Seven Ages of Paris (70 page)

The plastiques against writers and leaders of the left became more frequent and more inept. A bomb intended for Jean-Paul Sartre’s apartment on the Rue Bonaparte was placed on the wrong floor; Sartre’s front door was blown out, but the apartments on the floor above were destroyed. On the morning of 7 February, one of eleven bombings that day was inflicted on the Boulogne-sur-Seine home of André Malraux, de Gaulle’s Minister of Culture. Malraux lived upstairs, and anyway was absent that day. The plastique was detonated on the ground floor, close to where the four-year-old Delphine Renard was playing with her dolls. Splinters of glass blinded her in one eye and badly disfigured her.*

Although this outrage against Delphine would have attracted little attention in contemporary Algiers, where maimings and killings were commonplace, it provoked uproar in Paris. The next day the left organized a demonstration at the Bastille. Although the Minister of the Interior, Roger Frey, refused to lift a ban on political gatherings, some 10,000 demonstrators assembled in an angry mood—as much against the authorities for allowing such atrocities to go unpunished as against the OAS. The police were nervous and, as so often in Paris, overreacted. After two or three hours of skirmishing, they suddenly charged without warning. In panic, a number of the demonstrators sought to escape down the stairs to the Charonne Métro station, but found the gates locked. The police now lost control of themselves, flinging demonstrators over the railings on to the heads of those penned in below, and following that up by pitching heavy iron tree-guards and marble-topped café tables down on them.

At the end of it all, eight demonstrators lay dead, including three women and a sixteen-year-old boy, and more than a hundred were injured (the police too suffered 140 casualties). On the following Tuesday, 13 February, a grim procession estimated at half a million strong followed the eight coffins to Père Lachaise Cemetery. In an excess of emotion, Simone de Beauvoir exclaimed in her diary, “My God! How I hated the French!” The crisis in the Algerian War had been reached. Algérie française was dead—killed by the OAS.

The OAS broke up, the last plastique exploding in Paris in July 1963. Salan was captured in Algeria in April 1962 (and later narrowly escaped a death sentence). The last attempt against de Gaulle’s life, and the one that came closest to success, took place in August 1962 at the Petit-Clamart, just outside Paris. An OAS band equipped with machine guns and led once again by Bastien-Thiry ambushed the President’s car, with
Mme.
de Gaulle in the back, missing them both by a hair’s breadth, the bullets passing behind the General’s head and in front of the head of his wife. Never losing his composure, de Gaulle the soldier criticized the would-be assassins as “bad shots.” Bastien-Thiry was caught and executed, the first senior French officer to stand before a firing squad in many years. His death was to no avail. The second Evian talks had been concluded in March, with de Gaulle conceding everything to the FLN, including the recently discovered Algerian oil which France had fought so hard to keep. The tricolore was finally lowered in Algeria that summer. Amid tragic scenes one million pieds noirs left Algeria and the homes that had belonged to many of them for three generations. It was a miracle, owing almost entirely to the remarkable boom in the French economy under de Gaulle, that France was able to assimilate, almost overnight, so enormous an increment in her population. In independent Algeria, after brief intermissions of hope, the killings—now of Algerians by Algerians—would continue to the present day. In France the fiercely satirical, generally heartless magazine Le Canard Enchaîné took Parisians by surprise by printing in boldest letters, “To de Gaulle, from his grateful country: once and for all, MERCI!”

* Three months later Le Monocle was arrested by the French police and charged with the Delphine Renard bombing. He was sentenced to death, but this was commuted to life imprisonment, and he was later amnestied.

REVIVAL

A century before, Napoleon III had described Algeria as “a cannonball attached to the feet of France.” Now that the cannonball, unshackled, was allowed to roll away, France was “free to look at France once more,” as de Gaulle put it in 1960, and to “marry her age.” Political reform followed political reform, with referendum upon referendum—until Parisians grew tired of having to troop to the polls yet again. In fact, there were few fronts on which de Gaulle was not attacking with determination and energy in his first six plenipotentiary months from June 1958. First and foremost there was the new constitution, involving a mountainous work of drafting and consultation. “I considered it necessary,” declared de Gaulle, “for the government to derive not from parliament, in other words from the parties, but, over and above them, from a leader directly mandated by the nation as a whole and empowered to choose, to decide and to act.” The executive would be greatly strengthened, with many of the characteristics that had weakened the Third and Fourth Republics expunged from the body politic. For the first time in nearly a hundred years, France had a president vested with authority. The debilitating wrangling of the parties was a thing of the past, and so was any kind of political corruption. For the next few years under de Gaulle France enjoyed remarkable stability, unknown since the heyday of Louis Napoleon. Critics might grumble at de Gaulle’s authoritarianism, that he was “Charles XI” or a new Bonaparte, but he was never a self-serving despot or a would-be dictator. In his mystical references to “une certaine idée de la France,” if there was any viable affinity it was with Louis XIV, with his overriding pursuit of one thing: “La grandeur de la France.” That was all that ever mattered to de Gaulle, and his every act was directed to that single end.

De Gaulle began to travel ever more widely, to remind the outside world of the sound of France’s voice. It was a sound not always harmonious to the ears of her friends. The new year of peace, 1963, began with de Gaulle closing the door on Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community, with some brutality towards his old wartime colleague and loyal advocate Harold Macmillan. No sooner had he dealt this blow to his anglo-saxon former ally than he was off to Germany, amazing everybody by his German when he delcared “Long live Franco-German friendship!”—and wooing a receptive Dr. Adenauer, like him a product of the world pre-1914. In 1965, de Gaulle broke completely with NATO, explaining that France did not want to be drawn into any war not to her own liking. (From their Paris headquarters the departure ceremony of the fourteen NATO nations took place with admirable good humour, British army bands playing “Charlie Is My Darling”—a witty musical rebuke to the deliberately absent President de Gaulle.) The President embarked France upon her own go-it-alone, nuclear force de frappe. He recognized Mao’s Peking, and in 1966 visited Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, the first Western head of state ever to do so—to the consternation of les Anglo-Saxons. The Times observed that suddenly he seemed to be “the only active revolutionary in Europe.”

“In the year of grace 1962,” de Gaulle was able to write in his memoirs, “France’s revival was in full flower. She had been threatened by civil war; bankruptcy had stared her in the face; the world had forgotten her voice. Now she was out of danger.” Indeed, so it seemed, with the ending of the Algerian War. Life began to resume its usual course. The Brittany farmers embarked upon an “artichoke war,” to the discomfort of Parisians. Academicians began to fret about the incursions of franglais. The title of the new Vadim-Bardot film, Le Repos du guerrier, seemed to characterize the era. The politician Debré was replaced at the Matignon by the banker Pompidou. France’s gross national product rose by 6.8 per cent in the course of 1962. Free of the burden of Algeria, France’s economy at last began to demonstrate a miraculous blossoming as a result of the thoughtful planning carried out during the latter years of the maligned Fourth Republic and the first four years of Gaullism. Entering its seventh year, in 1965, the Fifth Republic showed its sudden miraculous fiscal prosperity with official reserves reaching $5 billion—unequalled in all Europe except at the Bundesbank.

Nevertheless, in the sunshine of France’s sudden climb to prosperity, the old shadows were not entirely banished. The serpent of Communism was still very much alive and wriggling in its opposition to de Gaulle and his dirigiste guidance of the economy. In October 1965 Paris was hit by a transport strike, with L’Humanité noting grandly, “In Thursday’s absence of traditional transportation, the workers took their cars to go to the factories.” It was surely the first time the Communist press had conceded that French workers were now paid well enough to own cars, rather than simply assembling them. Two years later, Paris was paralysed by what the media recorded as the greatest strike by the greatest number of workers France had ever known. Accompanied by slogans of “Down with Pompidou!” and “No Government by Decree!,” it was not a strike for wages, but a purely political strike for purely political reasons. A hundred and fifty thousand workers paraded for three hours from the Bastille to the République. As one foreign correspondent observed, “Only the sun and the moon continued their movements.”

The style with which de Gaulle conducted his presidential life at the Elysée, seated right in the heart of Paris, reflected the style of a highly personal government and his mystical notion of “une certaine idée de la France.” Privately, neither de Gaulle nor his wife, Yvonne, was ever entirely happy there. Indeed, the General felt himself a prisoner. Life as head of state was entirely dedicated to the state. Excursions outside in Paris were few: to the dentist, to visit Marshal Juin dying in hospital. De Gaulle never dined in town, and after a while gave up his walks in the Bois de Boulogne, so as not to be besieged by the “curious.”

BUILDING

As, under the impetus of de Gaulle’s advent, all the economic and industrial plans laid under the Fourth Republic bore fruit, so too did the architecture of Paris, so long dormant, begin to burst into flower. Like the two Napoleons before him, de Gaulle showed considerable interest in plans for the city’s development, frequently intervening. As with them, every proposition was subordinated to the one overriding question—did it promote the grandeur de la France? Like Napoleon I, de Gaulle looked forward to the day when a magnificent new Paris would become the wonder, if not the formal capital, of Europe. By 1962 population figures reached seven million for greater Paris, though the central city declined to 2.7 million from the 2.9 million of 1911. It was still overcrowded—with 353 people per hectare compared to 106 in London.

With his lofty objective in mind, de Gaulle made the inspired choice of appointing André Malraux as his Minister of Culture, a post he held until 1969—charged with taking Paris in hand. Under this remarkable man, ten years younger than de Gaulle—writer and artist, philosopher, aesthete and man of action, fighter with the Republicans in Spain, convert from Communism; scourge of both left and right, and member of the Resistance, whose life resembled a novel that might have been written by Malraux himself—the stones of Paris came to life again. It was Malraux who was responsible for the blanchissage of Paris, for digging out the lower floor of the Louvre’s Cour Carrée and returning it to its pristine glory, and restoring the Marais with the Place des Vosges, dilapidated almost to the point of total destruction, as its pièce de résistance. The cleaning of Paris by blanchissage transformed much of the capital. A secret anti-viral formula (made in Germany) was employed on the fabric of buildings, rubbed on like a paste, left to dry, then rinsed off with water. It was toothbrushing on a vast scale that filled Paris with workers in oilskins, just at the time when other buildings were being plastiqué by the OAS.

Work was also begun on the remarkable RER express underground system, capable of whisking Parisians on silent rubber wheels from Saint-Germain to the Etoile in four minutes during the rush hour, at 100 kilometres an hour. A giant hole—le grand trou—was built to create a new “Forum” in the centre of Paris, for so many years encumbered by Les Halles, now translated out to Rungis on the way to Orly Airport. Under de Gaulle and his successors Paris grew dramatically upwards, as well as down into the bowels of the earth. Less felicitous were architectural scandals like the Tour Montparnasse (started 1959, but not finished till 1973), greatest urban project since Haussmann, and designed to be the highest skyscraper in all Europe, menacing the ascendancy of the Eiffel Tower and the Invalides. Then, opened in 1977, came Richard Rogers’ Centre Pompidou, unhappy child of the first international competition ever held in Paris. There was the great and windy complex out at La Défense (where the last battle of the Siege of 1870–1 was fought and lost) and various other high-rise developments ringing Paris and threatening her historic skyline. Swallowing up ancient woodland like the Forest of Sénart, Paris built herself into the twentieth century. Of 300,000 new flats, one horrible dormitory complex was built in the form of a wriggling snake, nearly half a mile long. Meanwhile the old city centre changed, with Saint-Germain declared dead by the intelligentsia as bookshops were displaced by fashion boutiques or by trinket shops selling Limoges pillboxes topped with Jean-Paul Sartre’s spectacles.

Almost more than any other city in the world, de Gaulle’s Paris seemed to be dominated by cars. Art Buchwald of the New York Herald Tribune once complained that “In New York or London taxis drive their clients towards their destination; in Paris, you accompany the chauffeur towards his garage or his restaurant.” Resentfully he reckoned that every day of his life he spent four hours in public transport. While huge holes continued to be burrowed to house the growing car population, the available street surface was only 10 per cent greater by the end of the 1960s than it had been in 1900. On the Champs-Elysées traffic moved at about the same speed it had when Henri IV was assassinated. Shortly after it was completed, at unimaginable cost, the périphérique girdling the city achieved an accident rate of one per kilometre per day. It was hardly any surprise that Paris should innovate a new western malady—road rage. Already by 1965 les énervés du volant—“nervous wrecks at the wheel”—were being diagnosed: one dropped dead of a heart attack after a minor accident; another got out and assaulted an ambulance driver, causing a triple pile-up. Judges now began issuing automatic six-day jail sentences for such miscreants.