or the ravaging of the Bastille by the installation of Carlos Ott’s opera house twenty years later. They have even seen a number of successes, like the walkway on the old viaduct leading to the Bastille station, or Marc Mimram’s footbridge which cleverly links the Orsay museum with the Tuileries gardens. In point of fact, the very widespread impression that Paris has changed a great deal in recent years is quite correct, but what has changed is not so much the mineral and vegetable setting as the way in which the city is inhabited.
This development can be precisely located. On the Left Bank there has been scarcely any change. Apart from the great Chinatown of the 13th arrondissement, the population has remained almost uniformly white and bourgeois. The Blacks are street sweepers, the Arabs are grocers, the police are rarely seen and the historic streets are as clean as in the pedestrianized zones of the provinces. Everything is just a little older than when I started to write The Invention of Paris: the friendly beggar whose pitch had always been the five metres between the La Hune bookshop in St-Germain-des-Prés and the newspaper kiosk nearby now has grey hair and wears glasses to read the books that the bookshops pass on to him. Nothing happens anymore on the Left Bank, whereas in my youth we hardly needed to cross the Seine: the Right Bank was like a faraway desert.
Today the Right Bank is no more homogeneous than it was back in the insurrectional days of June 1848 or during the Commune. In what are rather ironically called the ‘beaux quartiers’ – let’s say west of a line that runs from Les Halles to the flea market via Rue Poissonière, Rue du Faubourg Poissonière and Boulevard Barbès – almost nothing has changed in ten years. The Batignolles, Plaine Monceau, the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Auteuil and Passy slumber peacefully. The Avenue des Champs-Élysées has gone downhill – I wrote in the closing years of the last century how it evoked ‘the duty-free mall of an international airport, decorated in a style that is a mixture of pseudo-Haussmann and pseudo-Bauhaus’ (p. 121); this is still the case, but the airport is now more down at heel, and you can scarcely find a table to have a drink except in the chains of faux pizzerias, genuine fast-food outlets, or pseudo-1900 cafés.
Working-class Paris occupies the east of the city – the northeast to be precise. People often say that this is also getting gentrified, that the marginal, the poor, the immigrants are steadily being driven out by the irresistible advance of the ‘bobos’ (‘bohemian bourgeois’ – intellectuals, artists, designers, journalists, etc.) who cultivate their superficial nonconformism and benign antiracism in these quarters, while driving up the rents with the help of property speculators. This opinion needs some shading. It is true that certain places which formerly were little visited at night have become meeting points for a more or less gilded youth: the banks of the Canal Saint-Martin, the surrounds of the Place Gambetta, Rue Oberkampf at its intersection with Rue Saint-Maur. At that very point, some fifteen years ago, I witnessed the start of this phenomenon: in this hidden corner, an old-established bougnat – the name once given to alcohol outlets kept by Auvergnats who also supplied wood and coal to the storeys above – had been transformed into a smart café, the Café Charbon, and in the wake of its success bars mushroomed to the point of invading the Rue Oberkampf and the Rue Saint-Maur a hundred metres in each direction. It is also true that streets that were very poor and dilapidated some ten years ago, like Rue Myrha or Rue Doudeauville to the north of the Goutte d’Or, have been gradually renovated, which leads to the expulsion of their vulnerable African population, often without documents or work.
But working-class Paris is resisting rather better than people say. The Chinese at Belleville, the Arabs at the Goutte d’Or, backed by well-established Algerian traders who own their freeholds, the Turks at the market of the Porte Saint-Denis, the Africans of the Dejean market (recently threatened, it’s true), the Sri Lankans and Pakistanis on the Faubourg Saint-Denis near La Chapelle – all these welcoming enclaves are holding their own, and even gaining some ground here and there. Besides, the presence in the same streets of Blacks, Arabs, and a precarious and proletarianized white youth, tends to create ties, particularly to face up to a police pressure that is much stronger than ten years ago. The expulsion by the police of the undocumented African hunger strikers who were occupying the Saint Bernard church at La Goutte d’Or aroused great indignation in 1996. Today it is lost in the flood of arrests, raids and expulsions that are the common lot of the working-class quarters of Paris. I am not claiming that these districts are in an effervescence like that of certain periods described in Part Two of this book. But solidarity and common action have gradually created a new situation, especially since the revolts of suburban youth in October–November 2005 forced the government to proclaim a state of emergency, for the first time since the Algerian war in the early 1960s.
These revolts had the effect, among other things, of raising once again the old question of how to put an end to the divide between Paris and its suburbs. This question will certainly seem very odd to English readers, long familiar with a Greater London that stretches almost to the sea. But Paris has always grown in a very different fashion from London: you will read how, from the wall of Philippe Augustus (1165–1223) to the Périphérique of Georges Pompidou (1911–1974), the city developed in concentric rings, like an onion, to the rhythm of its successive defences. It is a city materially and administratively closed in on itself that has now to be opened up, as has always happened in its history when the latest of its walls became too tight a constriction.
In the last few years, this opening of Paris towards the banlieue has been broadly achieved to the west, on a wide arc that runs from Levallois – formerly the domain of secondhand car dealers, and rich today in the headquarters of showbiz and arms multinationals – through to Vanves and Malakoff. Along this arc, both geographical and social conditions were favourable. The transition zone (between the ‘boulevard of the marshals’ and the Périphérique – see p. 223) is not disrupted, you can cross it on foot without risking your life. And the population on either side is homogeneous, white, and fairly well-off.
It is a different matter to the east of the city. Around 2000, I wrote: ‘It would need a Hugo to make the comparison between the Porte de la Muette with its pink chestnut trees, a sumptuous embarkation for Cythera, and the Porte de Pantin, an unbridgeable barrage of concrete and noise, where the Périphérique passes at eye level, with the Boulevard Sérurier beneath it engulfed in a hideous cutting in which the scrawny grass of the central reservation is littered with greasy wrappers and beer cans, and where the only human beings on foot are natives of L’viv or Tiraspol trying to survive by begging at the traffic lights’ (p. 224). The situation has hardly changed since then. The gulf between Paris and the banlieue remains a yawning one in this sector, for reasons that are political in the strong sense of the word. The present population of the former Paris ‘red belt’ (from Ivry and Vitry in the south to Saint-Denis and Aubervilliers in the north) is now for the greater part ‘of immigrant origin’, i.e., made up of Blacks and Arabs, the very people (or their relatives) who had been driven out of the city by renovation and rising rents. This process, moreover, is very much in line with the history of Paris, in which, ever since the great confinement of 1657 that locked up the poor, the deviant and the mad in the buildings of the Hôpital Général (p. 155), the combined action of town planners, property speculators and police has never stopped pressing the poor, the ‘dangerous classes’, further from the centre of the city. In these conditions, what is the point of making a Greater Paris here, why risk retrieving on the periphery those whom it took so much trouble to evacuate from the centre? At the request of the president of the Republic, the fine fleur of official architecture recently presented their projects for a Greater Paris, rather along the lines of gyroscopes or centrifuges: the question was to make the poor revolve around the city at a distance, preventing them from returning for any longer than their work as cashiers or night watchmen required.
Fortunately, thanks to the economic crisis, none of these plans will be realized. Greater Paris will be limited to a reorganization of police forces: last week, it was decided that the Paris prefect of police will have his authority extended to all the surrounding departments. But administrative decisions are one thing in the history of Paris, and what actually happens is something else, possibly very different. Already some years ago a new osmosis began to operate between
