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HISTORY |
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It was Rome that put Paris on the map, as it did the rest of western
Europe. When Julius Caesar's armies arrived in 52 BC, they found a
Celtic settlement confined to an island in the Seine - the Île de la
Cité.
Under the name of Lutetia, it remained a Roman colony for the next three
hundred years, prosperous commercially because of its commanding
position on the Seine trade route, but insignificant politically. The
Romans established their administrative centre on the Île de la Cité,
and their town on the Left Bank on the slopes of the Montagne Ste-Geneviève.
Though only two monuments from this period remain today - the baths by
the Hôtel de Cluny and the amphitheatre in rue Monge - the Roman street
plan , still evident in the north-south axis of rue St-Martin and rue St-Jacques,
determined the future growth of the city.
Although Roman rule disintegrated under the impact of Germanic invasions
around 275 AD, Paris held out until it fell to Clovis the Frank in 486,
whose conversion to Christianity hastened the Christianization of the
whole country. Under his successors, Paris saw the foundation of several
rich and influential monasteries, especially on the Left Bank.
With the election of Hugues Capet , Comte de Paris, as king in 987, the
fate of the city was inextricably identified with that of the monarchy .
Recurrent political tension between the classes and the crown led to
open rebellion , such as in 1356, when Étienne Marcel, a wealthy cloth
merchant, demanded greater autonomy for the city. Further rebellions,
fuelled by the hopeless poverty of the lower classes, led to the king
and court abandoning the capital in 1418, not to return for more than a
hundred years.
Growth of the city
As the city's livelihood depended from the first on its river-borne
trade, commercial activity naturally centred on the place where the
goods were landed. This was the place de Grève on the Right Bank , where
the Hôtel de Ville now stands. Marshy ground originally, it was
gradually drained to accommodate the business quarter. The Right Bank
continues to be associated with commerce and banking today.
The Left Bank 's intellectual associations are similarly ancient, dating
from the growth of schools and student accommodation round the two great
monasteries of Ste-Geneviève and St-Germain-des-Prés. In 1215, a papal
licence allowed the formation of what gradually became the renowned
University of Paris , eventually to be known as the Sorbonne , after
Robert de Sorbon, founder of a college for poor scholars.
To protect this burgeoning city, Philippe Auguste (king from 1180 to
1223) built the Louvre fortress and a defensive wall, which swung south
to enclose the Montagne Ste-Geneviève and north and east to encompass
the Marais. The administration of the city remained in the hands of the
king until 1260, when St Louis ceded a measure of responsibility to the
leaders of the Paris watermen's guild, whose power was based on their
monopoly control of all river traffic
Civil wars and foreign occupation
From the mid-thirteenth to mid-fourteenth centuries, Paris shared the
same unhappy fate as the rest of France, embroiled in the long and
destructive Hundred Years War with the English. The country reached its
lowest point when the English king, Henry VI, had himself crowned king
of France in Notre-Dame in 1430.
It was only when the English were expelled - from Paris in 1437 and from
France in 1453 - that the economy had a chance to recover from decades
of devastation. It received a further boost when François I decided to
re-establish the royal court in Paris in 1528. He began reconstruction
work on the Louvre, and built the Tuileries palace for Cathérine de
Médicis.
However, before these projects could be completed, war again intervened,
this time civil war between Catholics and Protestants. It was sparked
off by the massacre of some three thousand protestants on August 25,
1572, St Bartholomew's Day. The Protestants had gathered in Paris for
the wedding of Henri III's daughter, Marguerite, to Henri, the
Protestant king of Navarre. They were massacred at the instigation of
the Catholic Guise family. When, through his marriage, Henri of Navarre
became heir to the French throne in 1584, the Guises drove his father-in-law,
Henri III, out of Paris. Forced into alliance, the two Henris laid siege
to the city. Five years later, Henri III having been assassinated in the
meantime, Henri of Navarre entered the city as king Henri IV . "Paris is
worth a Mass", he is reputed to have said to justify renouncing his
Protestantism in order to soothe Catholic susceptibilities.
The Paris he inherited was not a very salubrious place. No domestic
building had been permitted beyond the limits of Philippe-Auguste's
twelfth-century walls, and the population had doubled to around 400,000,
causing an acute housing shortage and a terrible strain on the
rudimentary water supply and drainage system. It is said that the first
workmen who went to clean out the city's cesspools in 1633 fell dead
from the fumes
Planning and expansion
The first systematic attempts at planning were introduced by Henri IV at
the beginning of the seventeenth century: regulating street lines and
uniformity of façade, and laying out the first geometric squares. The
place des Vosges dates from this period, as does the Pont Neuf .
Grandiose public buildings from this period perfectly symbolise the
bureaucratic, centralized power of the newly self-confident state.
Louis XIV is responsible for the construction of the boulevards from the
Madeleine to the Bastille, the places Vendôme and Victoire, the Porte St-Martin
and St-Denis gateways, the Invalides, Observatoire and the Cour Carrée
of the Louvre - not to mention the vast palace at Versailles , which
Louis made the home of his court in 1671. The aristocratic hôtels or
mansions of the Marais were also erected during this period, to be
superseded early in the eighteenth century by the Faubourg St-Germain as
the fashionable quarter of the rich and powerful.
The underside of all this bricks-and-mortar self-aggrandizement was the
general neglect of the living conditions of the ordinary citizenry of
Paris. The centre of the city remained a densely packed and insanitary
warren of medieval lanes and tenements. And it was only in the years
immediately preceding the 1789 Revolution that any attempt was made to
clean it up. A further source of pestilential infection was removed with
the emptying of theovercrowded 800-year-old cemeteries into the
catacombs.
In 1786, Paris received its penultimate ring of fortifications, the so-called
wall of the Fermiers Généraux, with 57 barrières or toll gates (one of
which survives in the middle of place Stalingrad), where a tax was
levied on all goods entering the city.
The 1789 Revolution
The immediate cause of the Revolution of 1789 was a campaign by the
clergy and nobility to protect their status - especially their exemption
from taxation - from erosion by the royal government. The revolutionary
movement, however, was quickly taken over by the middle classes,
essentially the provincial bourgeoisie, relatively well off but
politically underprivileged. They comprised the majority of the
representatives of the Third Estate , the "order" that encompassed the
whole of French society after the clergy, who formed the First Estate,
and the nobility who formed the Second. It was the middle classes who
took the initiative in setting up the National Assembly on June 17,
1789. The majority would probably have been content with constitutional
reforms that checked monarchical power, as on the English model. But
their power depended largely on their ability to wield the threat of a
Parisian popular uprising.
Although the effects of the Revolution were felt all over France, it was
in Paris that the most profound changes took place. Being as it were on
the spot, the people of Paris couldn't avoid being caught up in the
Revolution. They formed the revolutionary shock troops, the driving
force at the crucial stages of the Revolution. Parisians marched on
Versailles and forced the king to return to Paris with them. They
stormed and destroyed the Bastille prison on July 14, 1789. They
occupied the Hôtel de Ville, set up an insurrectionary Commune and
captured the Tuileries palace on August 10, 1792. They invaded the
Convention in May 1793 and secured the arrest of the more conservative
Girondin faction of deputies.
Where the bourgeois deputies of the Convention were concerned
principally with political reform, the poorest people, the sans-culottes
- literally, the people without breeches - expressed their demands in
economic terms: price controls, regulation of the city's food supplies,
and so on. In so doing they foreshadowed the rise of the working-class
and socialist movements of the nineteenth century.
Napoleon - and the barricades
Napoleon's chief legacy to France was a very centralized, authoritarian
and efficient bureaucracy that put Paris in firm control of the rest of
the country. For the rest of the nineteenth century after his demise,
France was left to fight out, literally in the streets, the
contradictions and unfinished business left behind by the Revolution of
1789.
On the one hand, there was a tussle between the class that had risen to
wealth and power as a direct result of the destruction of the monarchy
and the old order, and the survivors of the old order, who sought to
make a comeback in the 1820s under the restored monarchy of Louis XVIII
and Charles X . This conflict was finally resolved in favour of the new
bourgeoisie. When Charles X refused to accept the result of the 1830
National Assembly elections, Adolphe Thiers - who was to become the
veteran conservative politician of the nineteenth century - led the
opposition in revolt. Barricades were erected in Paris and there
followed three days of bitter street fighting, known as les trois
glorieuses , in which 1800 people were killed (they are commemorated by
the column on place de la Bastille). The outcome was the election of
Louis-Philippe as constitutional monarch, and the introduction of a few
liberalizing reforms, most either cosmetic or serving merely to
consolidate the power of the wealthiest stratum of the population.
Radical republican and working-class interests remained completely
unrepresented.
The other, and more important, major political conflict was the extended
struggle between this enfranchized and privileged bourgeoisie and the
heirs of the 1789 sans-culottes , whose political consciousness had been
awakened by the Revolution but whose demands remained unsatisfied. These
were the people who died on the barricades of July to hoist the
bourgeoisie firmly into the saddle.
As their demands continued to go unheeded, so their radicalism increased,
exacerbated by deteriorating living and working conditions in the large
towns, especially Paris, as the Industrial Revolution got underway.
There were, for example, twenty thousand deaths from cholera in Paris in
1832, and 65 percent of the population in 1848 were too poor to be
liable for tax. Eruptions of discontent invariably occurred in the
capital, with insurrections in 1832 and 1834. In the absence of
organized parties, opposition centred on newspapers and clandestine or
informal political clubs in the tradition of 1789.
In the 1840s, the publication of the first socialist works such as Louis
Blanc's Organization of Labour and Proudhon's What is Property? gave an
additional spur to the impatience of the opposition. When the lid blew
off the pot in 1848 and the Second Republic was proclaimed in Paris, it
looked for a time as if working-class demands might be at least partly
met. The provisional government included Louis Blanc and a Parisian
manual worker. But in the face of demands for the control of industry,
the setting up of co-operatives and so on, backed by agitation in the
streets, the more conservative Republicans lost their nerve. The nation
returned a spanking reactionary majority in the April elections.
Revolution began to appear the only possible defence forthe radical left.
On June 23, 1848, working-class Paris - Poissonnière, Temple, St-Antoine,
the Marais, Quartier Latin, Montmartre - rose in revolt . Men, women and
children fought side by side against fifty thousand troops. In three
days of fighting, nine hundred soldiers were killed. No-one knows how
many of the insurgés - the insurgents - died. Fifteen thousand people
were arrested and four thousand sentenced to prison terms.
Despite the shock and devastation of civil war in the streets of the
capital, the ruling classes failed to heed the warning in the events of
June 1848. Far from redressing the injustices which had provoked them,
they proceeded to exacerbate them. The Republic was brought to an end in
a coup d'état by Louis Napoleon , who within twelve months had himself
crowned Emperor Napoleon III.
Expansion and the changing face of the city
There followed a period of foreign acquisitions on every continent and
of laissez-faire capitalism at home, both of which greatly increased the
economic wealth of France, then lagging far behind Britain in the
industrialization stakes. Foreign trade trebled, a huge expansion of the
rail network was carried out, investment banks were set up, and so forth.
The rewards, however, were very unevenly distributed, and the regime
relied unashamedly on repressive measures to hold the underdogs in
check.
The response was entirely predictable. Opposition became steadily more
organized and determined. In 1864, under the influence of Karl Marx in
London, a French branch of the International was established in Paris
and the youthful trade union movement gathered its forces in a
federation. In 1869, the far from socialist Gambetta, briefly deputy for
Belleville, declared, "Our generation's mission is to complete the
French Revolution."
During these nearly twenty years of the Second Empire, Baron Haussmann ,
appointed Prefect of the Seine department with responsibility for Paris
by Napoleon III, undertook the total transformation of the city. In love
with the straight line and grand vista, he drove 135km of broad new
streets through the cramped quarters of the medieval city, linking the
interior and exterior boulevards, and creating north-south, east-west
cross-routes. His taste dictated the uniform grey stone façades, mansard
roofs and six to seven storeys that are still the architectural hallmark
of the Paris street today.
The scale of demolition entailed by such massive redevelopment brought
the direst social consequences. The city boundaries were extended to the
1840 fortifications where the boulevard périphérique now runs. The
prosperous classes moved into the new western arrondissements, leaving
the decaying older properties to the poor. These were divided and
subdivided into ever smaller units as landlords sought to maximize their
rents. Migrant workers from the provinces, sucked into the city to
supply the vast labour requirements, crammed into the old villages of
Belleville and Ménilmontant. Cholera and TB were rife, sanitation non-existent,
and refuse was thrown into the streets.
Far from being concerned with Parisians' welfare, Haussmann's scheme was
at least in part designed to keep the workers under control. Barracks
were located at strategic points like the place du Château-d'Eau, now
République, controlling the turbulent eastern districts, and the broad
boulevards were intended to facilitate troop movements and artillery
fire. A section of the Canal St-Martin north of the Bastille was covered
over for the same reason
The Siege of Paris and the Commune
In September 1870, Napoleon III surrendered to Bismarck at the border
town of Sedan, less than two months after France had declared war on the
well-prepared and superior forces of the Prussian state. The humiliation
was enough for a Republican government to be instantly proclaimed in
Paris. The Prussians advanced and by September 19 were laying siege to
the capital. Gambetta was flown out by hot-air balloon to rally the
provincial troops, but the country was defeated and liaison with Paris
almost impossible. Further balloon messengers ended up in Norway or the
Atlantic; the few attempts at military sorties from Paris turned into
yet more blundering failures. At the same time, the peculiar conditions
of a city besieged gave a greater freedom to collective discussion and
dissent.
The government's half-hearted defence of the city - more afraid of
revolution within than of the Prussians - angered Parisians, who
clamoured for the creation of a 1789-style Commune. The Prussians
meanwhile were demanding a proper government to negotiate with. In
January 1871, those in power agreed to hold elections for a new national
assembly with the authority to surrender officially to the Prussians. A
large monarchist majority, with Thiers at its head, was returned.
On March 1, Prussian troops marched down the Champs-Élysées and
garrisoned the city for three days while the populace remained behind
closed doors in silent protest. On March 18, amid growing resentment
from all classes of Parisians, Thiers' attempt to take possession of the
National Guard's artillery in Montmartre set the barrel alight. The
Commune was proclaimed from the Hôtel de Ville and Paris was promptly
subjected to a second siege by Thiers' government, which had fled to
Versailles, followed by all the remaining Parisian bourgeoisie.
The Commune lasted 72 days - a festival of the oppressed, Lenin called
it. Socialist in inspiration, it had no time to implement lasting
reforms. Wholly occupied with defence against Thiers' army, it succumbed
finally on May28, 1871, after a week of street-by-street fighting, in
which three thousand Parisians died on the barricades and another twenty
to twenty-five thousand men, women and children were killed in random
revenge shootings by government troops. Thiers could declare with
satisfaction - or so he thought -"Socialism is finished for a long
time."
The Belle Époque
Physical recovery was remarkably quick. Within six or seven years few
signs of the fighting remained. Visitors remarked admiringly on the
teeming streets, the expensive shops and energetic nightlife. Charles
Garnier's Opéra was opened in 1875. Aptly described as the "triumph of
moulded pastry", it was a suitable image of the frivolity and
materialism of the so-called naughty Eighties and Nineties. In 1889, the
Eiffel Tower stole the show at the great Exposition. For the 1900 repeat,
the Métropolitain (métro) - or Nécropolitain, as it was dubbed by one
wit - was unveiled.
The lasting social consequence of the Commune was the confirmation of
the them-and-us divide between bourgeoisie and working class. Any stance
other than a revolutionary one after the Commune appeared not only
feeble, but also a betrayal of the dead. In the years up to World War I,
none of the contradictions had been resolved and the parties began to
polarize. The trade union movement unified in 1895 to form the
Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), and in 1905 Jean Jaurès and
Jules Guesde founded the Parti Socialiste (also known as the SFIO). On
the extreme right, fascism began to make its ugly appearance with
Maurras' proto-Brownshirt organization, the Camelots du Roi, which
inaugurated another French tradition - of violence and thuggery on the
far Right.
Yet despite - or maybe in some way because of - these tensions and
contradictions, Paris provided the supremely inspiring environment for a
concentration of artists and writers - the so-called Bohemians , both
French and foreign - such as Western culture had rarely seen before.
Impressionism, Fauvism and Cubism were all born in Paris in this period,
while French poets like Apollinaire, Laforgue, Max Jacob, Blaise
Cendrars and André Breton were preparing the way for Surrealism,
concrete poetry and symbolism. Film, too, saw its first developments.
After World War I, Paris remained the world's art centre, with an
injection of foreign blood and a shift of venue from Montmartre to
Montparnasse.
As Depression deepened in the 1930s and Nazi power across the Rhine
became more menacing, fascist thuggery and anti-parliamentary activity
increased in France, culminating in a pitched battle outside the Chamber
of Deputies in February 1934. The effect of this fascist activism was to
unite the Left, including the Communists, led by the Stalinist Maurice
Thorez, in the Popular Front , who went on to win the 1936 elections
with a handsome majority in the Chamber.
The German Occupation
During the occupation of Paris in World War II, the Germans found some
sections of Parisian society, as well as the minions of the Vichy
government, only too happy to hobnob with them. For four years the city
suffered fascist rule with curfews, German garrisons and a Gestapo HQ.
Parisian Jews were forced to wear the star of David and in 1942 were
rounded up - by other Frenchmen - and shipped off to Auschwitz.
The Resistance was very active in the city, gathering people of all
political persuasions into its ranks, but with Communists and Socialists,
especially of East European Jewish origin, well to the fore. The job of
torturing them when they fell into Nazi hands - often as a result of
betrayals - was left to their fellow citizens in the fascist militia.
Those who were condemned to death - rather than the concentration camps
- were shot against the wall below the old fort of Mont Valérien above
St-Cloud.
As Allied forces drew near to the city in 1944, the FFI (armed
Resistance units), determined to play their part in driving the Germans
out, called their troops onto the streets - some said, in a Leftist
attempt to seize political power. To their credit, the Paris police also
joined in, holding their Île de la Cité HQ for three days against German
attacks. Liberation finally came on August 25, 1944
Postwar Paris - one more try at revolution
Postwar Paris has remained no stranger to political battles in its
streets. Violent demonstrations accompanied the Communist withdrawal
from the coalition government in 1947. In the 1950s, the Left took to
the streets again in protest against the colonial wars in Indochina and
Algeria. And, in 1961, in one of the most shameful episodes in modern
French history, some two hundred Algerians were killed by the police
during a civil rights demonstration.
This " secret massacre ", which remained covered by a veil of total
official silence until the 1990s, took place during the Algerian war. It
began with a peaceful demonstration against a curfew on North Africans
imposed by de Gaulle's government in an attempt to inhibit FLN
resistance activity in the French capital. Whether the police were
acting on higher orders or merely on the authority of their own
commanders is not clear, but, according to hundreds of eyewitness
accounts, including some from horrified policemen, the police opened
fire on the protesters, clubbing people and throwing them into the Seine
to drown. For weeks afterwards the French media remained silent, in part
through censorship, in part perhaps unable to comprehend that such
events had happened in their owncapital.
The state attempted censorship again during the events of May 1968 ,
though with rather less success. Throughout this extraordinary month, a
radical, libertarian, Leftist movement spread from the Paris
universities to factories across the country, producing a general strike
by nine million workers. This general dissatisfaction with society, big
business and institutionalized oppression sparked a growing Women's
Movement and political interest in civil rights.
Elections were called in June to return the Right to power. The occupied
buildings emptied and the barricades in the Latin Quarter came down. For
those who thought they were experiencing the Revolution, the defeat was
catastrophic. But French institutions and French society did change,
shaken and loosened by the events of May 1968. Most importantly, it
opened up the debate of a new road to socialism, one in which no old
models would give all the answers
The Mitterrand era, 1981-95
The Socialists' first government after 23 years in opposition included
four Communist ministers: an alliance reflected in the government
commitments to expanded state control of industry, reduction of the
hours in the working week, high taxation for the rich, support for
liberation struggles around the world, and a public spending programme
to raise the living standards of the least well-off. By 1984, however,
the government had done a complete volte-face, with Laurent Fabius
presiding over a cabinet of centrist to conservative "Socialist"
ministers, clinging desperately to power.
The government's commitments had come to little. Attempts to bring
private education under state control were defeated by mass protests in
the streets; ministers were implicated in cover-ups and corruption; and
unemployment continued to rise. Any idea of peaceful and pro-ecological
intent was dashed, as far as international opinion was concerned, by the
French Secret Service's murder of a Greenpeace photographer on the
Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand.
There were sporadic achievements - in labour laws and women's rights,
notably - but no cohesive and consistent Socialist line. The Socialists'
1986 election slogan was "Help - the Right is coming back", a bizarrely
self-fulfilling tactic. The right-wing Jacques Chirac became prime
minister (and continued as Mayor of Paris).
Throughout 1987, the chances of François Mitterrand winning the
presidential election in 1988 seemed very slim. But Chirac's economic
policies of privatization and monetary control failed to deliver the
goods. Millions of first-time investors in "popular capitalism" lost all
their money on Black Monday. Terrorists planted bombs in Paris and took
French hostages in Lebanon. Unemployment steadily rose and Chirac made
the fatal mistake of flirting with the extreme Right, particularly Le
Pen. Mitterrand , the grand old man of politics, with decades of
experience, played off all the groupings of the Right in an
all-but-flawless campaign, and won a second mandate.
His party, however, failed to win an absolute majority in the
parliamentary elections soon afterwards. The austerity measures of
Mitterrand's new prime minister, Michel Rocard , upset traditional
Socialist supporters in the public-service sector, with nurses, civil
servants, teachers and the like quick to take industrial action. Though
Chirac's programmes were halted, they were not reversed.
In 1991, Mitterrand sacked Michel Rocard and appointed Édith Cresson as
prime minister. Initially the French were happy to have their first
woman prime minister, but she soon began to turn a few heads with her
comments about special charters for illegal immigrants, her dismissal
ofthe stock exchange as a waste of time, and attacks on her own
ministers, not to mention her description of the Japanese as yellow ants
and British males as homosexual.
Cresson's worst move was to propose a tax on everyone's insurance
contributions to pay for compensation to haemophiliacs infected with
HIV. The knowing use of infected blood in transfusions in 1985 became
one of the biggest scandals of the Socialist regime.
Pierre Bérégovoy succeeded Cresson in 1992. Universally known as Béré,
and mocked for his bumbling persona, he survived strikes by farmers,
dockers, car workers and nurses, various scandals involving the
Socialists, and the Maastricht referendum. But then a private loan was
revealed from one Roger-Patrice Pelat, a friend of Mitterrand's, accused
of insider dealing. Mitterrand distanced himself from his prime
minister, who then shot himself, on May 1, two months after losing the
elections, leaving no note of explanation.
The new prime minister, Edouard Balladur , a fresh and fatherly face
from the Right, started off with a lot of popular support. But a series
of U-turns after demonstrations by Air France workers, teachers,
farmers, fishermen and school pupils, and the state's rescue of the
Crédit Lyonnais bank after spectacular losses, wiped away his successes.
Meanwhile Mitterrand tottered on to the end of his presidential term,
looking less and less like the nation's favourite uncle. Two months
after Bérégovoy's suicide, Réné Bousquet, who was head of police in the
Vichy government and due to stand trial for supervising the rounding up
of Jews in 1942, was murdered. He was a friend of Mitterrand's and
thought to have known shady secrets about the president.
François Mitterrand's presidency came to an end in April 1995 when he
died following a battle with cancer. The last years of his presidency
saw him becoming ill and aged, his reputation tarnished and his party's
popularity reduced to an all-time low. But on his death in January 1996,
despite everything, Mitterrand was genuinely mourned as a man of culture
and vision, a supreme political operator, with unwavering commitment to
the European Union, and for the mark he made on the city with his
"grands projets": Parc de la Villette (inherited from Giscard), the
Louvre Pyramid, the Grande Arche de la Défense, the Institut du Monde
Arabe, the Opéra Bastille and the new Bibliothèque Nationale building
Modern developments of the city
Until World War II, Paris remained pretty much as Haussmann had left it.
Housing conditions showed little sign of improvement. There was even an
outbreak of bubonic plague in Clignancourt in 1921. In 1925, a third of
the houses still had no sewage connection. Migration to the suburbs
continued, with the creation of shantytowns to supplement the hopelessly
inadequate housing stock. After World War II, these became the exclusive
territory of Algerian and other North African immigrants . In 1966,
there were 89 of them, housing 40,000 immigrant workers and their
families.
Only in the last thirty-odd years have the authorities begun to grapple
with the housing problem, though not by expanding possibilities within
Paris, but by siphoning huge numbers of people into a ring of satellite
towns encircling the greater Paris region.
In Paris proper this same period has seen the final breaking of the
mould of Haussmann's influence. Intervening architectural fashions, like
Art Nouveau, Le Corbusier's International style and the Neoclassicism of
the 1930s, had little more than localized cosmetic effects. It was
devotion to the needs of the motorist - a cause unhesitatingly espoused
by Pompidou - and the development of the high-rise tower that finally
did the trick, starting with the Tour Maine-Montparnasse and La Défense
, the redevelopment of the 13e and, in the 1970s, projects like the
Pompidou Centre , the Front de Seine and Les Halles . In recent years,
new colossal public buildings in myriad conflicting styles have been
inaugurated at an ever more astounding rate.
When the Les Halles flower and veg market was dismantled, a sign posted
during its redevelopment lamented, "The centre of Paris will be
beautiful. Luxury will be king. But we will not be here." Indeed, the
city's social mix has changed more in twenty-five years than in the
previous one hundred. Gentrification of the remaining working-class
districts has accelerated, and the population has become essentially
middle-class and white-collar
The political present
Mitterrand's avuncular fourteen-year presidency was well calculated and
a hard act to follow, but general unease demanded a change of direction.
Lionel Jospin , the uncharismatic former education minister, performed
remarkably well in the election, topping the poll in the first round -
in which right-wing votes were split between Balladur, Chirac, the
extreme-right Le Pen and the anti-European Philippe de Villiers. In the
second round run-off, Chirac stole the Left's clothes by placing
unemployment and social exclusion at the top of the political agenda,
and heaped promises of better times on every section of the electorate.
He won, by a small margin, and was inaugurated as the new president of
France in May 1995. |
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