Seven Ages of Paris (59 page)

The post-war economy was indeed in a sorry state. France had spent a quarter of her national fortune during the war, and although with her customary recuperative genius she rapidly rebuilt her devastated industries and restored her agricultural production, it was her financial structure that had been most lastingly damaged. France had paid for the war by issuing paper money. Inflation soared as a result. By the Armistice the franc had lost nearly two-thirds of its value, exchanging at 26 to the pound sterling, and as early as the Victory Parade it had depreciated to 51 to the pound. By May 1926 its value had plummeted to 178 to the pound, and finally, only two months later, with a threatening mob pounding on the gates of the Palais Bourbon, to 220. Urged on by the revolutionary left, French workers had good reason to demand better conditions and higher wages to offset this inflation. National finances were further worsened by the additional millions of francs needed to fund the pensions of the host of ex-servicemen.

The post-war Minister of Finance, Louis-Lucien Klotz (according to Clemenceau “the only Jew who knows nothing about money”), made it clear that he expected France’s budgetary deficits to be redeemed by German reparations. But in 1923 Germany defaulted on her payments. France (unsupported by England) occupied the Ruhr in order to enforce payment, but she was soon obliged to withdraw, a humiliating setback to French power. While Britain and America were already emerging from the world slump, France remained in depression. Between 1928 and 1934, her industrial production fell by 17 per cent; between 1929 and 1936, average income slipped 30 per cent; and by the end of 1935 more than 800,000 were unemployed. So the nation’s financial crisis ran on into the 1930s, bringing down government after government, making it impossible to achieve a consistent foreign policy, quite apart from a policy of reconciliation with Germany.

EXPANSION AND EXPATRIATES

By the “hollow years” of the 1930s two-thirds of France’s population lived in the towns and cities; forty years before, the figure had been exactly the reverse, with two-thirds living on the land. The explanation for this dramatic swing lay partly in the appalling losses suffered among the sons of the peasantry in 1914–18, partly also in the universal drift to the cities. Paris remained, as always, the principal magnet. Yet, although the outer banlieues expanded, the population of central Paris actually decreased, from nearly 3 million just after the war to just over 2.7 million by 1939—not much more than it had been at the turn of the century. This reflected the serious lack of acceptable accommodation: more than half of the poorer young Parisians lived in one room or in a kitchen-bedroom, most of which had no toilet and no heating. It was not till around 1940 that most Parisian buildings had running water and drainage connected to a central sewer. How many centuries it had taken since the first endeavours of Philippe Auguste! The trouble was that, because of inhibiting legislation and stuffy building regulations imposed by successive post-1919 governments, there was little profit in building. Few private investors could afford the cost of constructing apartment blocks. Gone were the days of Haussmann. Instead speculators put their money into commercial property—and that bubble burst with the Depression. By 1939 the rate of dwelling construction had sunk from 6,470 storeys per year in 1914 to 400, with well over three-quarters dating from pre-1914.

In 1919, with the arrival of peace, the city of Paris had a unique opportunity for expansion. The line of Thiers’s old walls and bastions, thirty-five kilometres in all, and so useful in 1870, was now rendered obsolete by the development of heavy cannon and bombers. Instead there would be the Maginot Line protecting France’s eastern frontier. So this “zone,” representing a substantial proportion of the existing area of Paris, was purchased from the military, freeing it for immediate development. Demolition and construction began at once. Opened to private speculation, some 38,750 new dwelling units were run up, many lasting only a brief period. One critic described the result as a “dense wall of mediocrity encircling the city.” Fresh slums and what were later to become known as bidonvilles sprang up, and the zone was infested with corruption and poverty. Indeed, at the Porte de Clignancourt (site of today’s Marché aux Puces) forty-seven houses had to be demolished in 1921 because of an outbreak of bubonic plague. It became a terrible monument to the recently ended Great War. Building in the zone was not completed till the 1930s—though at the Liberation of 1944 the Allies still found something of an unoccupied desert there. Upon it de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic would build the notorious “Boulevard Périphérique,” thereby girdling the city with a new impenetrable wall.

For the reasons already suggested, after 1919 most new building shifted towards the public sector, with a marked slowing—particularly in the 1930s—in the building of luxury apartments, now stark and become simply “machines for living” with little that was decorative. Instead cinemas started to proliferate. The style of architecture changed, with a brief flash of inventiveness with the arrival of Art Deco in the mid-1920s—almost exclusively for the worse. It was perhaps just as well that there was a depression, with money short; otherwise the Swiss architect Le Corbusier might well have been able to refashion Paris in his own image. Le Corbusier had plans to destroy much of the centre of Paris on the Right Bank, replacing it with a grid of shoebox towers over 200 metres high. Perhaps for once Parisians had reason to thank the tangle of municipal building regulations descended from Bonnier’s 1902 prescriptions.

In practical terms, the one enduring (though visually questionable) success Modernism in Paris could claim was the great Trocadéro complex built for the World Exposition of 1937, although some contemporaries with long memories thought the structure little better than the pseudo-oriental mishmash left over from the last Expo, which it replaced. A man called Freyssinet wanted to construct on Mont Valérien a tower 700 metres high, up which you could drive a car; instead, here, on the site designated by Napoleon for his Palace of the King of Rome, uncompromisingly angular structures (of the sort Mussolini was building in Rome and Stalin in Moscow) were dominated by the Soviet and German pavilions. Symbolic of their times, there an aggressive Nazi eagle glared across at the new Soviet Adam and Eve, striding optimistically towards an unrealizable future. Like the regimes they represented, both pavilions would disappear—though the central feature linking them would survive to house the new Modern Art Museum and the Museum of Man.

Meanwhile, as dwelling space dwindled in the centre of Paris, so the pollution and noise from automobile traffic grew ever worse, as the number of cars rose from 150,000 in 1922 to 500,000 in 1938. One Parisian lamented, “C’est fini! the tranquillity of our streets, and the calm of promenading either on foot or in a carriage … Paris belongs to the machines.”

In the harsh 1920s there was, however, one important faction of Parisian society which found life wonderfully good and bon marché: the expatriates, and especially Americans. In 1921 foreign residents of Paris comprised 5.3 per cent of the population; ten years later the figure had almost doubled, to 9.2 per cent—while foreigners also accounted for a quarter of all those arrested by the police. Oscar Wilde’s Mrs. Allonby observes that when good Americans die they go to Paris; but after 1919 even not-so-good Americans took off in droves for Paris. For $80 they could secure a ship berth; otherwise they could work their way “shovelling out” in the holds of cattle boats; and a modest allowance in dollars would maintain an American in Paris for an indefinite period. The impulse generated was partly negative, an escape from the restrictive, puritan world that Prohibition under the Volstead Act had imposed on young Americans returning from the war. In Paris, by contrast, one was left free to lead one’s private life, to swim—or sink. Many Americans had sampled the delights of the city when serving as Pershing’s doughboys during the war and wanted to come back for more.

Paris also drew, once again, those of artistic bent as she had done in the days of Whistler, Henry James and Edith Wharton. The list was an imposing one: Gertrude Stein was already there, well established in her lair at Rue de Fleurus near the Luxembourg; then there were John Dos Passos, e.e. cummings, Stephen Vincent Benét, Archibald MacLeish, Louis Bromfield, Philip Barry, Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker—not to mention F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. There was Sylvia Beach, famed founder of Shakespeare and Co., the English bookshop and gathering point near the Odéon—and brave publisher of Joyce’s Ulysses and The Life and Loves of Frank Harris. Among itinerants, there was Cole Porter, with his nine cigarette cases and sixteen dressing gowns at 13 Rue Monsieur, his fibs (lapped up by Hollywood) about his wartime deeds in the Foreign Legion, his long-suffering wife, Linda, and his faiblesse for lusty black men. Then there was the magical, tragic dancer Isadora Duncan, broke and gallantly declaring that she didn’t know where her next bottle of champagne was coming from, later strangled when her scarf became caught in the wheels of a car.

By 1927, there were said to be 15,000 Americans resident in Paris, but the real figure was estimated to be much more like 40,000. For watering holes, they tended to gravitate around the Dôme and the Coupole in Montparnasse—and the enchanting Closerie des Lilas, which thoughtfully installed for them a bar américain (though Hemingway gave it the cold shoulder for a while after the new management ordered the waiters, mostly Great War heroes, to shave off their military moustaches and don white jackets). Meanwhile, bals became dancings—to the deep shock of académiciens, guardians of the language.

In Montmartre

In Montmartre, everybody is playing a part

wrote Douglas Byng. Did the expatriate writers and artists (American and others) find the fulfilment that Paris seemed to promise them? If we believe Hemingway, in his first blush of love for Paris—and for his young bride, Hadley—he for one was extremely poor, but happy. At 74 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine (then the centre of the rough Apache district and poor students’ quarters in the Contrescarpe area of the 6th arrondissement), they rented in 1922 a tiny flat on the fourth floor. It had no running water and a malodorous stand-up toilet on the landing; in winter it was so cold that tangerines left on the table would freeze overnight.

On Hemingway’s first meeting with the redoubtable Gertrude Stein she told him he had to “either buy clothes or buy pictures … It’s that simple.” In fact, the Hemingways had money for neither clothes nor pictures; Ernest could not even afford to buy the books he needed from Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Co., so he borrowed them instead. Often having to skip on meals, his large frame suffered agonies from the aromas wafting out from Montparnasse bistrots. (James Joyce, who completed Ulysses across the way, at number 71—though no plaque distinguishes it—frequently shared Hemingway’s hunger.) In romantic vein, Hemingway wrote: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

George Orwell, seriously impoverished in Paris in 1928, living in squalor at 6 Rue du Pot de Fer just round the corner from Hemingway’s Rue du Cardinal Lemoine, could never afford such romantic musings. His lodgings were not all that superior to those of his friend Boris, where “a long S-shaped train of bugs marched slowly across the wall above the bed.” The seventeen-hour day as a plongeur in a classy hotel kitchen was degrading. Deprived of any kind of luxury, he compared himself to the wretched rickshaw men and their miserable horses in the Far East.

One American who made no bones about disliking Paris and the Parisians was Scott Fitzgerald. According to Hemingway, “Since almost the only French he met regularly were waiters whom he did not understand, taxi drivers, garage employees and landlords, he had many opportunities to insult and abuse them.” Fitzgerald took to the bottle to the extent of terminally ruining a superb talent, and he blamed Paris—though ultimately he would recognize that “I spoiled this city for myself. I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.” Given the deadly combination of loneliness and satiety of pleasure that the city offered, young Americans coming to embrace her in the 1920s would have done well to heed the warning of poet Robert McAlmon: “Paris is a bitch and … one should not become infatuated with bitches, particularly when they have wit, imagination, experience and tradition behind their ruthlessness.” As Harold Stearns, racing reporter for the Chicago Tribune, observed, “Paris does not reproach the person bent on going to the devil—it shrugs its shoulders and lets him go.” Occasionally Paris sat up and noticed, as when, in 1927, young Charles Lindbergh arrived after his record-breaking solo flight: Paris went wild and mobbed him and his midge-like Spirit of St. Louis. Yet less than three months later Parisians were out on the streets booing America and Americans following the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the two Italian Anarchist immigrants whose fate aroused passions recalling the days of Dreyfus.

Stein dubbed her countrymen the “lost generation.” Then came the crash of ’29, and like butterflies in a storm they all vanished. Many of the expatriates, indeed, had to join the glum queue at the American Embassy for emergency funds to return home. The party was over. At the bottom end of the scale of those who did remain in Paris were the chiens érasés, the tragic failures or the crossed in love, the amputés de coeur fished out of the relentless Seine.

MUSIC AND SEX

The freedom that Paris offered in that heady false dawn of the 1920s held particularly true for black Americans. Many thousands had discovered Paris when serving as soldiers, and they relished the total lack of racial discrimination they found there: the bars and barriers that hemmed them in at home, stiff U.S. army regulations forbidding fraternization with whites, magically fell away. For them Paris was instantly a land of opportunity, welcoming such famous artists as clarinettist Sidney Bechet and dancer Josephine Baker, who sailed for France with a party of two dozen other black musicians, singers and dancers in September 1925. Many black Americans stayed on and took root, notably the black exponents of le jazz. Parisians came in their droves to hear Bechet play “Petite Fleur” at the Vieux Colombier. Paris was already jazz mad. Paris qui jazz had been the title of a revue of 1920 at the Casino de Paris, a runaway success. There was “A jazz band everywhere,” in the words of a hit of that year. Every night at the Casino de Paris and the Folies Bergère was a sell-out, with Jean Cocteau describing a revue at the former as “a kind of tamed catastrophe dancing on a hurricane of rhythms.”