The Paris Zone: A Cultural History, 1840–1944 by James Cannon (review)

At first sight it is hard to imagine what can possibly be said about the history of the Paris ‘zone’ that could be new or original. The term ‘zone’, as the old belt around Paris was called, has long been the stuff of Parisian folklore: the home of the chiffonniers celebrated by Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin. Much of proletarian Paris, from Zola to Céline, is described as staring down at the city from its heights on the edge. The ‘zone’ was also feared as the home of the dreaded ‘apaches’, and therefore the target of much antiproletarian bourgeois propaganda. From the 1970s onwards, the ‘zone’ has fascinated students and historians of Paris. The opening argument of James Cannon’s study—that this is a much-neglected part of Parisian history (‘a minor place in collective memory’, he says, p. 7) — no longer really has much substance. Nonetheless, Cannon has written an excellent and deeply nuanced book that, through his forensic work in a wide variety of archives, does bring genuinely fresh perspectives, or series of perspectives, to our reading of the ‘zone’ in culture and politics. He is not only an expert cultural historian, able to negotiate the trickiest of texts, but also a sharp-eyed literary critic. This is why, for example, his reading of Voyage au bout de la nuit is so effective: the ‘zone’ is a kind of hell, where Céline’s vision, both ‘apocalyptic and farcical’, in the words of Henri Mondor (quoted p. 140), is matched by a real, living physical reality, and Céline’s genius was to turn this landscape into an allegory of metaphysical misery. Cannon’s book is very well documented. However, he does not stick to the traditional sources. He is as at home with the history of map-making or military planning as he is with the history of French cinema or the more detailed ellipses of Walter Benjamin’s theorizing on the city. He also writes well — he is clear and authoritative, as well as entertaining and fluent. The result is a rich compendium of material that illuminates new aspects of the tangled skein of already existing texts on the ‘zone’. The timeframe Cannon deploys is also significant, and he skilfully makes the connection between the Revolutionary tensions of the nineteenth century and 1968. He tells how, for example, the singer Renaud, with anarchist sympathies and then only sixteen years old, had formed a ‘Groupe Gavroche révolutionnaire’, inspired by barricades in the Latin Quarter and the ‘blousons noirs’ of the ‘zone’ (p. 209). To this extent Cannon is faithful to the tradition established by the great historian of Paris, Louis Chevalier, whose insight into the story of the city is provided by those on the outside as much as by those on the inside. For this reason, and all the reasons cited above, this book is worth reading as a form of rediscovery.