The Paris Zone

A Cultural History, 1840-1944

James Cannon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317021728
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia sociale

Since the mid-1970s, the colloquial term zone has often been associated with the troubled post-war housing estates on the outskirts of large French cities. However, it once referred to a more circumscribed space: the zone non aedificandi (non-building zone) which encircled Paris from the 1840s to the 1940s. This unusual territory, although marginal in a social and geographical sense, came to occupy a central place in Parisian culture. Previous studies have focused on its urban and social history, or on particular ways in which it was represented during particular periods. By bringing together and analysing a wider range of sources from the duration of the zone's existence, this study offers a rich and nuanced account of how the area was perceived and used by successive generations of Parisian novelists (including Zola and Flaubert), poets, songwriters, artists, photographers, film-makers, politicians and town-planners. More generally, it aims to raise awareness of a neglected aspect of Parisian cultural history while pointing to links between current and past perceptions of the city's periphery.

1
The Urban Periphery and the Zone before 1870

During the 1840s and 1850s, the zone was more an object of military planning, political debate and legal dispute than creative representation. Most writers and artists interested in the urban periphery focused instead on the barrières or the petite banlieue, which were still being colonised in both a literal and imaginative sense.¹ Journalists nonetheless registered the creation of the zone. During the Second Empire, a small number of observers – prompted partly by the most ambitious program of urban redevelopment in Parisian history – began to explore the space immediately beyond the fortifications. For some, this space seemed altogether uninteresting. For others, it bore evidence of increasing social segregation. It also witnessed at least one attempt to bring social classes together. Certain writers and artists used the extramuros landscape as a metaphor for the end of the Romantic era while others simply recorded images of working-class sociability as it migrated beyond the city walls.

Early Images of the Zone

In 1814 and again in 1815, Paris had been invaded by a coalition of British, Austrian, Russian and Prussian forces determined to crush the Napoleonic regime while ensuring the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. These invasions provoked insistent calls, especially with the advent of the more liberal July Monarchy, to fortify the capital. In 1840, the Oriental Crisis brought France into renewed conflict with coalition powers and, in September of that year, Prime Minister Adolphe Thiers obtained cabinet approval and emergency funds to start immediate work on a new defence system combining a continuous wall with a line of detached forts.² In early 1841, the merits of this system were debated retrospectively in Parliament and the principal funds finally authorised by the law of 3 April 1841.

The same law provided for the creation of a zone non aedificandi outside the fortifications, based on the precedents of 10 July 1791 and 17 July 1819. These earlier laws had stipulated that all fortified towns officially classified as such be surrounded by three concentric zones with a combined radius of 974 metres. In the first zone, measuring 250 metres, any type of construction or plantation was strictly forbidden, except for openwork fences made of palings or dried hedgewood. In the second zone, measuring 237 metres, buildings made of earth or wood were allowed; brick, stone, lime and plaster could only be used as roughcast. Military authorities reserved the right to demolish such buildings without warning or compensation. In the third zone, measuring 487 metres, no paths, roads, levees, excavations or depots were permitted without the military’s authorisation.³

The zone non aedificandi established outside the Parisian fortifications in the early 1840s was exceptional for two reasons. First, Paris was never officially classified as a fortified town, which meant that the non aedificandi easement had a dubious legal basis. Second, to minimise the impact of the easement on suburban municipalities, only the first, 250-metre zone was applied. Earlier proposals had envisaged that the entire zone, notwithstanding the non aedificandi easement, would incorporate public gardens.⁴ This idea, conceived in the interests of public health and social order, had also informed the design of the barrières and was resurrected by Napoléon III during the Second Empire. As it turned out, he decided instead to focus on the renovation of the bois de Boulogne and the bois de Vincennes while also creating a series of English-style squares across intramuros Paris.

Meanwhile, the new defence system had done anything but encourage social peace. Many republicans denounced the detached forts in particular as a surreptitious means of controlling the Parisian population in the wake of the 1830 Revolution and the insurrections of the early 1830s. More generally, they argued that the enclosure of Paris dishonoured France’s revolutionary mission to disseminate democratic values beyond its borders. Alphonse de Lamartine – Romantic poet, member of the National Assembly and one of Thiers’s most eloquent adversaries – declared that ‘the fortifications in their current form are the most flagrant attack ever envisaged and carried out against the French Revolution’.⁵

At a local level, the fortifications and the zone cut a large swathe through 13 suburbs without leaving sufficient points of entry between the divided sectors. Construction work, supervised by military engineers in collaboration with private entrepreneurs, was carried out by more than 20,000 soldiers and civilians. Poor or unequal rates of pay provoked discontent and strikes were not uncommon during the early stages of the project. The land occupied by the fortifications was expropriated and its owners compensated, although a number of territorial and financial disputes gave rise to legal proceedings.⁶

No compensation was forthcoming for the non aedificandi easement in the zone. The democratic elan of the 1848 Revolution and early Second Republic (1848–1852) was short-lived. From 1849, the suburban newspaper L’Extra-Muros (subsequently renamed Journal de la Banlieue administratif, industriel et littéraire) published several articles acknowledging the government’s right to impose the easement but protesting against the lack of reparations. The fortifications, it argued, had devalued adjacent land and financially ruined the zone’s small title-holders. It reminded the government that the law of 1841 had allocated six million francs to clear the zone of buildings and, by implication, indemnify their owners. It also deplored the slow pace of boundary marking. Finally, it complained that recent, extensive construction in the zone disadvantaged title-holders who respected the non aedificandi easement. Military and suburban authorities initially permitted or turned a blind eye to new buildings in the zone, apparently on the understanding that the easement would only be enforced in the event of a siege. However, this also allowed the State to avoid paying compensation. Under the Second Empire, new legislation determined that the easement was indeed applicable while still making no provision for compensating the zone’s owners. From the mid-1850s to the Prussian siege of 1870–1871, the easement was more rigorously policed, at least in relation to new buildings.⁷

Such concerns dominated early discourse on the zone. During the July Monarchy, however, the death of the enormously popular crown prince Ferdinand-Philippe d’Orléans at Sablonville, a small village located in the north-western zone of Neuilly, inspired a wealth of visual, poetic and architectural commemoration. At 11 a.m. on 13 July 1842, near the porte Maillot, the driver of a carriage transporting the prince towards the family château lost control of his horses when they bolted in the direction of the route (chemin) de la Révolte. The prince was thrown from the carriage as it careered through Sablonville and struck his head against the pavement. Onlookers including a group of grenadiers rushed to his aid and carried him into the back room of a nearby shop at 13 route de la Révolte, owned by a grocer and wine merchant named Le Cordier. The royal family arrived shortly after with doctors and a priest, who administered the last rites before the prince’s death at 4.30 p.m. Various dignitaries came to pay their respects at Le Cordier’s shop, and the room where the prince had died was subsequently recreated with the original furniture at the château de Neuilly. The Queen, Marie-Amélie, also purchased the shop itself and had a neo-Byzantine chapel erected in its place. The ‘chapelle Saint-Ferdinand’, whose stained glass windows were designed by the prince’s friend, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, was inaugurated on 11 July 1843. Another friend of the prince, the Romantic poet Alfred de Musset, immortalised the tragedy in ‘Le Treize Juillet: Stances’: ‘To all who travel along this fatal path, / Watch your step, think of those who love you!’⁸

Musset’s lines, together with contemporary illustrations of the accident scene (plate 4), Le Cordier’s shop and the chapelle Saint-Ferdinand were among the first cultural representations of an area located in the zone. However, the zone was still taking shape; such representations conveyed little or no sense of its existence as a distinct space. The chapel itself contravened the non aedificandi easement. The new weekly magazine, L’Illustration, described its location ‘in Sablonville’ without mentioning the zone.⁹ Yet only a month earlier, the same magazine had published the first in a series of articles entitled ‘Promenades sur les fortifications de Paris’, which insisted that every ‘bourgeois de Paris’ worthy of the name acquaint himself with the new Parisian defences and admire their scope and logic. Although its founders were moderate republicans opposed to the July Monarchy, L’Illustration avoided taking an overtly political position. It concentrated instead on technical aspects of the fortifications, which it illustrated with cross-sections and bird’s-eye views, while arguing that the defence of any city ultimately depended on the courage and patriotism of its inhabitants. The zone was explicitly, if briefly, named and described: ‘Finally, in a 250-metre zone beyond the crest of the glacis, all construction is prohibited.’¹⁰ Some of L’Illustration’s readers no doubt responded to its exhortations. However, the reconfiguration of Paris during the Second Empire played a more important role in bringing the fortifications and the zone to public attention.

The Zone during the Second Empire

From the early nineteenth century, the periphery of many French cities was transformed by an unprecedented influx of rural immigrants combined with a new determination on the part of political elites to exclude unwanted people and activities from urban centres.¹¹ In Paris, this process culminated during the authoritarian regime of the Second Empire with a radical program of redevelopment initiated by Napoleon III and supervised by the Prefect of the Seine, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. Between 1853 and 1869, Haussmann and his collaborators demolished most of the city’s medieval slums, created a vast network of straight, wide boulevards lined with new shops and apartments, and built six major railway stations, a covered market, an Opera House, and numerous public gardens. What came to be known as the haussmannisation of Paris also included the introduction of running water and sewerage, the improvement of street lighting and furniture, and the annexation of the petite banlieue.

Haussmann’s achievements undoubtedly made central Paris more salubrious, elegant and comfortable but attracted vociferous opposition. His critics accused him of destroying the unique, picturesque fabric of Parisian street life, of financial corruption and profligacy, of permanently displacing hundreds of thousands of inhabitants who could no longer afford inner-city rents, and of creating open spaces to prevent the kind of revolutionary insurrection witnessed during the June Days of 1848.¹² A deepening division emerged between the city’s affluent west and its predominantly working-class north and east but also, more generally, between the centre and the periphery. Many workers who had previously lived in the inner city – along with rural immigrants attracted to the capital by the prospect of employment on Haussmann’s worksites – moved to the rapidly-expanding petite banlieue. Others resettled in areas outside the fortifications, including the zone.

On 1 January 1860, the city limits and customs barrier were transferred to the fortifications – just short of the zone – while the petite banlieue was annexed to Paris and reconfigured as arrondissements, increasing the total number of arrondissements from 12 to the present-day 20. The mur des Fermiers généraux was dismantled within several weeks. The annexation was designed to facilitate redevelopment of the new arrondissements while exerting greater control over their working-class population and raising additional revenue for the city. It also provoked a further exodus of workers, factories and businesses whose livelihoods had depended on the tax-free space of the petite banlieue.¹³ The area formerly occupied by the barrières and petite banlieue continued for some time to dominate literary and artistic representations of the urban fringe. However, some writers and artists had already begun to venture further afield.

Adolphe Joanne – one of L’Illustration’s founders – published a travel guide in 1856, Les environs de Paris illustrés: Itinéraire descriptif et historique, which drew heavily on the magazine’s descriptions of the fortifications from 1843. Joanne reminded readers that ‘in a 250-metre zone beyond the exterior embankment of the moat, all construction is prohibited’.¹⁴ Although he made few other direct references to the zone, he described in detail the route de la Révolte – a long stretch of which ran through the area’s north-western sector – and the chapelle Saint-Ferdinand.¹⁵ He also asserted that most of the suburbs on either side of the fortifications were devoid of interest, notwithstanding the occasional picturesque view, bucolic landscape or historical curiosity. Clichy, for example, was an ‘appalling agglomeration of ugly houses where only those with business in the area should travel’. According to Joanne, most Parisians had lost interest in Gentilly; the neighbouring municipality of ‘le Grand-Montrouge’ was ‘no more attractive than le Petit[-Montrouge]’; Issy was ‘poorly built and extremely ugly’. Joanne’s repetitive prose reflected his boredom: Le Pré-Saint-Gervais ‘offers nothing of any interest whatsoever’; Montreuil ‘in itself offers nothing of any interest whatsoever’; Vanves ‘offers nothing of any interest whatsoever’.¹⁶ The contrast between the illustrious past of certain suburbs form...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Urban Periphery and the Zone before 1870
• 2 The Emergence of the Zone as a Metaphor, 1870–1889
• 3 From Metaphor to Myth, 1890–1918
• 4 The Zone between the Wars, 1919–1939
• 5 The Death Knell of the Zone, 1940–1944
• Conclusion
• Sources
• Index