Paris from the Ground Up , and: The Heroic City: Paris 1945–1958 (review)

“The production of urban space is always a battlefield of contending forces, and the Parisian story is a complicated one,” writes Rosemary Wakeman in a conspicuous understatement, adding that “One can immediately put forward the seemingly simple supposition that the spaces of Paris evoked the past at the same time as they summoned the future” (10). It is this very supposition—that some of the long-established functions of city spaces will remain preserved and viable even while the city continues to transform itself—that guides two recent texts on the history and significance of Paris as an urban center.

The Heroic City: Paris 1945–1958 takes an absorbing look at Paris in the post-war years as France struggled to rethink its cultural identity. Wakeman considers the catastrophic damage done to the public realm by the Second World War; space artfully inscribed by the state had been left both physically and symbolically stripped of its meanings. Once the French—and the world—had seen Hitler victoriously touring the city, Paris was rendered strangely unintelligible. The luster of modernity had faded by the 1940s and 1950s, and nothing had filled the vacuum left by what had once been Haussmann’s cohesive, unquestioned Paris, a commanding network of monuments and boulevards, now part of a larger French trauma of repression and displacement. Collective life fell victim to the multiple forces of wartime disaster, postwar industrialization, a mass media boom, and a burgeoning youth culture. Lacking in a civic focal point, “Paris was a disassembled city. Its spaces were undergoing rupture and upheaval. The mesmerizing imagery of the City of Light was at risk of disintegrating” (11).

The response to this moment of crisis, argues The Heroic City, was a fervent reanimation of collective practices, a potent fusion of historical memory and public life as staged in the city’s spaces. The growing influence of cinema at the midpoint of the twentieth century gave Parisians a new visual language to express their ardor for the timeless beauty of the city, while paying new attention to the meaning and vitality of day-to-day urban existence. This was Robert Doisneau’s Paris, whose photographs often featured the hyper-monumental Eiffel Tower, while at the same time sharing the frame with a string of drying laundry or schoolchildren along the Champs de Mars. Yet this was not merely an artistic exercise; a surprising spectrum of perspectives found common purpose in the streets of Paris, from early television directors to a staggering Who’s Who of emerging French intellectuals: “The fragmented city was sighted, surveyed, opened up for examination. [ . . . ] The ordinary was heroicized. Anyone could become a celebrity, anything made into a celebrity event” (12). With the all of the urban center’s most and least famous spaces available as a backdrop, Parisians were once again able to reattribute meaning to the world immediately around them.

Wakeman’s extraordinary chapter on “Spatial Imagination and the Avant- Garde” reveals diverse intellectual movements at the fore in the 1950s (social Marxism, surrealism, technocratic rationalism), all with a stake in urban spatiality. The author traces the evolution of numerous urban observers, including Guy Debord’s experimental band of Situationists and urban sociology’s pioneers (Louis Chevalier, Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe) who sought to demystify the working classes through engaged, empirical study of the city’s îlots insalubres (unhygienic isolated districts). Postwar urbanists and intellectuals of the avantgarde exposed the skewed priorities of a capital designed for centuries around esthetic or commercial, rather than human, priorities.

Wakeman’s reading of youth culture as a spatializing force on the Left Bank offers a particularly innovative perspective on Paris at the start of les Trente Glorieuses (the period of economic growth from 1947 to 1974). She rightly argues that the youth of Paris had already taken on a...