Seven Ages of Paris (68 page)

Then, within half a year of Dien Bien Phu, encouraged by France’s defeat there, concerted revolt broke out in Algeria. There had already been uprisings to force France out of Tunisia and Morocco. However, established as an integral part of metropolitan France, Algeria was no mere colony, but the transcendent diamond in France’s imperial diadem, with a million pieds noirs (as the colonists were called) settled there. Although at first little noticed in Paris, a combination of the war in Algeria and Mendès’s unpopular attempts to wean Normandy school children from calvados on to milk and to alter the traditional drinking habits of France brought him down. The savage war struggled on for another seven and a half years, destroying the Fourth Republic, coming close to inflicting a military takeover in France, and bringing back de Gaulle as the only possible saviour. Meanwhile, as far as metropolitan France, and Paris in particular, was concerned, the conflicts in Indo-China and Algeria led to a sense of alienation among the troops not unlike that between the front and the rear in 1914–18. It was a sense of detachment that would rebound to hit de Gaulle—and metropolitan France—hard in the 1960s.

BIDONVILLES

During the Occupation, not surprisingly, all building and construction work in Paris came to an abrupt halt. About the only achievement was completion of a small stretch of the autoroute de l’ouest out at Saint-Cloud, which had been begun in 1935. Paris architects continued discussing the Porte Maillot development, and there were talks with Hitler’s Albert Speer on the future plans for Berlin. Out of the immense destruction which had left so many of Europe’s buildings damaged or destroyed, Paris mercifully had suffered relatively little. Nevertheless there was an acute housing shortage because of the flow of refugees from the devastated areas who reached Paris—and stuck. When the war ended, with neither funds nor material available, for ten years there was a virtual moratorium on any new work in Paris.

Those years constituted, architecturally, a dismal period in the history of Paris, for maintenance was deplorably neglected, old buildings like the Louvre left to crumble and be blackened by smoke and eroded by pollution. Slum areas and shanty-towns continued to deteriorate alarmingly, and disgraceful bidonvilles sprang up in the areas once occupied by the old fortifications. The Chambre Syndicale de la Savonnerie revealed that in post-war Paris only 15 per cent of dwellings possessed bathrooms, and that soap consumption was the lowest in Europe—hence, concluded an American correspondent, “the popularity of Eau-de-Cologne.” Even as late as 1954 the city authorities reported that 74 per cent of the capital’s dwellings were “substandard.”

Bringing the coldest weather in memory, the winter of 1954 also gave rise to a remarkable human phenomenon. So bitter was January that police found a woman frozen to death on the Boulevard de Sébastopol, an eviction notice clutched in her fist—a scene straight out of Balzac. The morgues were crammed with the frozen bodies of clochards whom even the hot air from the Métro grills could not warm. Appearing from nowhere, an unknown Jesuit priest calling himself the Abbé Pierre, a tiny bearded figure in his forties, the son of a wealthy Lyons silk manufacturer who had fought in the Resistance in the Vercors, seized the attention of all Paris. One evening, before the main feature, he leaped on to the stage of one of Paris’s largest cinemas and pleaded, “Mes amis, aidez-nous,” before describing the misery of the poor in the bidonvilles out in the unseen suburbs of Saint-Denis and Nanterre. He struck a chord; within two weeks more than a billion francs poured in from all walks of life, including sentimental prostitutes. The directors of the Métro converted three unused stations into lodgings for the homeless; Abbé Pierre took to haunting the corridors of the National Assembly, until he persuaded the Minister of Housing, Maurice Lemaire, to accompany him into the slums where a child had recently died of cold, reducing Lemaire to tears and to admitting, “It never occurred to me that we have such misery in France.” The Minister introduced a new bill to spend ten billion francs on low-cost housing. Then—typically of the Fourth Republic—the government fell, and nothing was done. Spring came, the poor disappeared from the Paris conscience, and so did Abbé Pierre.

The outstanding architectural monuments to the Fourth Republic were two great curved complexes of monotone concrete and windows, the UNESCO Building (completed in 1959), the largest building ever commissioned in Paris by an international body (but somewhat jerry-built), and the ORTF broadcasting centre (completed between 1956 and 1963) on the Right Bank, supposedly designed to resemble a gigantic electro-magnet. Conditioning all post-war city planning in Paris, as well as being its worst enemy, was the automobile. Turning the Concorde into a one-way carrousel and a ban on hooting were only first bites at the cherry. For years the city was heaved up as vast, sometimes seven-storey-deep car parks were burrowed under the Concorde, the Place Vendôme and almost everywhere else. There were violent protests as, in 1955, the magnificent chestnuts by the Place de l’Alma disappeared, then the riverside elms, victims of the new speedway down the Right Bank.

WRITERS AND ARTISTS

The end of the war led in Paris to an immense hunger for ideas, restricted only by an initial shortage of paper. The new writing based itself in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and more specifically the bar of the Café Flore—which happened to be convenient to the residence of the great guru of Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and his consort, Simone de Beauvoir. Holding forth with a torrent of sophistry in the smoke-filled rooms of the Flore, he never wanted for a captive audience of students, many of them American. De Beauvoir, sometimes known as la grande sartreuse, like a prim governess with her hair austerely tied back, was ever the better writer, breaking new feminist ground with her Le Deuxième sexe and providing valuable material for contemporary historians with her various books of memoirs and her criticism of the Algerian War in La Force des choses (1963).

Among the new writers of the 1950s whose books about the past war deeply shocked Parisians was Jean Dutourd, first of all with his flaying attack on the nastiness of the petits collabos in Au bon beurre (1952) and—three years later—with his Les Taxis de la Marne, which exalted heroism at the same time as it excoriated the debility of the “men of ’40.” A few months after the publication of Au bon beurre Parisian theatregoers were agog with excitement at the first night of Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot—even if many understood its cheerless message even less well than the philosophy of Sartre. Highly contemporary, but much more entertaining, was Raymond Queneau’s irreverent bestseller of 1959, Zazie dans le Métro, featuring a horribly knowing child from the provinces, precociously aware of transvestism, lesbians, paedophilia and child prostitution, her one desire being to travel on the Métro—which is of course on strike.

In an intensely hot August of 1954 the revered Colette died and was given a public funeral in the Cour d’Honneur of the Palais Royal, paid for by the state—the highest posthumous honour attainable, and the first time it had ever been accorded to a woman. “Pagan, sensuous, Dionysiac,” declaimed the Minister of Education in his funeral address, and all Paris mourned. Surrounded by her cats, she had spent her last few years being carried from place to place in a sedan chair, sometimes sending down to the Grand Véfour for a lark pie. “What a beautiful life I’ve had,” she was recorded as remarking towards the end. “It’s a pity I didn’t notice it sooner.” As Colette left the scene, so almost simultaneously a new female writer, aged only eighteen, arose to fill the gap—and take Paris by storm: Françoise Sagan, who was both a product of and a reaction against the Existentialist wave. Writing of Bonjour tristesse, her first novel, Françoise Mauriac praised its literary merit but described its heroine as “a charming little monster.”

Of the outstanding journalists of the 1950s and 1960s, there was of course Camus, who founded Combat as a Resistance organ during the war, to continue long afterwards as a national paper—with his rallying cry that it was required of his generation to rise “up to the level of its despair.” There was also the vigorous young figure of Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, who launched L’Express. Known popularly as J-J S-S, Servan-Schreiber headed the attack on French policy in Algeria, exposing the worst excesses of torture, before going on to attack the foe of American universal power in Le Défi américain. Also deserving of mention was that remarkable phenomenon, the Paris correspondent of the London Evening Standard, Sam White. With his gravelly voice, Australian prize-fighter’s nose and generally dishevelled appearance, liberally covered with cigarette ash, Sam was central-casting for a tough foreign correspondent as played by Bogart.

In the world of painting, Picasso—forgiven his wartime career in Paris—went from strength to inventive strength (and from mistress to mistress), turning his hand to sculpture, fashioning marvellous bulls out of bits of old bicycles, broken urns and baskets. In 1949 he re-established both his pre-eminence and the claim of Paris once more to be the global art forum at an exhibition of sixty-four recent canvases. At the same time there was a retrospective of ninety works by Léger at the Modern Art Museum. As Picasso cornered the market, so other fabled contemporaries left it: in 1954 Derain died, knocked off his bicycle at the age of seventy-four; Matisse went next, in November, aged eighty-four, followed, in 1955, by Léger, his funeral held under the auspices of the Communist Party, of which he (like Picasso) was a member, and by Utrillo—tragically alcoholic since the age of ten, much overrated as an original artist, but his canvases of a grey Montmartre still commanding the highest prices.

DISTRACTIONS

There was one branch of the arts in which Paris had always led the world, and did so again just as soon as wartime restrictions lifted—haute couture. To reclaim its ascendancy, the industry put on a remarkable exhibition even before the fighting ended, in the Louvre’s Pavillon de Marsan at the end of March 1945, masterminded by Robert Ricci (son of Nina), Lucien Lelong, Christian Bérard, Dior, Patou, Carven and other great names. To beat shortages of materials the new designs that were going to sweep the post-war world were displayed on faceless, miniature dolls made of wire and looking like Surrealist sculptures. Some were even clad in silk underwear. In freezing attics, warming their hands over candles, an army of seamstresses and milliners had worked bravely and ceaselessly through the winter to produce the new clothes. To give it due importance the Garde Républicaine, en grande tenue, formed a guard of honour on the opening night. The exhibition was an immediate success: over 100,000 came to see it. Many could not possibly afford the dresses that would, eventually, be sold from the doll models, and had had nothing new to wear since 1939, but were drawn by this heroic statement that Paris’s pre-eminence in beauty and luxury was once more alive after the grim Occupation years.

February 1947 saw Christian Dior, a newcomer—described as suffering from “an almost desperate shyness augmented by a receding chin”—put on his first post-war show in the Avenue Montaigne. Such was the buzz about the show that some Parisians even tried to get in through the top of the house by ladder; it was that night that the New Look, with its tightened waists and ample skirts, was born, and Parisian haute couture was once more back on its rightful throne. Dior was followed by Givenchy, Balmain, Balenciaga, Courrèges, Saint-Laurent and others.

Not everyone instantly fell in behind these illustrious names, however. The fashionable Louise de Vilmorin, Duff Cooper’s mistress, was heard to declare in Saint-Germain that fashion was “a veneer foisted on naive women by despots. Give me sincere blue jeans!” Worse still, when Dior took his models to be photographed at the Rue Lepic market in a deprived area of Montmartre they were mobbed by angry stall-holders who tore their hair and tried to rip their expensive clothes off. Once more, it was a clear demonstration of the continued coexistence of two Parises—the rich and the poor. Following a fashion of a different kind, on the male side—as a kind of counterpart to London’s teddy-boys and a protest against contemporary values—were the zazous, children of the affluent bourgeois with their long greasy hair and equally exaggerated jackets with high collars—sometimes set upon and beaten up by Communist or fascist youths.

The world of the fashion model was not always that far removed from that of the oldest profession, once more back with a swing following the Liberation—with barely a pause for the cropped hair to regrow. By the early 1950s the Paris vice squad estimated the number of working prostitutes at around 17,000; they ranged from the blowzy workingman’s whores plying their trade for a few francs in the Place de la Bastille to stunning girls who worked the bars along the Champs-Elysées. More discreet, and more distinguished, were the various maisons de passe, or maisons de rendezvous, such as were so devastatingly portrayed in Buñuel’s 1966 film Belle de jour, and catering to every taste and perversion. There clients would be entertained by dazzling young models or jeunes filles biens in quest of a little extra pocket money and some fun.

THE SECOND COMING

Beset by the unwinnable Algerian War, by the merry-go-round of collapsing governments which seemed finally to have run out of talent and by perennial strikes, the Fourth Republic stumbled on to its extinction. Nineteen-fifty-six began with the unhappy omens of the Eiffel Tower catching fire and Mistinguett dying, followed by the longest stretch of cold weather (colder than Moscow’s) since 1940, which caused a quarter of Paris traffic lights to freeze up. Fisticuffs broke out in the Assembly, and the year ended with the humiliation of Suez—with France, in Parisian eyes, let down by both Britain and the United States, marking a caesura of distrust of her anglo-saxon allies never quite to be repaired.

Then, as a last indication of the decay of political institutions, there was the short-lived phenomenon of Pierre Poujade, a thirty-five-year-old shopkeeper from the Lot. A powerful rabble-rouser who appealed to his audience by performing a kind of striptease on the platform, hurling off his jacket, his pullover and finally his shirt as he warmed to his subject, Poujade created a grassroots political party out of the discontent of France’s small shopkeepers. Unambiguously called UDCA—Union de Défense des Commerçants et Artisans—it had the unpleasantly thuggish and anti-Semitic tendencies of the extreme right, but it was suddenly swept into the Assembly on a wave of petit-bourgeois discontent with taxation and government generally. In the elections of January 1956 UDCA amazed Paris and Poujade himself by attracting nearly two and a half million votes, to win 53 seats, with the Communists at the other extreme increasing their share from 95 to 150. It was the worst defeat for the conventional parties of the centre since the Republic first saw the light of day—and until the 2002 flowering of Jean-Marie Le Pen. But within the year the Poujadists in the Assembly, an undistinguished lot, began to disintegrate, and Poujade himself disappeared as swiftly as he had arrived; but Poujadism remained—in the English as well as the French vocabulary.