful of the authorities and French culture. Radio Beur still has a large audience (Figure 12.1). In recent years, the persistent discontent from the suburbs has fed into acts of terrorism that, especially after the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, drew heavily upon strains of radical Islamic thought. In turn, the troubles in the banlieue encouraged the rise of the right-wing National Front, which advocated anti-immigrant policies. Politicized disputes erupted in 1989 and 1994 over the wearing of religious clothing by Muslim women. Some French saw this as a violation of France’s tradition of laïcité, which decreed no public displays of religion. In the 1980s, anti-racist/pro-immigrant groups like SOS Racisme and France Plus rose in response to the nationalist and anti-immigrant voices.2

2 Successes in the banlieue Unhappy, seemingly dispossessed young French of North African descent did not define everything about the banlieue—a sprawling, culturally diverse portion of the enormous Paris region with the city at its center. Demographically, part of the banlieue was composed of working-class ethnic French or persons descended from older immigrant populations of North and West Africans, Poles, Spaniards, Italians, Portuguese, Armenians, and others. The suburbs—proche (near) and loin (far)—also attracted retired older Parisians on a fixed budget looking for cheaper living spaces and a break from the hustle-and-bustle of the city. Some parts of the banlieue

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were viewed as “desirable.” These included Neuilly, Boulogne, and SaintCloud in the west; Saint-Mandé and Vincennes in the east; and Saint-Rémyles-Chevreuse in the south.3 The Red Belt, which began in the nineteenth century as an industrial area with a working-class population that sided with the political Left, has not entirely disappeared. Today, the Red Belt includes the suburbs and communes of Malakoff, Montreuil, Bagnolet, Bobigny, and Kremlin-Bicêtre. Montreuil remains the headquarters of the CGT; it has a large, thriving African-Asian community and a comparatively healthy local economy. Beginning in the 1970s and through the rest of the decade, municipal officials initiated numerous projects to build up the banlieue. Public transportation from suburb to city by bus and RER commuter line improved in the 1990s. The Archives of Paris was built in 1990 in the northeastern nineteenth arrondissement at the frontier of the banlieue, drawing students and scholars interested in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Parisian history. Even more momentous for historians of France, a new National Archives was opened in 2013 in the far northern suburb of Pierrefitte. The Stade de France, the national stadium, was built in the old northern suburb of Saint-Denis. This was a major project. Construction began in 1995 and the stadium, which can hold over 80,000 people, opened three years later. It is the home of the national football team and has hosted French, European, and world championships. It is also used for events like big music concerts. The stadium has helped revitalize Saint-Denis and banlieue neighborhoods that were once considered triste (sad) and the home to gangs of casseurs (hooligans). The site of the Basilica of Saint-Denis—the burial place of French kings—and an industrial center in the nineteenth century, Saint-Denis today is home to a diverse and multi-cultural population of over 100,000 people. The area supports numerous programs to foster assimilation and economic development. For many Parisian authorities, the banlieue had always seemed a place for experimentation, and this attitude continues. Le Metropole du Grand Paris banlieue gives more political and administrative voice to the suburbs. A new Paris Philharmonic is situated at the Parc de la Villette. At the southern end of the Paris region is SaintRémy-les-Chevreuse, a town of about 8,000 people set in the green and idyllic countryside. As the last southern stop on RER line B, it is connected both to Paris and to Saint-Denis at the northern axis. Saint-Denis and Saint-Rémyles-Chevreuse could hardly be more different, yet both are part of the larger region—a megalopolis, with Paris as its heart.

3 Post-1989 immigration In 1990, Paris’s population stood at 2,154,678 people, about 16 percent of whom were foreign-born; by 2011, about 20 percent were foreign-born. The population of suburban Saint-Denis was 26 percent foreign-born in 2011. Along with ongoing immigration from North and West Africa, in the early 1980s, refugee Boat People—Vietnamese, especially, but also Laotians

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and Cambodians from the former French colony of Indochina—arrived in Paris and began to settle an enclave, a Quartier asiatique, in the southeast of the city near Bercy. This would become Paris’s first Chinatown. There was another surge of immigrants in the 1980s, this one from countries closer to France: Hungary, Poland, and Rumania, as well as Roma leaving Eastern Europe in the wake of revolutions that began in 1989, and then the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In wealthier western Paris, there were many well-off ex-pats whose children went to nearby international schools. The nationalities with the most immigrants in Paris today (all numbering over 200,000) are Portuguese, Algerian, and Moroccan. Paris already had a long history of receiving immigrants and refugees from Eastern Europe. Following the failed rebellion of 1830–31, Poles— mostly from the upper classes—came to Paris, where they set up a refugee/ exile headquarters at the seventeenth-century Hôtel Lambert on the Île Saint-Louis. The most prominent among the exiled Poles was the poet and nationalist Adam Mickiewicz. Members of the Russian intelligentsia arrived in Paris later in the nineteenth century. The Russian political reformer and journalist Alexander Herzen was in and out of Paris, where he died in 1870. From the 1860s through the 1880s, Paris was the occasional home of the famous Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, who died there in 1883. Vladimir Lenin periodically lived and worked in Paris before returning to Russia in the spring of 1917. There was a wave of working-class East Europeans who came to Paris after the First World War, many of whom worked and settled in the banlieue or working-class areas such as Belleville and La Villette. The presence of non-French nationalities and non-Catholics has sometimes provoked acts of racism and anti-Semitism in Paris, for instance during the presidential election of 1980, when four persons were killed and several wounded in a terrorist bombing at a Reform Jewish synagogue on the Rue Copernic. The attack shocked France and Paris, which is home to over a quarter-million Jews. Within days, Parisians responded with a demonstration of over 200,000 people who marched from the Place de la Nation to the Place de la République in support of the city’s Jewish population. There are other signs that French are beginning to see their country as a “melting pot”: the father of Nicolas Sarkozy (1955–), who was president of France from 2007 to 2012, was an Hungarian immigrant.

4 2003 heat wave Paris, like most of northern and western France, has a maritime climate governed by its proximity to the Atlantic Ocean. This means generally mild temperatures throughout the year and frequent, light rainfall. The skies are often gray with low clouds and drizzly conditions the rule from September through May. Usually, the rain is not heavy, averaging about 25 inches annually. In the winter, there is not much snow, and even when there is it rarely accumulates. Extreme temperatures in summer or winter

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are uncommon; it hardly ever goes below freezing during the winter. The average high and low temperatures in January and July are, respectively, 45 and 37 degrees Fahrenheit (7 and 3 Centigrade); and 77 and 60 degrees (25 and 16 Centigrade). Ever since the Popular Front government of the 1930s initiated paid summer vacations in the 1930s, during the months of July and August, Parisians head to sunnier, warmer areas in the south of France. The generally reliable, mild temperatures are one reason why the terrible heat wave of summer 2003 caught Paris off guard and produced such drastic results. In July and August 2003, parts of Western and Central Europe saw some of the hottest temperatures ever recorded on the Continent. France suffered the worst, where it had probably not been this hot since the sixteenth century. The high temperature recorded in Paris during the month of August was 39.5 Centigrade (103 Fahrenheit), which was very close to the all-time record. But what was really extraordinary was that the excessive heat went on day after day. Most Parisian homes and apartments did not have air conditioning, and because the temperatures were unprecedented people did not know how to respond or to cool off. Conditions remained warm even at night, and for days there was little relief. The results were terrible: perhaps 70,000 deaths across Europe, including 15,000 in France, and over 700 in Paris. The elderly especially suffered. Many doctors and other health care professionals were away from the city on vacation, and so were not available to care for the afflicted. There were fewer social services equipped to check up on persons confined to their homes. Some families came back from vacations to find parents or grandparents dead from the temperatures. The thought of elderly persons dying on their own in the stifling heat of closed-off apartments troubled the consciences of everyone. Accordingly, the weather catastrophe of summer 2003 provoked a national conversation about where to place blame, the effects of global warming, and the isolation that many elderly Parisians— out of sight and out of mind—endure. The response was to be prepared for the next heat wave with neighborhood cooling centers and regular visits to the elderly and infirm. There were more heatwaves in 2006 and 2012, but Paris and France were better prepared. The lesson about extreme weather had hit home: in April 2016, Paris hosted representatives from across the world to sign the Paris Climate Accord by which individual nations would enact policies to reduce the man-made contributions to rising global temperatures.

Anglophone/francophile historians of Paris

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nglophone (English-language) historians have written a lot about Paris—almost as much, it seems, as French historians. Paris has served as topic and muse for (here is a much-abbreviated list) British historians Richard Cobb and Robert Tombs; Australian historian David Garrioch; Canadian historians Michael Sibalis and Clare Crowston; and American

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historians Steven Laurence Kaplan, Tyler Stovall, and Lynn Hunt. Yet in some ways, these historians have been bucking a strain of Anglo-American “francophobia” that has a long history (and which some of these scholars have written about4). Some of this has to do with a political and cultural bias deriving from the “black legend” of the French Revolution that began in England with Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and the counter-revolutionary genre that followed. In the nineteenth century, Thomas Carlyle’s influential History of the French Revolution (1837) cast the Revolution as a misguided episode representative of the naturally turbulent Parisians. Charles Dickens relied upon Carlyle’s history to write A Tale of Two Cities (1859), which became the most widely known fictional account of the Revolution. British writers may have even invented the phrase “Reign of Terror.” By the mid-nineteenth century, Anglo-American audiences were more likely to know about the French Revolution through the patronizing versions of Carlyle and Dickens than from empathetic accounts translated into English by French writers Alphonse de Lamartine, Alexis de Tocqueville, or Jules Michelet. In the twentieth century, the biases were bolstered by representations in Hollywood films like D. W. Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm (1921), W. S. Van Dyke’s Marie Antoinette (1938), and Anthony Mann’s The Black Book (1949). So how was it that Anglophone historians began to lean toward Paris? Some of the draw had to do with a place they were familiar with from literature and history, but which at the same time seemed to offer something a little exotic because of the language difference and because Paris and France seemed in some ways not to fit the Anglo-American model. American historians could recognize France as both “sister republic” and as a unique place. As students, Americans and British took courses in French language and learned about the central place of France in the “Western Tradition” and, through the Enlightenment and French Revolution, Paris’s role in helping to create the modern world. A “Lost Generation” of mostly American writers, including some historians, went to Paris during the Interwar years (1919–39) to find their muse, explore the archives and libraries, and escape the conformity of the Anglo-American world. Researchers became teachers, and after the Second World War, French history became a regular part of the academic curriculum in the United States and Canada, with most history departments offering courses on the topic, and research institutions graduating young scholars for whom months honing their research skills at the Archives Nationale (National Archives) or Bibliothèque Nationale (National Library) in Paris became a kind of rite of passage into the profession. Historians, like other visitors to Paris, also went for the art, the food, the ambiance. Some went to delve into what they perceived as a more carefree and authentic life. Some future historians had experienced the city as study-abroad students in high school or college. Some historians had experienced Paris as soldiers or diplomats during the First and Second World Wars.5

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Economy 1 Grands Projets François Mitterrand, elected president of France in 1981, intended to add to Paris’s already fantastic architectural landscape. He was certainly not the first French leader to see the capital as the object of grandiose ideas. Leaving aside the Medieval and Early Modern eras, in the modern period Napoleon Bonaparte and especially his nephew Napoleon III added many new buildings, roads, and other structural features to the city. Twentiethcentury presidents Pompidou and Giscard d’Estaing were not shy about bringing their own touches to the classical features of the cityscape. But Mitterrand had the boldest plans since the Second Empire. These revolved around completing an “axis”—a connection or line of sight—linking the

MAP 4  Contemporary Paris.

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FIGURE 12.2  The Pyramid at the Louvre Museum. The Louvre was a sometimes confusing place to view art until it was re-done under the presidency of François Mitterrand by building the Pyramid as a main entrance and central organizing feature. © Casey Harison.

Place de la Bastille in the east with the area of La Défense in the west, and erecting or completing new, large structures, including the modern Opéra at the Place de la Bastille and a new National Library at Bercy in the southeast (Map 4). One of Mitterrand’s most ambitious and controversial decisions was to re-think the layout of the Louvre Museum. These were all bold ideas that generated considerable criticism. But the new president seemed to relish the challenge (Figure 12.2). The large, new buildings were dubbed Grands Projets. Mitterrand oversaw their completion by sometimes acting imperiously in the French executive tradition of dirigisme. He favored modern styles, which he thought Paris lacked. Projects left over from the d’Estaing years were completed: the Gare d’Orsay museum of modern art, the ministry of finance building along the Seine in Bercy, and a big park at La Villette. But Mitterrand wanted to leave his own stamp, too. Despite objection, work was begun on a new opera at the Place de la Bastille and an Institute for the Arab World close to the Jardin des Plantes, for which France shared the building costs with nineteen Middle Eastern and North African nations; the Institute has a library and a museum with free admission. The eye-catching Grande Arche

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was added to the sprawling commercial complex at La Défense and the enormous new National Library designed by Dominique Perrault took shape at Bercy (it opened in 1996). Everything was done in modern architectural style, with sharp (critics would say “brutal”) lines and much glass and steel. Probably the most controversial undertaking was the redesign of the Louvre Museum—a complex of buildings and courtyards dating from the Middle Ages in the center of the city along the Right Bank of the Seine. This complex would be rationalized by adding a glass pyramid (designed by the ChineseAmerican architect I. M. Pei) in the middle of the courtyard to serve as a unifying feature and the main entrance to the museum. Over time, most of the buildings and changes to Paris accomplished under Mitterrand have come to be appreciated, but not without exception: The Bastille Opéra is not loved. The Louvre Pyramid raised howls of protest, but now is viewed as Mitterrand’s triumph.6 The new buildings gave the capital’s east-west axis better definition and helped reorient the city more

FIGURE 12.3  Grande Arche. The western end of the urban “axis” completed under President Mitterrand (the Bastille Opéra is the eastern end). The top of the arch is accessible via an elevator and offers an excellent view of the city. © Casey Harison.

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closely to the Seine River, which had been neglected in those years when suburban expansion was emphasized. Was this the architecture of the Socialist Party, to which Mitterrand belonged? Were these monuments to an age or to a single person? The opulence of the Grands Projets contrasted mightily with grim neighborhoods in the banlieue. Like so much of the building accomplished in Paris since the Second Empire, Mitterrand’s vision partly had to do with attracting visitors to the city, and the Grands Projets brought in lots of them: at the start of the 1990s (as measured by nights spent in Parisian hotels), there were about 12.5 million visitors per year (7.5 million from other countries and 5 million from France). Among Europeans, most were from the United Kingdom, followed by Italy and Germany; there were almost a million North Americans, and 755,000 from Japan. Since the new millennium, more and more Chinese tourists are coming to Paris (Figure 12.3).

2 New technology and industry Paris over the last two or three decades has been alternately enthusiastic and skeptical about globalization. From the outside, this attitude may appear schizophrenic, but in fact it reflects the belief that globalization seems mostly to mean the Americanization of commerce and social values. In fact, it is not hard to find in Paris a balance between respect for traditional, classical forms and openness toward new technology and gadgets. In recent years, the clash between old and new has been apparent in the economy of the banlieue. The arrival of high-tech industries like computer engineering and telecommunications paralleled suburban deindustrialization, where in the 1980s long-established industries like steel and textiles began to struggle against low-wage competitors in Asia. On the other hand, the major French film industries Gaumont and Pathé are still located in the Paris region, as is the media and television company Canal Plus. Parisian entrepreneurs in the post-industrial world, as in so many European and American cities in the two decades before and after the new millennium, have looked to the creation and exchange of information as a source of growth. France’s Minitel was a forerunner of the internet that allowed persons to connect to others, accomplish tasks, and make purchases. It was invented in 1978 and operated over phone lines managed by the national telecommunications agency, PTT (Postes, Télégraphes, et Téléphones). Minitel service became widely available in Paris starting in 1983. Millions of terminals were distributed to individuals and organizations. Users could look up names and addresses, purchase train and airline tickets, read newspaper articles, and access databases. But the Minitel was not as flexible or as global as the World Wide Web, and so was discontinued in 2012. Today, Paris is as connected to the internet as any other big city. Recently, there is talk of a “New Paris” where “high tech” industries will require special support. In the new millennium, many young Parisians

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initially left for the economic promise of London. Under mayors Bernard Delanoë (2001–14) and Anne Hidalgo (2014–), the capital has welcomed “startups” and digital enterprises, and the young entrepreneurs who tend to run them. The 2008 global financial crisis hit Paris as hard as anyplace. Some recent urban projects are meant to counter the ill effects of technology, like the air pollution from Paris’s heavy automobile traffic. To curb the dominance of car over pedestrian, reduce pollution and, in the grand tradition of the Parisian flâneur, encourage foot traffic, two initiatives have been launched: the bicycle service Vélib’ (short for “vélo” [bicycle] and “liberté” [freedom]) in 2007 under Mayor Delanoë, and in 2015 the Paris respire—Journées sans voiture (Paris breaths—a day without cars) under Mayor Hidalgo. Vélib is a bike-sharing program that provides bicycles at stations throughout the city so that anyone can, for a small fee, use one to get around. Paris and France—the home of the Tour de France—likes biking, and so the service has been a success, one that has since been copied in many places across the globe. The Journées sans voiture is the first Sunday of every month when cars (excepting emergency vehicles) are forbidden in some areas. Paris is thus turned over to pedestrians, bicyclists, and flâneurs so that they can enjoy the sites without the noise and exhaust of automobiles.

3 Gastronomy For many people, Paris is the home of eating well, the place where the modern restaurant was “invented.”7 The historian Rebecca Spang writes that the modern restaurant first emerged in Paris in the late eighteenth century, specializing in the preparation of bouillons (clear broths that aimed to “restore” one’s health and well-being) and then expanding the menu and regularizing the service of food in ways we would recognize today. When visitors come to Paris today, they sometimes head for famous restaurants they read about in tourist guides. Parisians themselves are more familiar with out-of-the-way neighborhood bistros, cafés, and brasseries. Some of the great connoisseurs of food and eating came out of Paris in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Alexandre-Laurent Grimod de la Reynière (1758–1837) was born in Paris to a wealthy family living near the Champs-Élysées. Trained as a lawyer, his real interest was food. He opened groceries in Lyon and Paris, and quietly began a career—very new for its time, but familiar to us today—as a food critic, especially of the new restaurants opening in Paris during the early years of the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte. Grimod was something of an academician in the way he thought about and consumed food. His observations were published in his Almanac of Gourmands (1803–12). It was Grimod who conjured our modern sense of “gourmet” and “gourmand.” A contemporary was Jean-Anthelme BrillatSavarin (1755–1826), born in the provinces, but a long-time resident of Paris; he is buried at Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Brillat-Savarin trained as a

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lawyer and had an interest in politics, serving as a delegate to the EstatesGeneral in 1789 before the Revolution drove him to several years of exile in Switzerland and the United States. He was back in France by the late 1790s, after which he cultivated an interest in food. He also was an accomplished writer, his most famous book The Physiology of Taste (1825). Brillat-Savarin was interested as much in ingredients, including healthful ingredients, as their preparation. Even today, chefs abide by his famous reflection: “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” Yet another famous contributor to the Parisian cooking tradition from this period is Marie-Antoine Carême (1784–1833). Born and raised in Paris in humble circumstances, Carême, unlike Grimod and Brillat-Savarin, was himself an expert chef. He began as a pastry cook and improved his skills to eventually prepare meals for some of the famous personalities of the day, including Napoleon and Talleyrand. In the process, Carême played an important role in the development of what became “classic” French cooking techniques, which he recorded in his fivevolume The Art of French Cooking (1833–34). From the classic cooking tradition that emerged in Paris in the nineteenth century came famous dishes like vol-au-vent, lobster Thermidor, and sauce Béarnaise. Though excellent French cooking has certainly long since expanded outside the French capital (Lyon in the south of France considers itself today is center of French cooking), the tradition of fine dining continues to be a part of ordinary life, both for Parisians and visitors alike.

4 Transportation Getting to and around Paris has been a concern for national and municipal governments in the twentieth century as the suburban population has grown, and because so much of that population travels every day to the city to work, shop, and seek entertainment. At the same time, Paris remains an international destination for tourists, business people, diplomats, and professionals. To handle the traffic, Paris has two busy airports (Charles de Gaulle and Orly). Most national flights leaving Paris take passengers to French cities in the south (Toulouse, Nice, and Bordeaux), and most international flights go to Italy, Spain, the United States, Germany, and Britain. Paris has seven train stations with hourly departures to towns and cities across France and Europe. The Eurostar train takes passengers from the busy Gare du Nord to the Atlantic coast and through the “Chunnel” (underneath La Manche or English Channel) to London. Superfast trains, including the TGV with connections across France, travel to Luxembourg, Brussels, and Amsterdam. The Paris subway, the Métro, has sixteen rail lines with over 300 stations across the twenty arrondissements; users rarely need to walk more than a few minutes to get to a subway stop. The five lines of the regional commuter line, the RER, extend many miles into the suburbs and intersect with the Métro. Châtelet-Les Halles in the city center remains

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the great hub for the Métro and RER. Busses (a convenient way to tour) use over fifty lines to crisscross Paris. Recently, a tramway system has been revived. The first Paris tramway dated from the 1850s, and by the 1870s there were ten lines operating on both banks of the Seine. The first trams were horse-drawn, but by 1914 the system was electrified. In the 1920s, it was decided that the trams inhibited automobile traffic, and so they were replaced with busses, with the last tram demobilized in 1937. But since 1992, in the effort to reduce the numbers of cars on the streets, trams are making a comeback. There are currently nine lines, most of them operating in the suburbs, although two of them run through sections of the city, parallel to big boulevards on the southern periphery. There are plans to expand to other sections of the capital. The tramway is managed under the same regional authority (the RATP [Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens]) that handles the Métro and city busses. Recent mayors understand that Paris is too congested with automobiles, busses, and trucks, and that a more pedestrian-friendly infrastructure is both a desirable and necessary ingredient of the city’s future. Princess “Di” of Great Britain was killed in an auto accident near the Pont de l’Alma in August 1997. Parisians drive, but they also enjoy walking, and so there has been general support to reduce automobile traffic, noise, and pollution, and to find ways to return physical space to pedestrians and bicyclists. The Promenade plantée, an elevated pedestrian walkway in the 12th arrondissement lined with trees and plants, opened in 1993. It is a “rails-totrails” project built along the old “petite ceinture” rail line that ringed the city in the second half of the nineteenth century.

CULTURE 1 Bicentennial of the French Revolution The 200th anniversary (Bicentennial) of the French Revolution of 1789–94 took place in 1989. Some looked forward to it; some were ready to ignore or criticize. The French Revolution still divided Parisians and French. François Mitterrand was president at the time of the Bicentennial, and as a member of the Socialist Party he saw the Revolution as a great accomplishment and so was eager to celebrate. The universal goals articulated between 1789 and 1794 had had a difficult history, but since the end of the Second Empire in 1870 (and aside from the interlude of Vichy, 1940–44), the Republic—and the Revolution that produced it—seemed to have won out in France. Two years ahead, Mitterrand appointed a Bicentennial Commission to organize the affair. Celebrations were scheduled throughout France, but the biggest were set for Paris. A century earlier, the Centennial of 1889 had been marked by a World Exposition and the erection of the Eiffel Tower (at first disparaged, then embraced, and now one of the best-known symbols

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of the city). Among the events timed to coincide with the Bicentennial was completion of two of the Grands Projets of the Mitterrand era: the Opéra at the Place de la Bastille (a fitting location, since one of the signal events of 1789 had been the fall of the Bastille to the revolutionary crowd), and the Grande Arche at La Défense; the two structures would now comprise the ends of the axis connecting the capital from east to west. Another celebratory project was the construction of the new National Library at Bercy (it would not open until 1996). The big celebration was set for Bastille Day (July 14) in Paris. There was a huge parade and review along the Champs-Élysées, stretching from the Place de la Concorde (the site of the execution of Louis XVI in 1793) to the Place de l’Étoile and the Arc de Triomphe. The celebration coincided with the international G-7 economic summit of world leaders and came not long after the repression of the Chinese democracy movement at Tiananmen Square in Beijing; both events figured in the Bastille Day Bicentennial. There were singers, dancers, bands, floats, and lots of military personnel and hardware. The entertainment was colorful, avant-garde, and multicultural—the French Revolution, after all, had cast itself as a universal event. Political leaders from throughout the world attended. The climax came with the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise,” by the American singer Jessye Norman, who was draped in the French tricolor flag. Many Parisians and French, in fact probably most, led by President Mitterrand, were determined to celebrate the Bicentennial of the Revolution. In the end, most commentators thought the Bastille Day ceremony in Paris a success. But the Bicentennial also prompted much thinking and re-thinking by scholars about the long-term meaning of the Revolution. The historian François Furet was notable among the “revisionists” of the day. Was the Revolution in fact a positive thing? Had its democratic goals really won out? How could one separate the “good” of the Revolution (the promise of universal human rights) from the “bad” (the Terror)? Was the Revolution over?

2 Good Bread Is Back Good Bread Is Back is the title of a book by the American historian Steven Kaplan that describes the rise, decline, and rise again of that long-time Parisian staple: good bread, especially the long, crusty “baguette.” Over the last two or three centuries as Paris has modernized and changed, Parisians have worried about the loss of things that make the city special. The history of the baguette epitomizes this story. Bread has long been central to life in Paris. Inexpensive (the price fixed by the government) and normally abundant, bread has been a fixture of the daily diet. But by the twentieth century as food production and distribution modernized, and as the variety of things to eat expanded, the importance of

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bread waned. Bread production modernized, too. Breadmakers had always been trained as artisans, but after 1945 American-style mass production threatened to take over. Franchise grocery stores began to sell inferior loafs produced at centralized bakeries. The neighborhood boulangerie was under threat. Some Parisians did not mind the innovations and the change in texture and taste, but others did—properly prepared bread was part of the French heritage and good bread was “sacred.” Artisan-produced bread began to make a comeback in the 1950s. Grain millers took the lead in stoking the renaissance and French governments endeavored to convince bakers to revive the old, exacting standards. In the 1990s, bread made without additives or without the dough having been frozen could earn the official label of “bread of the French tradition.” A modern-day “hero” of the traditional baguette is Eric Kayser. Originally from Lorraine in eastern France and descended from a long line of bread makers, Kayser represents the return to artisanship. The opening of his Parisian boulangerie on the Rue Monge in 1996 was a great success and has been followed by the opening of more artisan bakeries in Paris and across the world. “Good bread is back!”8 The history of Parisian bread in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries reflects the struggle to maintain standards. Elsewhere in the world of Parisian cuisine, the trends have been a little in the other direction: a steady welcoming of the new and the foreign. “Nouvelle cuisine” arrived in the 1970s. Most neighborhoods have their assortment of charcuteries and traiteurs offering traditional Parisian and regional French (produits régionaux) foods and groceries, but Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and recently Korean) options are common. Moroccan restaurants featuring cous cous and tagine dishes are omnipresent. At the same time, restaurants with regional fair from Auvergne, Alsace (choucroute [sauerkraut] and raclette [melted cheese]), Normandy, Provence, and the Basque area have not gone away. Mayor Anne Hidalgo wants to make the city more pedestrian friendly, and so has encouraged “street food.” “Food trucks” are starting to show up. Favored neighborhoods for eating and drinking shift from year to year: first the Marais, then streets near the Canal de l’Ourcq. Boites de nuit are late-night bars and the craft beer mania that began in North America has arrived at bars à bière. The ethic of Paris’s new “bistronomy” is simple: it is okay to eat anything you like, but in moderation.9

3 New cultural vistas The intellectual breakthrough, the avant-garde, and the daring have always seemed a part of Paris, even as Parisians remained confident and protective of the city’s traditions. After May 1968, Paris seemed open to more new ideas, including foreign influences. Smoking cigarettes—a

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FIGURE 12.4 National Library. Another project of Mitterrand, it replaced the original Bibliothèque Nationale located on the Rue de Richelieu as the main national repository for books, articles, manuscripts, and other research materials. The construction of the Library has helped vitalize the southeast section of Paris where it is located. © Casey Harison.

staple image of the Left Bank café scene—was banned in public places in 2008 a few years after bans went into place in other sections of the Atlantic World. Paris had long seen itself, and had been seen by others, as the city of elevated culture, with unique accomplishments in art, style, architecture,

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and cuisine appealing to sophisticated tastes. At the same time, in the Other Paris there was a long history of popular culture, like the “cancan,” that kicked up its heels and snubbed its nose at elite tastes. Someplace inbetween is Disneyland Paris (originally called Euro-Disney), the Americaninvented theme park that arrived in 1992 at the outer Parisian suburb of Marne-la-Vallée. The boldness of planting a middle-brow invention like this in the world capital of high culture meant that from the start some Parisians hated it. But others (especially kids) loved it, and Disneyland Paris still operates. Paris could add to its reputation and list of things for which it was “world capital” as it became a center for African music in the 1980s and 1990s. The city has a long history of hospitality to Africans and African Americans. Musicians from Francophone sub-Saharan Africa—Senegal, Mali, Cameroon, Ivory Coast—arrived in Paris as migrants starting in the 1960s. Many were relatively well-educated and had a trade they could fall back on when necessary. The griot music they created was a hybrid of African and European. Over time, they became Parisians themselves, and in the process helped make the city a little more African. In the meantime, big name rock and roll acts able to draw huge crowds performed at the Palais Omnisports de Bercy. Opera, too, draws crowds, even though its Parisian venue—the Bastille Opéra—is not especially appreciated. Since the 1980s, the national football team, Les Bleus, has consistently ranked among the best in the world. Les Bleus won the World Cup in 1998, playing a final match at the new Stade de France in Saint-Denis. Parisian gay culture emerged openly for the first time in the 1980s—like so many other cultural developments, seemingly a delayed response to the events of May 1968. Gay culture and a gay population settled initially into a place: the Marais. The Marais was one of Paris’s oldest neighborhoods, whose fortunes had prospered and declined over the centuries. In the first half of the twentieth century, it was a center for the city’s Jewish population, much of it of East European descent and relatively poor. Under de Gaulle, the Marais was renovated, and by the 1980s was transformed. Middle- and upper-middle class persons moved in, while the older working-class was pushed out by higher rents. A distinctive part of this transformation was the development of a middle-class gay community. Shops, restaurants, and bistros aimed at a gay clientele arrived. Under President Mitterrand, outmoded laws targeting homosexuality were done away with. Older discriminatory attitudes faded. The mayor Bertrand Delanoë was openly gay. Paris’s first Gay Pride celebration was held in 1995. By the turn of the next century, the city’s gay community had begun to move to other parts of the city. The now annual “Paris Pride” LGBT celebration includes a parade that moves from the Montparnasse Tower to the Bastille and ends with a street party in the Marais.

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4 Paris today and tomorrow An historical perspective offers a sense of what lies ahead for Paris. In the modern era, Paris has been a cosmopolitan city: a draw and sometimes the home for outsiders—French, European, American, African. That remains true today, though many of those from ethnicities outside of Europe tend to live in clusters in sections of the central city or in the banlieue. Since the last decades of the nineteenth century, Paris has turned into a mostly bourgeois central city with a majority population of French ethnicity surrounded by ever-expanding suburbs inhabited by working-class populations of second- or third-generation African (North or sub-Saharan) ethnicity. The vast majority of all these people are French citizens, but the cultural distinctions—and their political and economic impact—have been a challenge to overcome. The cosmopolitanism is evident in Parisians inclination toward the idea of “Europe” and pride in the city’s hosting international events—cultural, political, and economic. Paris remains the place where diplomats and world leaders often meet to negotiate treaties and trade agreements and discuss the affairs of the world. France’s most recent president—Emmanuel Macron, born in the suburb of Clichy and a graduate of the École Normale Superiéure—has endeavored to join, in symbol and deed, French nationalism with European solidarity. But the city’s cosmopolitan instinct also makes it a periodic target for terrorism, like the 2015 attacks on the Charlie Hebdo office, Stade de France, and Bataclan theater. It is important to remember that, historically, this is not a new development—Paris has seen many episodes of violence, assassination, and terror since the eighteenth century— and so it is not something we should expect to end. Parisian and French anxiety about the place of the city and the nation in the world has a history dating from at least the end of the Second World War; as the recent “Yellow Vest” (gilets jaunes) movement shows, that, too, is not likely to diminish. The economist Thomas Piketty (1971–)—professor at the prestigious École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and graduate of the École Normale Supérieure (both part of the Parisian grands écoles) has a forecast for Paris and the world. Born in Clichy, he is author of Capital in TwentyFirst Century (2013), which looks at the last two and one-half centuries of the history of capitalism to estimate what will happen in the coming years. Piketty sees a future of increasing capital accumulation by the wealthy and thus increasing disparities of social class, standard of living, and income. Political disruption is an inevitable by-product of this trend. The solution, he argues, are programs to redistribute wealth. These are assessments and solutions that would have been familiar to generations of modern Parisians ever since the years leading up to the Revolution of 1789 (Figure 12.5).

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FIGURE 12.5 Bastille Métro stop. Hand-painted, colorful scenes from the Revolution of 1789–94 decorate the walls of the subway stop. Many Paris’s subway stops are imaginatively designed and decorated. © Casey Harison.

Parisians—probably much of the rest of the world, too—still tend to see Paris as something special, even though Paris sometimes seems reluctant to change or adopt “things”—food, drink, language, style—from other places. And yet today one can see restaurants specializing in Moroccan, Lebanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese foods; or coffee houses and craft beer sellers offering products from the United States, Belgium, or Germany; or films from China, Brazil, and Argentina. The beloved English-language bookstore Shakespeare and Company, located next door to Notre-Dame Cathedral, now has a coffee shop from which one can gaze upon the towers of Notre-Dame Cathedral.

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In April 2019, Paris and lovers of Paris were aghast to see images of those towers on fire. The fire was described as accidental, but the damage to the cathedral and to public sensibilities was considerable. The government and private entities immediately promised to rebuild, but the willingness to spend huge sums for reconstruction also served to expose the grievances of the Other Paris and the long-standing divide between France and its capital city.

Conclusion Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose—the more things change, the more they stay the same! This cliché is not something with which historians always agree. In any event, some things about Paris have remained essential in the modern era: its place as the political, economic, and cultural center of France; the draw it exerts on persons from other countries; its capacity for generating ideas, designs, and the avant-garde. But at the same time—and as we have seen in this book—so much has changed in Paris since the middle of the eighteenth century: the population and physical size of the city, particularly as the banlieue expanded and modernized; the look and layout of the city, notably as a result of Haussmannization in the second half of the nineteenth century and the Grands Projets of the last quarter of the twentieth century; the automobiles, Métro, and other modern forms of transportation that move people around quickly; and the “little people” of Paris—who have been mostly pushed to the suburbs and are more likely to have been born outside of France than in earlier times. The issues that sometimes divide Paris and French since the last quarter of the twentieth century linger, though Parisians continually seek ways to address these. One relatively new development is re-thinking the city as “Greater Paris” (Le Grand Paris) as a way of merging center and banlieue. New museums focusing on immigration and the 1930s have gone up in the suburbs, and the first banlieue-only Métro line is in the works. Tourism and beautification, and the desire of French presidents and Parisian mayors to leave their mark on Paris, continue to generate new projects, like the promenade-lined Canal de l’Ourcq, the Fondation Louis Vuitton art museum designed by the famous architect Frank Geary, and the Musée du quay Branly—Jacques Chirac, which features art from outside Europe, along the Left Bank in the central city. Still, the focus of French leaders on Paris continues to agitate the old center-periphery/Paris versus the provinces divide: the 2018–19 demonstrations of the “Yellow Vest” movement is partly a center/periphery debate. Paris continues to be a cosmopolitan and universal place—a city that tourists love to visit and a setting where universal problems are discussed and, sometimes, addressed. The Paris Climate Accord of 2015 seeks to control pollution and its contribution to global warming. The newest president—Emmanuel Macron—aspires to make France a defender of the liberal world order that, in so many ways, was born in Paris during the French Revolution.

CHRONOLOGY

1763

Place Louis XV (now Place de la Concorde) inaugurated

1782–84 Palais-Royal constructed 1785

Construction of tax wall begins

1789

French Revolution begins—fall of Bastille—National Assembly and royal family move to Paris

1790

Completion of Panthéon

1791

Champ de Mars Massacre

1792

Popular assault on Tuileries and overthrow of monarchy— Republic established—September Massacres—foreign war begins—arrival of volunteers, including Marseillaise

1793

Execution of Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, Olympe de Gouges, Girondin leaders—assassination of Marat—start of Terror

1794

Terror continues until Thermidor—execution of Danton, Desmoulins, Hébert, Robespierre, Saint-Just

1795

Directory established—Paris reorganized into arrondissements and quartiers

1797

Babeuf Plot

1799

Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état

1804

Napoleon becomes Emperor in ceremony at Notre-Dame Cathedral—Père Lachaise cemetery established

1805

Numbering of streets completed

1806

Construction of Arc de Triomphe begins (finished 1836)

CHRONOLOGY

1814

Defeat of Napoleon and Restoration of Bourbon monarchy (Louis XVIII)—Paris occupied

1815

Napoleon’s “100 Days”—second Restoration of Bourbons

1820

Assassination of Duc de Berri

1822

Execution of “Four Sergeants”

1824

Death of Louis XVIII and accession of Charles X

1830

“Three Glorious Days” and Revolution of 1830

1832

Cholera epidemic—June insurrection

1834

Attempted republican insurrection—“Massacre of the Rue Transnonain”

1835

Fieschi attempt on Louis-Philippe

1837

First railroad launched in Paris

1839

“Society of the Seasons” insurrection

315

1841–45 “Thiers Wall” built 1846

Gare du Nord opens

1848

February Revolution—Second Republic declared—June Days— election of Louis-Napoleon as president

1851

Louis-Napoleon’s coup d’état

1852

Louis-Napoleon becomes Napoleon III and establishes Second Empire—Bon Marché department store opens

1853

Baron Haussmann appointed prefect—Haussmannization begins

1855

First Paris World Exposition

1860

Annexation of suburbs—construction of National Library begins

1867

Second Paris World Exposition

1870–71 Siege of Paris during Franco-Prussian War

316

CHRONOLOGY

1871

Paris Commune—Bloody Week

1875

Opening of Opéra designed by Garnier—construction of SacréCoeur Basilica begins

1880

Emile Zola publishes Nana

1889

Centennial of French Revolution—third Paris World Exposition—opening of Eiffel Tower

1895

Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) created—first film shown in Paris

1898

Action française founded—Zola writes “J’Accuse” in defense of Dreyfus

1900

First Métro line opens—fourth Paris World Exposition

1901

Strike of subway workers

1903

First Tour de France bicycle race begins and ends in Paris

1910

Seine River floods

1914

Assassination of Jaurès—start of Great War and Battle of Marne—Union Sacrée government

1919

Peace conference at Versailles—opening of Le Bourget airport— destruction of Thiers Wall—Sacré-Coeur Basilica consecrated

1926

Opening of Paris Mosque

1931

Colonial Exposition

1934

Rightist demonstrations—Prost Plan

1936–38 Matignon Accords—Popular Front government 1937

Fifth Paris World Exposition

1939

Second World War in Europe begins

1940

France defeated—Paris occupied by German forces

1942

Arrest and deportation of Paris Jews

1944 Liberation 1945

Execution of Pierre Laval

CHRONOLOGY

317

1958

Charles de Gaulle elected president of Fifth Republic— development of La Défense begins

1961

Creation of Paris region—massacre of Algerian protesters—RER launched

1962

Culture Minister Malraux creates conservation districts

1964

Seine department reorganized

1968

Student rebellion and labor strikes

1969

De Gaulle leaves office—suburban market established at Rungis

1970

Reorganization of Paris universities

1973

Montparnasse Tower and peripheral highway completed

1974

Charles de Gaulle Airport opens at Roissy

1977

Office of mayor re-established and Jacques Chirac elected mayor—Pompidou Center opens

1979

Forum des Halles opens

1981

First TGV rail line (Paris-Lyon) opens—President Mitterrand announces Grands Projects

1986

Gare d’Orsay museum opens

1989

Bicentennial of French Revolution—Louvre Pyramid, Grande Arche, and Bastille Opéra open

1992

Euro-Disneyland opens in suburb

1996

Opening of new National Library at Bercy

2005

Riots and demonstrations in suburbs

2007

Introduction of Vélib bicycle rental

2015

Terrorist attacks at Charlie Hebdo office, Bataclan Theater, and Stade de France

2018–19 Yellow Vest movement 2019

Notre-Dame Cathedral severely damaged by fire

NOTES

Introduction 1 Jeremy Popkin, A History of Modern France, 4th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2012) and Tyler Stovall, Transnational France: The Modern History of a Universal Nation (London: Routledge, 2015).

Chapter 1 1 Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). 2 Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996). 3 David Garrioch, “Suzanne, David, Judith, Isaac … Given Names and Protestant Religious Identity in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” French Historical Studies 33, no. 1 (Winter 2010). 4 Alan Potofsky, Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 35; Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 5 Vincent Denis, “Les Parisiens, la police et les numérotages des maisons du XVIIIe siècle à l’Empire,” French Historical Studies 38, no. 1 (Feb. 2015). 6 David Garrioch, The Making of Revolutionary Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 67. 7 Steven L. Kaplan, Provisioning Paris: Merchants and Millers in the Grain and Flour Trade during the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 31. 8 Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 654. 9 Alan Williams, Police of Paris: 1718–1789 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 37, 63. 10 Daniel Roche, The People of Paris: An Essay in Popular Culture in the Eighteenth Century, tr. Marie Evans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 71. 11 Ibid. 12 Clare Crowston, “Engendering the Guilds: Seamstresses, Tailors, and the Clash of Corporate Identities in Old Regime France,” French Historical Studies 23, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 339–71.

NOTES

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13 Jeffry Kaplow, The Names of Kings: The Parisian Laboring Poor in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1972). 14 Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Panorama of Paris: Selections from “Tableau de Paris”, tr. and ed., Jeremy D. Popkin (State College: Penn State University Press, 1999). 15 Michael Sonenscher, Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 16 Kaplan, Provisioning Paris, 28. 17 Arlette Farge, Fragile Lives: Violence, Power, and Solidarity in EighteenthCentury Paris, tr. Carol Shelton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 18 Roche, People of Paris. 19 Jacques-Louis Ménétra, Journal of My Life, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 20 Restif de la Bretonne, Nicolas-Edme, Les Nuits de Paris, tr. Linda Asher and Ellen Fertig (New York: Random House, 1964).

Chapter 2 1 David Andress, The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2006). 2 Micah Alpaugh, Non-Violence and the French Revolution: Political Demonstrations in Paris, 1787–1795 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 3 Lynn Hunt, ed., The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Bedford, 2016). 4 Potofsky, Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution. 5 Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, tr. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).

Chapter 3 1 Philip Mansel, Paris between Empires: Monarchy and Revolution, 1814–1852 (London: St. Martin’s Press, 2003). 2 Ian Coller, Arab France: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 1798–1831 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 3 Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, tr. Frank Jellinek (New York: Howard Fertig, 2000). 4 Denise Davidson, “Making Society ‘Legible’: People-Watching in Paris after the Revolution,” French Historical Studies 28 (Spring 2005): 265–96. 5 Alan B. Spitzer, The Generation of 1820 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). 6 Adeline Daumard, La Bourgeoisie parisienne de 1815 à 1848 (Paris: SEVPEN, 1963).

320

NOTES

7 Dora Weiner, The Citizen-Patient in Revolutionary and Imperial Paris (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

Chapter 4 1 Barrie M. Ratcliffe, “Manufacturing in the Metropolis: The Dynamism and Dynamics of Parisian Industry at the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” The Journal of European Economic History 23 (Fall 1994): 263–328. 2 Louis Gabriel Gauny, Le Philosophe plébéien (Paris: Découverte/Maspero, 1983). 3 David H. Pinkney, Decisive Years in France, 1815–1847 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 4 Jill Harsin, Barricades: The War of the Streets in Revolutionary Paris, 1830– 1848 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 5 Jean Maitron, ed., Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier français (Paris: Les Editions Ouvrières, 1964). 6 Rifaa a Rafi al-Tahtawi, An Imam in Paris: Account of a Stay in France by an Egyptian Cleric (1826–1831), tr. Daniel L. Newman (London: Saqi Books, 2011). 7 Luc Sante, The Other Paris (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 161. 8 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, tr. Howard Eiland and Kevin McCaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002). 9 Susan S. Waller, The Invention of the Model: Artists and Models in Paris, 1830–1870 (London: Ashgate, 2006).

Chapter 5 1 Bernard Moss, The Origins of the French Labor Movement, 1830–1914: The Socialism of Skilled Workers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 51. 2 Lenard R. Berlanstein, Big Business and Industrial Conflict in NineteenthCentury France: A Social History of the Parisian Gas Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 3 David Jordan, Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 4 Victoria Thompson, “Urban Renovation, Moral Regeneration: Domesticating the Halles in Second-Empire Paris,” French Historical Studies 20, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 87–110. 5 Jonathan Beecher, Victor Considérant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 6 Katherine Fischer Taylor, In the Theater of Criminal Justice: The Palais de Justice in Second Empire Paris (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 7 Jerrold Siegel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1986). 8 Elizabeth Anne McCauley, Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris, 1848–1871 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 1.

NOTES

321

9 Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

Chapter 6 1 Dominica Chang, “‘Un Nouveau ’93’: Discourse of Mimicry and Terror in the Paris Commune of 1871,” French Historical Studies 36, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 629–48. 2 Robert Tombs, The War against Paris, 1871 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 3 See Gay Gullickson, Unruly Women of Paris: Images of the Commune (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996) and Carolyn Eichner, Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). 4 Barrie Ratcliffe, “Perceptions of the Urban Margin: The Rag Pickers of Paris in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Canadian Journal of History/ Annales canadiennes d’histoire 27 (1992): 197–233. 5 John Merriman, Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune (Paris: Basic Books, 2014). 6 Pierre-Olivier Lissagaray, History of the Paris Commune of 1871, tr. Eleanor Aveling Marx (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967).

Chapter 7 1 Colette E. Wilson, Paris and the Commune, 1871–78: The Politics of Forgetting (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). 2 Danielle Tartakowsky, “La Construction sociale de l’espace politique: Les usages politiques de la place de la Concorde des anneés 1880 à nos jours,” French Historical Studies 27, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 5. 3 Sante, The Other Paris, 245–50. 4 Nancy L. Green, Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 36. 5 Judith G. Coffin, The Politics of Women’s Work: The Paris Garment Trades, 1750–1915 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 129, 141, 151, 162. 6 Alain Faure, “Paris, ‘gouffre de l’espece humaine?’,” French Historical Studies 27 (Winter 2004): 49–86. 7 Michele Plott, “The Rules of the Game: Respectability, Sexuality, and the Femme Mondaine in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris,” French Historical Studies 25, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 531–57. 8 Kathleen Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth Century Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 9 David S. Barnes, The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). 10 W. Scott Haine, The World of the Paris Café: Sociability among the French Working Class, 1789–1914 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

322

NOTES

11 Sante, The Other Paris, 113–14. 12 Alain Corbin, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850, tr. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 105. 13 Ann-Louise Shapiro, Breaking the Codes in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); Eliza Earle Ferguson, Gender and Justice: Violence, Intimacy, and Community in Fin de Siècle Paris (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); William A. Pension, Pederasts and Others: Urban Culture and Sexual Identity in Nineteenth-Century Paris (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2004); Sante, The Other Paris, 128. 14 Sante, The Other Paris, 198. 15 Donald Reid, Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 82. 16 H. Hazel Hahn, Scenes of Parisian Modernity: Culture and Consumption in the Nineteenth Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 17 Ann-Louise Shapiro, Housing the Poor of Paris, 1850–1902 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). 18 Haine, World of the Paris Café. 19 Richard S. Hopkins, Planning the Greenspaces of Nineteenth-Century Paris (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015). 20 Karen L. Carter and Susan Waller, eds., Strangers in Paradise: Foreign Artists and Communities in Modern Paris, 1870–1914 (London: Ashgate, 2015).

Chapter 8 1 Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976). 2 Lenard Berlanstein, The Working People of Paris, 1871–1914 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). 3 Martin Brueghel, “Workers’ Lunch Away from Home in the Paris of the Belle Époque: The French Model of Meals as Norm and Practice,” French Historical Studies 38, no. 2 (April 2015): 253–80. 4 Berlanstein, Working People of Paris, 9. 5 Patricia Tilburg, “‘Sa Coquetterie Tue la Faim’: Garment Workers, Lunch Reform, and the Parisian Midinette, 1896–1933,” French Historical Studies 38, no. 2 (April 2015): 281–309. 6 Corbin, Women for Hire. 7 Leslie Page Moch, The Pariahs of Yesterday: Breton Migrants in Paris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 73–5. 8 Sante, The Other Paris, 164. 9 Berlanstein, Working People of Paris, 175–6. 10 Bernard Marchand, Paris, histoire d’une ville: XIXe-XXe siècle (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993), 200. 11 Jeffrey H. Jackson, Paris under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 12 Robin Walz, Insolent Popular Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 13 Marchand, Paris, histoire d’une ville, 222.

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Chapter 9 1 Robert Soucy, French Fascism: The First Wave, 1924–1933 (New Haven, CT: Yale, 1986). 2 Neil McWilliam, “Conflicting Manifestations: Parisian Commemoration of Joan of Arc and Etienne Dolet in the Early Third Republic,” French Historical Studies 27, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 381–418. 3 Chris Millington, “February 6, 1934: The Veterans Riot,” French Historical Studies 33, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 545–72. 4 Tyler Stovall, The Rise of the Paris Red Belt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 5 Kenneth Mouré, “Le Capital de la Faim: Black Market Restaurants in Paris, 1940–1944,” French Historical Studies 38, no. 2 (April 2015): 311–41. 6 Jacques Adler, The Jews of Paris and the Final Solution: Communal Response and Internal Conflicts, 1940–1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 7 Amit Prakash, “Colonial Techniques in the Imperial Capital: The Prefecture of Police and the Surveillance of North Africans in Paris, 1925-circa 1970,” French Historical Studies 36, no. 3 (Summer 2013): 479–510. 8 Clifford Rosenberg, “The Colonial Politics of Health Care Provision in Interwar Paris,” French Historical Studies 27, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 637–38. 9 Steven L. Kaplan, Good Bread Is Back: A Contemporary History of French Bread, the Way It Is Made, and the People Who Make It (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 10 Joseph Roth, Report from a Parisian Paradise: Essays from France, 1925–1939, tr. Michael Hoffman (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), 13. 11 Sante, The Other Paris, 182–8. 12 Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). 13 T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Bricktop’s Paris: African American Women in Paris between the Two World Wars (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2015), 7. 14 Jeffrey H. Jackson, Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 15 Elaine Brody, Paris: The Musical Kaleidoscope, 1870–1925 (London: George Braziller, 1987). 16 Xavier Girard, Paris in the 1920s with Kiki de Montparnasse (New York: Assouline, 2012).

Chapter 10 1 Sante, The Other Paris, 19. 2 Julian Jackson, “The Mystery of May 1968,” French Historical Studies 33, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 625–53. 3 Prakash, “Colonial Techniques in the Imperial Capital.” 4 W. Brian Newsome, “The Apartment Referendum of 1959: Toward Participatory Architectural and Urban Planning in Postwar France,” French Historical Studies 28, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 329–58.

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5 Rosemary Wakeman, The Heroic City: Paris, 1945–1958 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2009). 6 Whitney Walton, Internationalism, National Identities, and Study Abroad: France and the United States, 1890–1970 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).

Chapter 11 1 Julius W. Friend, Seven Years in France: François Mitterrand and the Unintended Revolution, 1981–1988 (London: Routledge, 1989). 2 Colin Jones, Paris: The Biography of a City (London: Penguin, 2004), 456. 3 Ibid., 457–59. 4 Ibid., 447–8. 5 Anne Jäckel, “The Inter/Nationalism of French Film Policy,” Modern & Contemporary France 15, no. 1 (February 2007): 24. 6 James A. Winders, “Mobility and Cultural Identity: African Music and Musicians in Late-Twentieth-Century Paris,” French Historical Studies 29, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 483–508.

Chapter 12 1 Gabriel Goodliffe and Ricardo Brizzi, eds., France after 2012 (New York: Bergahn, 2015). 2 Mairi Maclean, ed., The Mitterrand Years (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997). 3 David Applefield, Paris Inside Out (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994). 4 Robert Tombs and Isabelle Tombs, That Sweet Enemy: Britain and France: The History of a Love-Hate Relationship (London: Vintage, 2008). 5 Laura Lee Downs and Stephane Gerson, eds., Why France? American Historians Reflect on an Enduring Fascination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007). 6 Maclean, ed., Mitterrand Years. 7 Rebecca L. Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 8 Kaplan, Good Bread Is Back. 9 Lindsey Tramuta, The New Paris (New York: Abrams, 2017).

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Some of the titles listed below have been cited in the chapters; most are written or have been translated into English and most are relatively recent publications. They offer a glimpse at the wealth of scholarship on the history of modern Paris. Indeed, there is much more—I have included relatively little from the vast academic journal literature, or the biographies or memoirs of individual Parisians, or the wonderful array of primary sources, some of which are now available for the classroom in print or on the internet. Similarly, there are endless histories of discreet topics like Parisian streets, buildings, trades, department stores, cuisine, and so on; and on the other end of the topical spectrum, there are surveys of the nation of France that, of necessity, devote a great deal of space to Paris, since French and Parisian history are tied together as France centralized during the modern period. Some of the titles below may serve as supplemental readings alongside this survey text in a course on the history of Paris.

General surveys There are numerous French-language histories about Paris by French scholars, including the multi-volume, multi-author Nouvelle Histoire de Paris, which describes the history of the city from antiquity to modern times. The Guides Bleus travel guide on Paris (for which there is an English translation) is packed with interesting historical detail and information on Parisian streets and buildings. Bernard Marchand, Paris, histoire d’une ville (1993) covers the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These works and others like them are essential reference works on Parisian history. However, because of their size and because they are not available in English, they are not appropriate for use as surveys in courses at Anglophone universities. There are other, more compact histories of the city’s past. Many of these are excellent, accessible “reads,” and some—like Colin Jones’ Paris: The Biography of a City (2004)—truly outstanding contributions to the literature on Paris. A work that highlights a theme emphasized in this textbook is Luc Sante, The Other Paris (2015); see also Andrew Hussey, Paris: The Secret History (2007). A useful reference is Alfred Fierro, Historical Dictionary of Paris (1998). One approach to the history of Paris is street-by-street: Jacques Hillairet, Dictionnaire Historique des rues de Paris, 2 vols. (1957–

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61) provides endless detail, while Richard Cobb’s The Streets of Paris (1980) and Eric Hazan’s The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps (2010) are entertaining and impressionistic. Daniel Roche is perhaps the pre-eminent French historian of eighteenth-century Paris, though some of his works have not been translated into English. Graham Robb, Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (2010) is a stylized account. None of the titles listed above are survey texts covering a range of topics over a span of time specifically designed for undergraduate or graduate student instruction. There are other, broadly framed histories. Robert Cole offers A Traveler’s History of Paris (2008) that briefly surveys everything since the founding of the city. André Castelot, Paris the Turbulent City (1962) and Johannes Willms, Paris: Capital of Europe from the Revolution to the Belle Époque (1997) emphasize political history and rebellion. Over the years, a number of authors have described Paris as a kind of universal emblem; for instance, Patrice Higonnet, Paris: Capital of the World (2002) and David Harvey, Paris: Capital of Modernity (2003). Two cultural histories that cover nineteenth-century Parisian history are Pricilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Paris as Revolution: Writing the Nineteenth Century (1994) and Charles Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century (1992). See also Charles Rearick, Paris Dreams, Paris Memories: The City and Its Mystique (2011) and James H.S. McGregor, Paris from the Ground Up (2009). Gillian Tindall, Footprints in Paris: A Few Streets, A Few Lives (2009), is a personal interpretation. Alistair Horne has written a great deal about French history, and especially about Paris (Seven Ages of Paris [2002] is a good historical survey) as has Charles Tilly (a sample is The Contentious French [1986]).

Politics Crowds and collective action have had a large role in Parisian history, especially in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but also intermittently in more recent decades. A classic of the historiography of the crowd is George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (1959). More recent, and approaching the issue from a different angle, is Micah Alpaugh, Non-Violence and the French Revolution: Political Demonstrations in Paris, 1787–1795 (2015). On print and politics during the era of the Revolution, see Carla Hesse, Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789– 1810 (1991). Mark Traugott (Armies of the Poor: Determinants of WorkingClass Participation in the Parisian Insurrection of June 1848 [1985]), Peter Amann (Revolution and Mass Democracy: The Paris Club Movement in 1848 [1975]), Georges Duveau (1848: The Making of a Revolution [1984]) wrote on the Revolution of 1848 and the Second Republic. There is less historical writing about the city (in English) during the Napoleonic era, though there are works to rely upon from French scholars Jean Tulard (Paris et son administration, 1800–30 [1976]) and Alphonse Aulard (Paris sous

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le Premier Empire, 3 vols. [1912–13]). Philip Mansel’s Paris between the Empires (2001) is a readable account about political developments in the first half of the nineteenth century. On the relationship of epidemic disease and Parisian politics, see François Delaporte, Disease and Civilization: The Cholera in Paris, 1832 (1986). Alan Williams (The Police of Paris, 1718–89 [1979]), Jonathan M. House (Controlling Paris: Armed Forces and CounterRevolution, 1789–1848 [2014]), and John Merriman (Police Stories: Building the French State, 1815–51 [2005]) write on the police of Paris, and R.M. Andrews (Law, Magistracy and Crime in Old Regime Paris, 1735–89 [1994]) on the courts of pre-Revolution Paris. Lloyd Kramer (Threshold of a New World: Intellectuals and the Exile Experience in Paris, 1830–1848 [1988]) describes the Parisian milieu of the foreign intelligentsia. Much of Mark Traugott’s The Insurgent Barricade (2010) is about nineteenthcentury Paris. There is a large body of work on the Paris Commune of 1871, beginning with primary sources like Karl Marx (The Civil War in France, of which there are numerous editions) and P.-O. Lissagaray (History of the Commune of 1871 [1967]), as well as twentieth-century interpretations from Frank Jellinek (The Paris Commune of 1871 [1971]), Robert Tombs (The War against Paris, 1871 [1981]), John Merriman (Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune [2014]), Gay Gullickson (Unruly Women of Paris: Images of the Commune [1996]), and Carolyn J. Eichner (Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune [2004]). During the early years of the Third Republic, the Boulanger and Dreyfus Affairs had an impact across France, but began and were most intensely played out in the capital. For those topics, there is William D. Irvine (The Boulanger Affair Reconsidered: Royalism, Boulangism, and the Origins of the Radical Right in France [1988]), Leslie Derfler (The Dreyfus Affair [2002]), as well as numerous other titles. Paris under the German Occupation of the Second World War is covered in Gilles Perrault and Pierre Azéma (Paris under the Occupation [1990]), Jacques Adler (The Jews of Paris and the Final Solution: Communal Response and Internal Conflicts, 1940–44 [1997]), David PryceJones (Paris in the Third Reich [1981]), and Allan Mitchell (Nazi Paris: The History of an Occupation, 1940–44 [2008]); the topic is the object of ongoing research and publication, and so we can expect to see more titles in the future. For the post-war years, see Anthony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, Paris after the Liberation (1994). The rebellion of May 1968 and its aftermath have produced many studies, including by Kristin Ross (Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture [1995] and May ’68 and Its Aftermath [2002]) and Michael Seidman (The Imaginary Revolution: Parisian Students and Workers in 1968 [2004]). Louis Chevalier—influential demographer, historian, and social critic—attacked modernizing trends in The Assassination of Paris (1994). Joan Wallach Scott has taken up the contentious topic of laïcité in Politics of the Veil (2010), and the Paris mayor, then French president, Jacques Chirac has written a memoir: My Life in Politics (2012).

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Society The sections of the book on society draw upon fascinating works about preRevolutionary Paris by Steven Kaplan (Provisioning Paris: Merchants and Millers in the Grain and Flour Trade during the Eighteenth Century [1984] and The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question, 1700–75 [1996]) and Arlette Farge (Fragile Lives: Violence, Power and Solidarity in EighteenthCentury Paris [1993]), as well as the following works by David Garrioch: The Making of Revolutionary Paris (2002), Neighourhood and Community in Eighteenth-Century Paris (1986), and The Formation of the Parisian Bourgeoisie, 1690–1830 (1996). There is also Arlette Farge and Jacques Revel’s The Vanishing Children of Paris: Rumor and Politics before the French Revolution (1991). Clare Crowston has contributed Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675–1791 (2001), which focuses considerably on Paris. Jacques-Louis Ménétra, Journal of My Life, ed., Daniel Roche (1986) and Jeremy Popkin, ed., The Panorama of Paris (1999) offer translated primary source accounts of the pre-Revolution period. Jeffry Kaplow, The Names of Kings: The Parisian Laboring Poor in the Eighteenth Century (1971) is an older, but still worthwhile analysis of the city’s lower classes ahead of the Revolution of 1789. Paris was the center of the Revolutionary world of the late eighteenth century, and there are abundant works—old and new—on the city during these years. The British historian Richard Cobb wrote a great deal about Paris during the Revolution; a sample is his Paris and Its Provinces, 1792– 1802 (1975). The sans-culottes were the object of research by Albert Soboul (The Parisian Sans-Culottes and the French Revolution, 1793–4 [1964]); and more recently by Michael Sonenscher (Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution [2018]). Over the last two decades historians have begun to bring the story of Parisian women during the Revolution to light; see, for instance, Dominique Godineau, The Women of Paris and Their Revolution (1998) and Sara Melzer and Leslie Rabine, eds., Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution (1992). A burgeoning profession is detailed in Michael Fitzsimmons, The Parisian Order of Barristers and the French Revolution (1987). The Gilded Youth have probably not gotten the coverage they are due, while Michael Sibalis has delved into Parisian labor for the period 1800–1815 (“Workers’ Organization in Napoleonic Paris,” Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History [1977]). Still, it is curious that comparatively little has been written about Parisian society during the Directory and Napoleonic era. Maurice Guerrini, Napoleon and Paris: Thirty Years of History (1967), while dated, remains a useful rare account, and Dora B. Weiner’s The Citizen-Patient in Revolutionary and Imperial Paris (1993) covers a particular topic of the era. On Paris’s cemeteries and their history, see Jonathan Strauss, Human Remains: Medicine, Death, and Desire in Nineteenth-Century Paris (2012) and Richard A. Etlin, The

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Architecture of Death: The Transformation of the Cemetery in EighteenthCentury Paris (1984). Beginning in the 1970s, a tremendous body of social history has been produced about Paris of the nineteenth century, much of it dealing with the working class and much of it revolving around the topics of politicization and revolution. Most of Cynthia Truant’s The Rites of Labor: Brotherhoods of Compagnonnage in Old and New Regime France (1994) is set in Paris. Works by John Merriman (The Agony of the Republic: The Repression of Left in Revolutionary France, 1848–51 [1978]), Peter Amann (Revolution and Mass Democracy: The Paris Club Movement in 1848 [1975]), and Barrie Ratcliffe and Christine Piette (“Immigration into Paris in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century: A Reassessment,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History, 18 [1991]) and “Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses à Paris pendant la première moitié du XIXe siècle? The Chevalier Thesis Reexamined,” French Historical Studies 17 [1991] fit into this genre, some of which took the form of a response to Louis Chevalier’s influential Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes [1973]. A book-length response to Chevalier is Ratcliffe and Piette, Vivre la ville: les classes populaires à Paris, première moitié du XIXe siècle [2007]). A sociological analysis of nineteenth-century Paris revolution is Insurgent Identities: Class, Community and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune (1995) by Roger Gould, which compares the motivations and social dynamics behind the June Days rebellion of 1848 and the Commune of 1871. The Parisian bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie have been described by Philip Nord (Paris Shopkeepers and the Politics of Resentment [1986]). Alain Corbin (Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850 [1996]) and Jill Harsin (Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Paris [1985]) write about prostitution in Paris (Harsin also has a book on insurrection and assassination in mid-nineteenth century Paris: Barricades: The War of the Streets in Revolutionary Paris, 1830–48 [2001]). Lenard Berlanstein wrote on the Parisian working class of the early Third Republic (The Working People of Paris, 1871–1914 [1984]). Tyler Stovall combines social and political history in an account of Paris’s suburban Red Belt (The Rise of the Paris Red Belt [1990]). The story of women workers comes through in Judith Coffin’s scholarship (The Politics of Women’s Work: The Paris Garment Trades, 1750–1915 [1996]), as it does in Rachel Fuchs’s description of being Poor and Pregnant in Paris: Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century (1992) and Susan S. Waller’s work on models and artists (The Invention of the Model: Artists and Models in Paris, 1830–1870 [2006]). Eliza Earle Ferguson (Gender and Justice: Violence, Intimacy, and Community in Fin de Siècle Paris [2010]) looks at Parisian women and the legal system. On female artists, see Tamar Garb, Sisters of the Brush: Women’s Artistic Culture in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris (1994). A Parisian family dynasty from the upper class is the topic of Laurence H. Winnie’s Family Dynasty, Revolutionary Society: The Cochins of Paris, 1750–1922 (2002).

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“Housing the poor” in nineteenth-century Paris has drawn the attention of Ann-Louise Shapiro (Housing the Poor of Paris, 1850–1902 [1985]). Other groups—in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, migrants from elsewhere in France, and in the twentieth century migrants from outside of France—are detailed in histories by Leslie Page Moch (The Pariahs of Yesterday: Breton Migrants in Paris [2012]), Françoise Raison-Jourde (La Colonie Auvergnate de Paris au XIXe siècles [1976]), and Casey Harison (The Stonemasons of Creuse in Nineteenth-Century Paris [2008]); see also Nancy L. Green, The Pletzl of Paris: Jewish Immigrant Workers in the Belle Époque (1986). Nicholas Papayanis writes about coachmen (The Coachmen of Nineteenth-Century Paris [1993]), and Donald Reid about Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations (1991). The French historian Alain Faure has done a tremendous job of documenting living and housing patterns among native and migrant Parisians from the second half of the nineteenth century to 1940 (“Paris ‘gouffre de l’espèce humaine?,’” French Historical Studies [2004] provides a sample of his work). Jeffrey H. Jackson assesses the impact on the city, and the response of Parisians, when the Seine River flooded in 1910 (Paris under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 [2011]). Over the decades, many Americans have had a genuine affinity for Paris. See T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Bricktop’s Paris: African-American Women in Paris between the Two World Wars (2015) and Harvey Levenstein, We’ll Always Have Paris: American Tourists in France since 1930 (2004); see also Nancy L. Green, The Other Americans in Paris: Businessmen, Countesses, Wayward Youth, 1880–1941 (2014). Many of these authors describe the process of integration—sometimes achieved, sometimes not—among migrants, exiles, and expats arriving in modern Paris.

Economy The economic sections in the chapters describe what was for a time considered Paris’s and France’s peculiar “path” toward modernity—different from that of Britain or Germany, but in its own way no less “successful” (see Barrie Ratcliffe, “Manufacturing in the Metropolis: The Dynamism and Dynamics of Parisian Industry at the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” The Journal of European Economic History 23 [1994]), and though it took some time for the Social Question about quality of life to be “answered.” Allan Potofsky’s Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution (2012) analyzes the relationship between economics and politics during the era of the French Revolution. For the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see the work of David H. Pinkney Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris (1958) and Decisive Years in France: 1815–47 (1986), and Stephane Kirkland (Paris Reborn: Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann and the Quest to Build a Modern City [2014]). David Jordan (Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of

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Baron Haussmann [1995]), Anthony Sutcliffe (The Autumn of Central Paris: The Defeat of Town Planning, 1850–1970 [1970]), and David Harvey (Paris: Capital of Modernity [2003]) assess the impact of urban planning and Haussmannization. Nicholas Papayanis writes on urban planning before the Second Empire in Planning Paris before Haussmann (2004). David S. Barnes, The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs (2006) looks at hygiene and sewers. Victoria E. Thompson (The Virtuous Marketplace: Women, Men and Money in Paris, 1830–70 [2000]) describes the cultural shift to laissez-faire capitalism. Paris was an innovator in modern department stores (Michael Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920 [1981]) and apartment life (Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London [1999]). On modern architecture in the French capital, there are François Loyer, Paris Nineteenth Century: Architecture and Urbanism (1988); David Van Zanten, Building Paris: Architectural Institutions and the Transformation of the French Capital (1994); and Norma Evenson, Paris: A Century of Change, 1878–1978 (1979). On the Parisian real estate market, see Alexia M. Yates, Selling Paris: Property and Commercial Capital in the Fin de Siècle (2015). Rosemary Wakeman looks at the remarkable economic resurgence of the Trentes Glorieuses in Paris after 1945 (The Heroic City: Paris, 1945–58 [2009]). There also has been useful scholarship (Richard S. Hopkins, Planning the Green Spaces of Nineteenth-Century Paris [2015]) on parks and greenspaces in Paris.

Culture Cultural history has probably replaced social history as the main area of interest for historians of Paris during the last two or three decades. The reader may consult works by Patricia Ferguson, Paris as Revolution or Richard D.E. Burton, Blood in the City: Violence and Revelation in Paris, 1789–1945 (2001) about the cultural legacy of violence. For pre-Revolution salon culture, “forbidden texts,” and emergence of a “public sphere,” there are Daniel Roche (The People of Paris: An Essay in Popular Culture in the Eighteenth Century [1987]), Robert Darnton (The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France [1996]) and Dena Goodman (The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment [1994]); see also Carla Hesse, Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789– 1810 (1991) and Louise E. Robbins, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris (2002). For Parisian pets in a later era, there is Kathleen Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris (1994). Sydney Watts, Meat Matters: Butchers, Politics, and Market Culture in Eighteenth-Century Paris (2006) examines an important segment of the Parisian economy and guilds. Christopher Isherwood’s Farce and Fantasy: Popular Entertainment in Eighteenth-

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Century Paris (1986) is enlightening on its topic. Colin Jones, The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris (2017) is delightful. For the attack on symbols of the Old Regime after 1789, there is Richard Clay, Iconoclasm in Revolutionary Paris: The Transformation of Signs (2012). On theater and innovation during the Revolution, there is Mark Darlow, Staging the French Revolution: Cultural Politics and the Paris Opera, 1789–94 (2012). The bohemian element of Parisian life has always attracted observers and scholars: Frank Manuel’s The Prophets of Paris about the “utopian socialists” fits this genre, as does Jerrold Siegel’s Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830–1930 (1999). A fascinating analysis of suburban Paris is James Cannon, The Paris Zone: A Cultural History, 1840–1944 (2015). See also Nicholas Hewitt, Montmartre: A Cultural History (2017). Cultural historians have explored aspects of Parisian society and life that were long unknown in the literature, and so we now have an emerging wealth of books and articles on topics that include listening (James Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History [1995]), noise (Aimée Boutin, City of Noise: Sounds and Nineteenth-Century Paris [2015]), sexual identity (William Peniston, Pederasts and Others: Urban Culture and Sexual Identity in Nineteenth-Century Paris [2004]), smell (Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination [1988]), and restaurants and culinary culture (Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Gastronomic Culture [2001]). See also Michael Marrinan’s Romantic Paris: Histories of a Cultural Landscape, 1800–50 (2009). The cholera epidemic of 1832 has been interpreted culturally by Catherine Cudlick (Cholera in PostRevolutionary Paris: A Cultural History [1996]) and Andrew Aisenberg, Contagion: Disease, Government, and the “Social Question” in NineteenthCentury France (1999). Roger Shattuck’s classic The Banquet Years (1968) about the avant-garde of the early Third Republic is set mostly in Paris; for similar coverage of a later period, see Stanley Meisler, Shocking Paris: Soutine, Chagall and the Outsiders of Montparnasse (2015). The historian Scott Haine has written about the “sociability” cultivated in cafés (The World of the Paris Café: Sociability among the French Working Class, 1789–1914 [1996]), while Thomas Brennan (Public Drinking and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century Paris [1988]) has described similar processes for an earlier era. Paris was a center for the invention of photography in the nineteenth century (Elizabeth Anne McCauley, Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris, 1848–1871 [1994]). Art historians T.J. Clark (The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers [1999]) and John Milner (The Studios of Paris: The Capital of Art in the Late Nineteenth Century [1988]) have joined social and cultural history to produce influential interpretations, while narrower works— like Albert Boime’s Art and the French Commune: Imagining Paris after War and Revolution (1995), and Vanessa Schwartz’s Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin de Siècle Paris (1998) of the Third Republicbelong to the newer, cultural historiography; see also Hollis Clayson, Paris

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in Despair: Art and Everyday Life under Siege, 1870–71 (2002). On the cultural history of medicine and doctors in this era, there is Mary Hunter, The Face of Medicine: Visualizing Medical Masculinities in Late NineteenthCentury Paris (2016). Paris was a consumer society by the late nineteenth century—see H. Hazel Hahn, Scenes of Parisian Modernity: Culture and Consumption in the Nineteenth Century (2009). On popular culture in Paris in the twentieth century, there is Robin Walz, Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in Early Twentieth Century Paris (2000), Jeffrey H. Jackson, Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris (2003), and Roger Nichols, The Harlequin Years: Music in Paris 1917–1929 (2002). Nancy Green writes on business, style, and clothing in the comparative Ready-to-Wear, Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York (1997). See also Valerie Steele, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History (2017) and J.G. Kennedy, Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing and American Identity (1993). Interior design of the Parisian apartment is explored in Heidi Brevik-Zender, Fashioning Spaces: Mode and Modernity in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris (2015). There are many histories about persons from other countries adopting Paris as their home. These include Tyler Stovall’s history of African Americans in Paris (Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light [1996]) and works by Tag Gronberg (Designs on Modernity: Exhibiting the City in 1920s Paris [1998]); Andy Fry, African American Music and French Popular Culture, 1920–1960 (2014); and Brooke L. Blower (Becoming Americans in Paris: Transatlantic Politics and Culture between the World Wars [2011]). On Interwar cultural developments in literature and art, see Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–40 (1987); Vincent, Cronin, Paris: City of Light, 1919–39 (1995); and Mary McAuliffe, Paris on the Brink: The 1930s Paris of Jean Renoir, Salvador Dali, Simone de Beauvoir, André Gide, Sylvia Beach, Léon Blum, and Their Friends (2018) and When Paris Sizzled: The 1920s Paris of Ernest Hemingway, Coco Chanel, Jean Cocteau, Cole Porter, Josephine Baker, and Their Friends (2019). For the post-1945 decades, a great deal has been written about intellectual developments, including the milieu that contributed to the rise of the Existentialists in Tony Judt’s Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–56 (1992); similar coverage is in Herbert Lottman’s older, but still useful The Left Bank: Writers, Artists and Politics from the Popular Front to the Cold War (1982). Stanley Karnow’s Paris in the Fifties (1997) is accessible reading about the era. Mairi Maclean, ed., The Mitterrand Years (1997) devotes considerable attention to the French president’s interest in Parisian architecture and building. Steven L. Kaplan spent time learning to bake bread in Paris and is glad to report that Good Bread Is Back: A Contemporary History of French Bread, the Way It Is Made, and the People Who Make It (2006).

INDEX

Absolutism 101 Académie des Beaux-Arts 79 Académie française 13, 79–80, 260 Action directe 266, 293 Action française 155, 157, 164, 186, 188, 191, 214, 217, 316 African American 221, 234–45, 284, 310, 333 Aide-toi, le ciel t’aidera 63 Algeria 84, 110, 143, 155, 224, 237–8, 241–2, 244, 246, 272, 281, 290–2, 294, 297, 317 Alibaud, Louis 100 Alphand, Jean-Charles 113, 121–2, 197 Alsatian 125, 166, 223 ambulancière 142 American Church 260 Americanization 221, 259, 271, 288, 303 amnesty 153, 155, 159–60 anarchism 136, 163 Annales 26 années folles 235 année terrible 135, 153, 155, 189, 213 anti-Americanism 259, 270 anti-Dreyfusard 164, 188, 214 anti-Semitism 158, 164, 187–8, 212, 218, 297 apache 169, 233 Appollinaire, Guillaume 205 Arab Bureau 224, 245 Arab Spring 288 Aragon, Louis 232 arcades 48, 97–8, 104–5, 232, 279 Arc de Triomphe 34, 56, 116, 197, 226, 276, 314 argot 42, 68, 90, 253 Armand, Inessa 194 Armstrong, Louis 234–45

arrondissement 22, 65, 70, 101, 113, 116, 138, 140, 143, 166, 173–4, 197, 253, 271, 273, 305, 314 articles de Paris 6, 18, 96, 124 Assembly of Notables 9 L’Assommoir 112, 129, 173, 176 atelier 94, 106 Atlantic Revolution 3, 84, 259 Atlantic World 13, 56, 72, 84, 87, 126, 130, 157, 172, 175–6, 192, 206, 227, 264, 285, 288, 309 Aulard, Alphonse 191, 326 automobile 6, 127, 176, 186, 199–200, 207, 226, 231, 267, 269, 290, 304, 306 Auvergne 17, 24, 308 avant-garde 3, 128, 176, 183, 185, 205–6, 221, 332 Babeuf, Gracchus 33, 42, 314 baguette 66, 224–5, 307–8 Baker, Josephine 234–5 Bakunin, Mikhail 112, 135, 148, 189 Baldwin, James 260 balloon 9, 29–30, 105, 136 Balzac, Honoré de 51, 65, 68, 77–8, 84, 94, 102, 180, 250 bandes dessinées 206 Bandy de Nalèche, Louis 118 Bank of France 70, 75, 147–8, 213 banlieue 4, 53, 116, 119–20, 132, 166, 172–4, 186, 192, 200–2, 216, 226–8, 236, 246–7, 266–8, 272, 281, 292–7, 313 Banquet Campaign 87 Barrès, Maurice 188 barricades 64, 85, 87, 89, 98, 115, 134, 136, 139, 142, 145, 149, 151, 153, 243 Barthes, Roland 282

INDEX

Bastille 16, 33, 35–6, 39, 42, 54, 79, 85, 197, 263, 269, 276, 287, 301–2, 307, 310, 312, 314, 317 Bataclan 283, 287, 290, 293, 300, 311 Bateau-Lavoir 178, 182 Battle of the Marne 185, 211, 316 Baudelaire, Charles 127–8, 178 Beauvoir, Simone de 223, 254, 256, 282 Bécassine 195 Belgium 84, 117, 143, 201, 228–9, 234 Belle Époque 164, 167–9, 176–8, 180–3, 185–8, 192–210, 220 Belleville 113, 116, 119–20, 140, 174–5, 201, 233 Benjamin, Walter 98, 105 Bercy 297, 301–2, 307, 310 Berlioz, Hector 79 Berri, Duc de 59, 62–3, 79, 315 Bertillon, Alphonse 169 Bertolucci, Bernardo 280 beur/beurette 295 Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris (BHVP) 45–6, 300 Bibliothèque Public d’Instruction (BPI) 277–80 Bicentennial 265, 276, 284, 287, 306–7, 317 bicycle 185, 206–7, 287, 304, 316–17 bidonville 246–7 Bienvenüe, Fulgence 171 bistro 176, 185, 206–7, 287, 304, 310, 316–17 Blanc, Louis 88, 102–3 Blanqui, Louis-Auguste 69, 85, 87, 89, 93, 135, 137–9, 141, 145–6 Bloody Week 129, 133–56, 316 Blum, Léon 217–18, 230–1 boat people 273, 297 bohemian 103, 104–6, 121, 127–30, 139, 151, 208–9, 332 Bois de Boulogne 30, 113, 115–16, 121–2, 178, 201, 300 Bois de Vincennes 113, 115, 229, 300 Bolsheviks 134, 150, 156, 212, 222 Bonaparte, Napoleon 30, 33–5, 40, 42, 44–57, 59–68, 70–1, 73, 79, 81, 84–6, 100, 110–11, 112, 125, 151, 162, 170, 175, 197, 247, 250, 253, 276, 300, 304, 314–15

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Bon Marché 109, 121, 130, 165, 172–3, 315 Bonnot Gang 185, 206, 209 Bordeaux 213 Boucicault, Aristide 130 Boulanger Affair 158, 162–3, 176, 182, 187, 190–1, 212, 327 boulangerie 225, 308 Boulevard du Temple 79, 104–5 Boulevard Haussmann 130 Boulevard Saint-Germain 39, 222, 300 Boulevard Saint-Michel 243, 274 Boulogne-Billancourt 176, 186, 226, 228, 255, 281 bouquiniste 274 Bourbon 34, 41, 51, 59–64, 69, 76–81, 83–6, 103, 107, 187, 190, 222, 315 bourgeois 4, 7, 13, 16, 18–19, 24, 27, 36, 45, 67, 71, 84, 86, 90, 92, 98, 103–7, 115–16, 120–2, 130–2, 140, 148, 163, 167–8, 173, 189, 193, 195, 196, 232, 246, 248, 253, 294, 311, 329 Bourse 56, 70 bourse du travail 161 Bousquet, René 219, 290–1 Boyer, Adolphe 94 brasserie 176, 195, 304 Brasserie Lipp 254, 256 Breton, André 209, 232 Bretons 166, 195, 197 Brillat-Savarin, Jean-Anthelme 304 Brumaire 109, 111 Brussels 76, 104, 163, 305 Bureaux de placement 50 butchers 6, 21, 99 Buttes de Chaumont 113, 115, 122, 178, 232 Buzenval 146 cabaret 94, 119, 176–7, 197, 235 Cabet, Étienne 103, 135 café-concert 104, 177, 233, 235 Café de Flore 254, 256 Cahiers du Cinéma 258 Caillebotte, Gustave 181 Calonne, Charles-Alexandre du 14 Camp, Maxime du 128, 131, 159 Camus, Albert 223, 241, 256–7, 282

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INDEX

Canal de l’Ourcq 175, 309, 313 cancan 178, 197–8 Capital of Modernity 5, 231 Capital of Revolution 5, 56, 84, 105, 231 Capital of the World 7, 132, 155, 236, 238 Carbonari 62–3 Carême, Marie-Antoine 305 Carnavalet Museum 249–50 carpenters 21, 23, 48, 95, 99, 117 Cartier, Louis-François 270 Cartier-Bresson, Henri 256 Cassatt, Mary 182, 221 Catholic Church 10, 12, 52–3, 61, 64, 80–1, 86, 111, 151, 155, 164, 187, 218, 247 Cavaignac, Eugène 89, 111 Cézanne, Paul 178 Chabrol, Claude 258 Chagall, Marc 209 Chaillot 71, 170, 179 Chamber of Commerce 95, 99, 175 Chambord, Comte de 190 Chambre patronale 203 Champ de Mars 16, 23, 38, 42–3, 47, 55, 127, 131, 170 Champs-Élysées 16, 23, 56, 104, 196–8, 208, 240, 243–4, 276, 307 Chanel, Coco 209, 249 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste 27 Charef, Mehdi 281 Charles X 59–63, 76–80, 84–6, 90–2, 107, 315 Charles de Gaulle Airport 252, 263, 277–8, 317 Charlie Hebdo 260 Charter 85 Chateaubriand, François René de 77–8 Châtelet-Les Halles 252, 278–9, 305 Chevalier, Louis 67–8, 90, 92, 268, 271, 327, 329 Chevalier, Maurice 233–6 chiffonier 90, 144–5 Chinatown 273, 297, 300 Chirac, Jacques 263, 268–84, 289, 313 cholera 71, 76, 83, 87, 90–1, 96, 102, 107, 125, 144–5, 168, 315, 332

Chopin, Frédéric 197 Cité Universitaire 227, 229 citizen-king 86, 103 city council 161, 174, 190, 289 City of Light 5, 90, 121, 123, 126, 134, 143 civilizing mission 179, 224, 229, 234 Civil War in France 134, 146, 150 Clair, René 236, 259 clandestine 21–2 Claudel, Camille 195 Clemenceau, Georges 163–4, 213–14 clerk 139–40, 143, 167, 192–3 Clichy 201, 292, 311 clubs 38–9, 43–5, 104, 137, 146, 234–45, 254, 257, 283 Cluseret, Gustave-Paul 138 Cocteau, Jean 209, 235 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel 243, 248, 265 Cold War 238, 256–8, 265, 285, 288 Collaboration 188, 214–20, 233, 244, 249 Colonial Exposition 211, 224, 228–9 colons 242, 245 commissaire 20, 94 Committee of Public Safety 15, 39–42, 63, 135–9, 172 communalism 148–9 Commune 1871 5, 36, 39–40, 46, 53, 75, 85–6, 106, 112–15, 119, 128–32, 133–62, 179, 189, 191, 194, 236, 279, 316, 327, 329 communist 42, 73, 139, 149, 189, 194, 202, 215–16, 222, 224–9, 231, 239, 255, 266 compagnonnage 88, 94, 99, 329 Concordat 61, 79 confection 70, 99 Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) 157, 161, 213, 226, 229–30, 255, 266, 292, 296, 316 conseils des prudhommes 50, 109, 112 Considerant, Victor 128 Constant, Benjamin 62, 69 consumer 172, 259, 270 Cooper, James Fenimore 67 cooperative 112 Cordeliers 16, 38–9, 43–4

INDEX

coup d’état 33, 56–7, 109, 111–12, 120, 315 Courbet, Gustave 106, 128–9, 151 Cousin, Victor 63, 69 Crédit Mobilier 6, 109, 123 Creuse 95, 115, 117–18, 143, 166 crime 2, 20, 68, 104, 107, 168–9, 206, 209–10 cris de Paris 71–2, 127 Croix de Feu 214 crowd 7, 11, 24, 26, 29, 34–45, 50, 53–4, 60–5, 86, 112, 114, 128, 137, 154, 191, 215, 243, 245, 258, 307, 310, 326 Cubism 178, 182, 205, 209 Curie, Marie and Pierre 179, 205 Dadaism 232 Daguerre, Louis 105 Danton, Georges 33, 38–9, 44, 54, 191, 314 Darboy, Archbishop Georges 141 Darnton, Robert 12 Daumier, Honoré 91–2, 102, 106 dauphin 9, 11, 26 David, Jacques-Louis 27, 41, 44, 51–3, 56, 76 Déat, Marcel 215 déclassé 87, 104 Decolonization 238–9, 257, 260 Degas, Edgar 128, 168, 182 Delacroix, Eugène 77, 80, 151 Delanoë, Bertrand 289–91 Delescluze, Charles 136 Derrida, Jacques 282 Desmoulins, Camille 29, 33, 36, 46, 54, 314 Diaghliev, Serge 205–6 Diamond Necklace Affair 30 Diderot, Denis 10–11, 14–15 Dior, Christian 249, 252 Directory 33, 39–40, 45–7, 56, 65, 79–80, 314 dirigisme 269, 301 Disneyland Paris 287, 310, 317 Dmitrieff, Elizabeth 142, 146 Doisneau, Robert 256 domestic servant 18

337

Doriot, Jacques 216 double burden 165 Dreyfus Affair 157–8, 162–4, 176, 182, 186–92, 209, 212, 217 Drumont, Édouard 164, 188 Duclos, Jacques 216 Dufayel, Georges 173, 193 Durand, Marguerite 168 Durkheim, Émile 54, 173, 186, 189 École des Beaux-Arts 96, 105, 151 École Normale 80, 189, 223, 267, 282, 311 École Polytechnique 267, 282 Egypt 67, 103, 105 Eiffel Tower 141, 172, 179–82, 190, 218, 232, 252–3, 300, 316 embourgeoisement 248 Enlightenment 3, 10, 12–15, 35, 48–50, 186, 188, 214 enragés 42 Estates General 14, 19, 36, 305 Eurocommuism 266 Eurostar 305 Existentialism 223, 238, 254, 256, 259, 282 expat 193–4, 221–3, 229, 232, 235 “Fantômas” 222 Far Left 163, 186, 189 Far Right 186–8 fascism 182, 188, 210, 212–16, 222, 230, 234, 236, 243, 272, 288, 291 fast food 260 faubourg 16–24, 31, 36, 140, 173, 196 Faubourg Saint-Antoine 16, 18, 21–4, 30, 43 Fauré, Gabriel 235 February Revolution 83–8, 99, 103 fédérés 42, 138–42, 148–54 femme mondaine 167 Ferry, Jules 123, 160 Festival of Federation 33, 37 Festival of Supreme Being 52–3, 55 Fête de l’Humanité 258, 284 Feuillants 38 fiacre 200

338

INDEX

Fieschi, Giuseppe 83, 86, 100, 315 film 4, 7, 185–6, 200, 207–8, 210, 226, 233, 236–8, 248, 253, 257–9, 265, 270–2, 274–5, 280–1, 299, 312 Final Solution 218, 236, 242 fin de siècle 158, 205–8 First Industrial Revolution 175 flanêur 48, 72, 104, 121, 127, 178, 232, 304 Flaubert, Gustave 46, 80, 103 flea market 290 Flight to Varennes 33, 37, 39 floating population 18, 22 Folies-Bergère 127 forts, les 125 Foucault, Michel 74 Fouché, Joseph 68 Four Sergeants 63 Fourth Republic 216, 239–40 Fragonard, Jean-Honoré 27 Franco-Prussian War 109–10, 114, 133, 135, 155 Freemason 13 Frégier, Honoré 67, 90, 92 French Revolution 2–3, 6, 9–11, 33–5, 38–57, 59, 75, 84, 100, 106, 160, 188, 199, 249, 299, 306–7, 313–17 French theory 282–3 Front de Seine 271 Front Libération Nationale (FLN) 241–2, 246 Furet, François 256, 266, 307 furniture making 22, 24, 67, 102, 166 Gabin, Jean 236 Gallieni, Joseph 220 Gambetta, Léon 146, 160 gamin 45 Garde Mobile 89 Gare d’Austerlitz 95, 280 Gare de Lyon 95–6 Gare d’Orsay Museum 254, 263, 279–80, 287, 301 Gare du Nord 95, 124, 305 Gare Montparnasse 96 Garin, Maurice 207 Garnier, Charles 79, 116, 316 garnis 94–6, 117–19, 174, 246 Gastronomy 304–5

Gaulle, Charles de 101, 125, 237–43, 255–60, 263–5, 270–1, 275, 283, 291–2, 317 Gaumont, Léon 207 gay culture 169, 243, 265, 290, 310 general strike 162, 189, 203, 242, 255 Géricault, Théodore 77, 130 Germany 137, 158, 162–70, 179, 186, 189, 191–2, 199, 210, 212, 216, 218, 220, 232–3, 236–7, 251, 303, 305, 330 Gestapo 220, 291 Gide, André 256 Girondins 39, 42–4, 78, 314 girouette 52 Giscard, Valéry d’Estaing 267–70 globalization 288, 303 Godard, Jean-Luc 258, 272 Gouges, Olympe de 44, 314 Gould, Roger 150 Government of National Defense 136 grandes écoles 79–80, 282 grandes ensembles 247 grands magasins 70, 165, 173, 181, 230 Grands Projets 303, 307, 317 Grande Arche 276 Great Depression 212, 214, 216, 226, 230 Great Fear 37 Great Flood 173, 185, 203–4, 210 Great Terror 40, 53 Great War 126, 161, 164, 171, 179, 185–6, 188, 191–3, 196, 200, 205–10, 211–28, 231, 234, 270, 273, 316 Grimod de la Reynière, AlexandreLaurent 305 griot 284 Gros, Jean-Antoine 76–7 Guet 20 guilds 20–4, 28, 42, 46–7, 49–51, 101, 103, 125, 199 guillotine 38, 40, 44, 52–4, 63, 75, 81, 100, 135 guingette 119, 208 Guizot, François 63, 86, 103 Hallyday, Johnny 283 Harki 242, 245

INDEX

Haussmann, Baron Georges 5, 96, 98, 115, 117, 145, 149–50, 170, 173, 197, 274 Haussmannization 5, 72, 92, 107, 110, 113, 116, 119–32, 133, 143, 271, 315 haute couture 106 heat wave 297–8 Hébert, Jacques-René 39, 42, 53–4, 314 Hemingway, Ernest 209, 221 Hermès, Thierry 270 Herzen, Alexander 106, 297 Hidalgo, Anne 289–90, 304, 308 hijab 292 Hocquenghem, Guy 243 Hôtel de Ville 7, 16, 40, 46, 54, 94, 97, 101, 116–17, 133, 137, 142, 145, 154, 156, 181, 273–4 Hôtel-Dieu 73 Hôtel Lamoignon 46 hôtels garnis 94, 97, 174, 246 Hot Jazz 235 Hugo, Victor 47, 69, 78–80, 90–1, 102, 110–11, 131, 179 human rights 3, 34, 43–4, 134, 307 iconoclasm 53, 151 Île de France 228 Île de la Cité 16, 170, 291 Île Saint-Louis 28, 297 îlots insalubres 193, 200, 228 Incroyable 45 Indochina 229, 238, 241, 259, 272, 297 Industrial Revolution 3, 31, 71, 84, 124, 158, 175 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 76–7 intelligentsia 11, 105, 139–40, 164, 194, 221–3, 266, 270, 297, 327 International Workingmen’s Association 112, 135 Jansenism 10, 12–13 Jardin des Plantes 136, 170, 301 Jaurès, Jean 154, 164, 185–6, 189, 192, 211, 213, 217, 239, 316 jazz 221, 234–5, 254, 257 Jews 17, 43, 74–5, 164, 166, 194, 211, 217–19, 232, 235–6, 246, 290–1, 297, 310, 316

339

Joan of Arc 155, 164, 188, 191, 214, 235 Journées sans voiture 304 June Days 83, 89–90, 102, 110, 120, 134, 173, 315 July Monarchy 63, 69, 71, 75, 78, 80, 83–107 juste milieu 86–7, 90–4, 98 Kaplan, Steven 20, 24, 225, 299, 307 Kieslowski, Krzysztof 275 Kiki de Montparnasse 235 Kristeva, Julia 282–3 labor movement 98–9, 112, 161–2, 166, 175, 186 Labrouste, Henri 96, 126 Lacan, Jacques 282 La Défense 275–6, 300–2, 317 Lafayette, Marquis de 36, 38, 42, 44, 85, 130, 165 laïcité 186, 292, 295, 327 Lamartine, Alphonse de 77–8, 299 Lang, Jack 275 La Roquette prison 128, 141 Latin Quarter 63, 76, 127, 195, 232, 243, 248, 254 League of Patriots 191 Le Chapelier Law 47 Le Chat Noir 177, 205 Le Corbusier 227, 229, 247 Le Figaro 168–9 Legitimist 103 Le Golf Drouot 257–8, 283 Lenin, Vladimir 134, 150, 156, 194, 222, 297 Léo, André 142 Le Pen, Jean-Marie and Marine 291 Les Deux Magots 254, 256 Les Halles 16, 98, 116, 125–6, 198, 251–2, 267, 274, 278–9, 289 Les Misérables 47, 68–9, 87, 91, 102, 124, 254 Levallois 153, 201 leveé en masse 146 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 282 L’Humanité 189, 213, 216, 239, 255 Liberation 197, 211–12, 218, 220, 234, 237, 239–41

340

INDEX

Limousin 17–18, 95, 117, 166 Lindbergh, Charles 221 Lissagaray, Prosper-Olivier 149, 152 Liszt, Franz 106 livret 22, 50, 99 London 28, 71, 93, 102, 112, 126, 130–1, 135, 176, 233, 252, 257, 268, 283, 305 Longchamps 116, 122, 178 Louis XIV 10–13, 19, 20, 23, 27, 37, 51, 56, 75, 78, 121, 126, 269 Louis XV 9, 11, 13, 23, 48, 160, 274 Louis XVI 9, 11, 14, 26, 31, 33, 36–7, 43–4, 45, 56, 69, 81, 85, 307, 314 Louis XVIII 34, 52, 59–62, 68–9, 75–7, 81, 86, 315 Louis-Philippe 71, 75, 83–7, 90–2, 96, 98–107, 120, 315 Louvre 127, 130, 171, 204, 232, 249, 273–4, 276, 278, 287, 300–2 Lutetia 10, 250 Lyceé Henri IV 267 Lyceé Louis-le-Grand 15, 77, 80, 189 macadam 115, 126 Macron, Émmanuel 291, 311, 313 Maghreb 224 Mali 5, 224, 284, 310 Milice 239 Malle, Louis 259 Malraux, André 237, 241–2, 248–9, 253, 257, 271, 317 Manchester 3, 6, 24, 49, 93 Manet, Édouard 128, 130, 151 Manifesto of the Sixty 112 Man Ray 221, 235 Marais 98, 166, 219, 249–50, 268, 308, 310 Marat, Jean-Paul 15, 33, 38, 41, 314 marchandage 85, 99, 161, 202–3 Marie-Antoinette 9, 11, 26, 30–1, 33, 37, 44, 52–3, 61, 314 Marseillaise 33, 42, 314 Marville, Charles 105, 129 Marx, Karl 67, 73, 78, 93, 110, 112, 134–5, 139, 141, 146–50, 189 Matignon Accords 230–1 Maupassant, Guy de 173, 197 Maurras, Charles 164, 188, 256

May 1968 237, 239, 241, 242–8, 254–5, 259–61, 263, 265–70, 282, 285, 289, 308, 310, 317 Mazas prison 141 Méliès, Georges 185–6, 208 Ménétra, Jacques-Louis 25–6, 28, 31 Ménilmontant 132, 134, 233, 236 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien 23 Merriman, John 143, 150, 156 Michel, Louise 45, 137, 142, 146, 152, 162, 191 Mickiewicz, Adam 106, 297 Middle East 264, 267–8, 288, 293 midinette 194–5 Miller, Henry and June 209 Minck, Paula 142 Minh, Ho Chi 223 Minitel 268, 287, 303 Mistinguett 233 Mitterrand, François 300–10, 317 Monet, Claude 178, 181, 232 Montcalm, Madame de 75–6 Montfaucon 144 Montgolfier brothers 9, 29–30 Montmartre 21, 113, 116, 119, 130, 133, 135–42, 153, 159, 176–8, 182–3, 186–7, 198, 200–1, 205–8, 213–14, 221, 232–5 Montparnasse Tower 251–2, 263–71, 275, 277, 279, 300, 310, 317 Montrouge 31, 174–5, 201, 240 Montsouris, Parc 3, 112, 115, 122, 178, 209, 229 Morocco 186, 224, 229, 244 mouche 20, 26, 50, 68 Moulin Rouge 177–8, 198, 233 Municipal Guard 87, 99 munitionnettes 226 Mur des Fédérés 154 Murger, Henri 104, 128 Muscadin 45 mutilés 226 Nadaud, Martin 95, 118 Nadar, Félix 105 Nana 110, 120, 157, 316 Nanterre 242–3 Napoleonic Code 34, 44, 70, 99, 167 National Convention 37–53, 76, 80, 100

INDEX

National Front 285, 291–2, 295 National Guard 36–7, 41–2, 64, 87, 136–49, 153 National Library 45, 109, 126, 151, 280, 287, 299–302, 307, 309, 315 National Workshops 88, 90 Nazis 212, 214, 218–19, 232, 235, 239 Necker, Madame 11, 14, 36, 39 Neoclassical 27, 52 neo-Jacobin 103, 136, 139, 149 Neuilly 201, 258, 296 New Caledonia 143–4, 153, 155, 159, 162 New Men 6, 50–1, 70, 101 New Wave 257–9, 272, 281 New York City 130, 167, 172, 221, 231, 233, 238, 252, 283, 293 Nin, Anaïs 232 Nora, Pierre 159 Notre-Dame Cathedral 33, 52–3, 56, 73, 98, 127, 141, 172, 219, 221, 224, 230, 240, 277–8, 291, 294, 312, 314 Nouvelle cuisine 308 October Days 37, 44, 48 octroi 35, 119 Offenbach, Jacques 127, 198 Ollivier, Émile 114 Olympia 257, 283 Olympics 179, 227 One-Hundred Days 34, 59, 60 Opéra 62, 78–9, 114, 116, 121, 157, 220, 263, 276, 287, 301–2, 307, 310, 316 Ophüls, Marcel 280 Organisation armée secrète (OAS) 237, 242–3, 292 Orléans, Duc de 54, 197 Orly Airport 252, 277–8, 293, 305 Orsini Attempt 114 Ozouf, Mona 54 Palais-Royal 9, 16–17, 28–9, 45, 62, 88, 169, 314 Panthéon 33, 48–9, 55, 63, 76, 205, 314 Pantin 75, 174–5 Papon, Maurice 242, 246, 281, 290–1 Parc Monceau 178, 197

341

Parent-Duchâtelet, Alexandre 91, 102 Paris Climate Accord 313 Parisian Gas Company 124 Paris Mosque 273 Paris Parlement 11, 13–14 Paris Peace Accords 259 Parti Communiste Française (PCF) 194, 215–19, 229, 231, 239–40, 242, 248, 251, 255, 258, 266, 282 passerelle 171 Pasteur, Louis 171, 179, 205 Pathé 186, 207–8, 303 People’s Armies 38, 43 Père Duchesne 42, 62 Periere, Émile and Isaac 123 Père Lachaise 74–5, 78–9, 140, 154–6, 178, 190–1, 213, 224, 254, 260 Périer, Casimir 70 périphérique 241 Pétain, Philippe 214, 218, 220, 240 pétroleuse 142 Philipon, Charles 102 philosophes 15, 21, 47–8, 52, 63 photography 46, 104–5, 128–9, 204, 256, 332 Piaf, Édith 233, 235–6, 257 Picasso, Pablo 7, 178, 182, 205, 209, 249 piecework 99 Pied Noir 245 Piketty, Thomas 311 Pinkney, David 84, 95 Place de Grève 16, 54, 62–3, 94–5, 97, 116–18, 125, 202 Place de la Concorde 105, 116, 160, 179, 215, 265, 307, 314 Place de la République 136, 297 Place des Vosges 76 Poincaré, Raymond 213–14 poissarde 125 Poland 112, 205, 275, 297 police 19–20, 22, 25–6, 50, 68, 87, 91–5, 118, 128, 137–9, 148, 163, 168–9, 219, 224, 232, 242–3, 245–6, 289–90, 292, 294 Pompidou Center 254, 265, 268, 271, 276–8, 280, 300 Pont des Arts 171 Pont Neuf 76, 170

342

INDEX

Popular Front 172, 216, 228, 230–1, 251, 298 Portuguese 5, 194, 297–8 poubelle 144–5 Poulenc, Francis 236 Poulot, Denis 112 prefect 50, 99, 113, 161 proletariat 77, 92–4, 107 prostitution 28, 90, 120, 168–9, 177, 195, 227, 253, 329 Prost Plan 228, 316 Protestant 12, 43, 86 proto-fascist 110, 163, 188 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 112, 139 Provisional Government 239, 240, 244 public sphere 12, 45, 77, 331 Puteaux 175–6 Pyramid (Louvre) 301–2, 317 quartier 16, 19, 24, 33, 65, 89, 94, 96, 119, 209 Rambuteau, Comte de 96–8, 123 Reclus, Élie 151 Red Belt 120, 175, 202, 216–17, 239, 255, 266, 294, 296 Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens (RATP) 278, 306 Reinhardt, Jean “Django” 234–5 Renault 176, 223, 240, 293 Renault, Louis 176 Renoir, Jean 178, 232 Republic of Letters 10–12 Réseau Express Régional (RER) 237, 241, 247, 278–9, 296, 305–6, 317 Resistance 218–19, 223, 227, 234, 239, 290 Resnais, Alain 258 restaurant 118, 148, 166, 193, 197, 218, 260, 304–5 Restoration 34, 51, 59–81, 315 Rétif de la Bretonne, Nicolas-Edme 27–8, 31 Revolutionary Syndicalism 161, 175, 186, 202 Revolutionary Tradition 135–6, 150, 216 Rifaa a Rafi al-Tahtawi 103 Rigault, Raoul 128, 139

Right Bank 46, 95–6, 102, 116, 119, 124, 166, 178–9, 195, 220, 232, 249, 254, 273, 283 Rivera, Diego 209 Robespierre, Maximilien 15, 33, 39–45, 53, 156, 172, 217, 314 Roche, Daniel 15, 18–20, 326 Rochefort, Henri 114 rock and roll 258, 260, 268, 283, 310 Rodin, Auguste 195, 232, 250 Roland, Madame 44 Roland Garros Stadium 227 Roma 104, 234–5 Romanticism 60, 69, 76–7 Roth, Joseph 232 Rougon-Macquart series 121, 130, 155 Rousseau, Henri 193 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 11, 52–3 Ruche, La 209 Rue de la Paix 65, 121, 126, 270 Rue de Rivoli 48, 115 Rue Goutte d’Or 119–20, 173, 201, 224, 246 Rue Mouffetard 94, 119, 166, 203, 246, 249 Rue Rambuteau 98 Rue Sentier 165–6 Rue Transnonain 315 Russia 59, 67, 105, 112, 167, 179, 182, 194, 202, 212, 216, 219, 221 Sacré-Coeur Basilica 141, 155, 159–60, 187, 214, 300, 316 Saint-Denis 201, 207, 215–16, 239, 284, 296 Saint-Just, Louis-Antoine de 15, 33, 39–40, 45, 54 Saint-Lazare prison 169 Saint-Merri Church 277 Saint-Ouen 75, 201, 228 Saint-Rémy-les-Chevreuse 296 Saint-Simon, Henri de 73, 78, 93, 123, 149 Saint-Simonianism 73, 77–8, 112, 123, 149 Saint-Sulpice 15 salons 11–12, 69, 75–8, 128, 151, 182 Sand, George 46, 93, 131 sans-culottes 22, 31, 37–45, 50, 57

INDEX

Sante, Luc 90 Sarkozy, Nicolas 297 Sartre, Jean-Paul 80, 223, 241–2, 254, 256, 259, 282 Satie, Erik 178, 205, 209 Schlieffen Plan 213, 219 Second Empire 79, 109–32, 135, 138, 140, 142, 151, 172–3, 198, 203, 300, 306 Second Industrial Revolution 124, 175 Second Republic 83, 88, 110–13, 120, 186, 315 Seine River 1, 7, 91, 96, 116, 169–70, 171–2, 179, 181, 185, 203–4, 210, 246, 254, 273–4 Senghor, Léopold 230 September Massacres 33, 43, 314 sergents de ville 87 Seurat, Georges 181 sewing machine 165, 183 Shakespeare and Company Bookstore 312 Sieyès, Émmanuel-Joseph (Abbé) 14, 52 Sismondi, Jean-Charles 73 Smith, Ada “Bricktop” 221, 235 Smith, Adam 47, 72 Soboul, Albert 43 Social Question 3–4, 84, 87–8, 102–3, 128, 134, 157–62, 199 Société nationale de chemins de fers français (SNCF) 231, 251, 278 Society of Revolutionary Republican Women 44 Solidarism 169, 173, 203 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander 266, 282 Sorbonne 191, 243 Sorel, Georges 161 Stade de France 287, 293, 296, 310–11, 317 Staël, Germaine de 44, 69 Stalinism 222, 239, 265–6 Stavisky Affair 215 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) 77–8 stonemasons 17, 48, 65, 95, 115, 117–19, 143, 166, 194, 203 Stravinsky, Igor 206, 235 strikes 21, 42, 47, 50, 99, 110, 112, 114, 161–2, 175, 177, 185, 189, 199, 202–3, 210, 213, 216, 227,

343

230–1, 237, 242, 248, 254–5, 263, 316 students 63, 74, 85, 237, 243–50, 253–5, 260, 263, 265, 277, 280, 290, 292, 299, 317 Sue, Eugène 90 Surrealism 205–6, 232, 234 sweated labor 165 syndicat 199 take-off 72, 252 tarif 23–4, 99, 202 Taylorism 199 Terror, the 15, 33–4, 38, 39–40, 45, 47, 52–4, 57, 61, 100, 135, 269, 282, 299, 307, 314 terrorism 68, 100–1, 157–8, 163, 182, 219, 241–2, 266, 283, 288, 290, 292–3, 295, 297, 311, 317 textiles 84, 95, 125, 165–6, 174, 303 Thermidor 33, 40, 42, 45, 68, 269, 314 Thiers, Adolphe 86, 98, 133, 137, 140–1, 151, 153 Thiers Wall 98, 138, 228–9, 315–16 Third Republic 101, 113, 121, 130, 154, 158, 160–1, 163–70, 172–9, 186, 190, 220, 239 Thorez, Maurice 231, 239 Three Glorious Days 84–6, 315 Tiberi, Jean 289 titi 26, 233 Tocqueville, Alexis de 259, 299 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 177–8 Tour de France 21, 185, 207, 304, 316 tour des lacs 122 Touré, Kunda 284 tourism 6, 131–2, 181, 241, 253–4, 313 tram 306 Trentes Glorieuses 238, 260–1, 268–70 tricolor flag 61, 86, 190, 307 Trochu, Jules 136–7 Trollope, Francis 67, 103, 106 Troppmann, Jean-Baptiste 127 Trotsky, Leon 222–3 Truffaut, François 258, 259, 272 tuberculosis 193, 223 Tunisia 162, 224, 246 Turgenev, Ivan 106, 128

344

INDEX

Union Sacrée 185, 213–14 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 241, 271 Urbanisme 227 Vaillant, Édouard 154, 213 Van Gogh, Vincent 178 Varlin, Eugène 136 Veil, Simone 268 Vel d’Hiv 207 Vélib 287, 304 Vendôme Column 56, 126, 151–2 Verlaine, Paul 128 Versailles 10–11, 14, 16, 19, 26, 30, 34–7, 44, 52, 61, 81, 137–42, 147–53, 212, 214, 254–5 verseuse 195 Vichy 155, 214–20, 227, 232, 234, 239–42, 245–6, 266, 280–1, 290–1 Vidocq, François-Eugène 68 Vigilance Committees 137, 146, 153

Villermé, Louis-René 91 Villette, La 119, 145, 174–5, 186, 297, 310 Voltaire 11, 14–15, 48, 52, 55 Wajda, Andrzej 275 Weil, Simone 223 Western Front 219 Who, The 257–8, 284 Woman Question 142, 162 worker poets 93 World Expositions 109, 126–32, 156, 157, 170, 173, 179–81, 185, 190, 280, 306, 315–16 Wright, Richard 260 Zazie dans le Métro 253, 258 Zazou 236, 253 Zola, Emile 110, 112, 120–1, 125, 127, 130, 155, 157, 164, 173, 316 Zone, The 71, 145, 228, 259