Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

they beat the girl, tore her hair and tried to pull the clothes off her. The other models beat a hasty retreat into the bar, and in a very short time clothes and models were heading back to the safety of the Avenue Montaigne.
    Even in the conservative confines of the 7th
arrondissement
Dior clothes provoked some hard stares. Nancy Mitford was wearing her Dior suit when ‘a strange woman said would I excuse her asking but does it come from Dior? This was in the bistro I go to – and of course everybody knows about Dior’s prices. So I made up a sort of speechabout how I saved up the whole war for a new coat etc.! But I know mine will soon be the same fate of
l’élégante de la rue Lepique
[
sic
]. Between the Communists and the ménagères one’s life is one long risk.’
    But despite the disapproval of the great and the good, and the outrage of the poor, there was no turning back: the New Look was in such demand that it represented 75 per cent of the total export sales from France’s fashion industry for 1947. It was also relentlessly copied. ‘The London New Look made me die laughing,’ wrote Nancy Mitford. ‘Literal chintz crinolines. Apparently Dior went over: and when he reflected on the fact that he was responsible for launching it, he was ready to kill himself.’

23
    A Tale of Two Cities
    The Communist view of Paris was not just of a city of stark contrasts, but of two different cities juxtaposed. ‘There is the Paris of banks, of boards of directors, of ministries, of American films, of insolent GIs, of American cars from the embassy of which the government is an annex; the Paris of nauseating luxury, of town houses inhabited by elderly dowagers who are lost in the labyrinth of their rooms.’ Then there was ‘the other Paris… at the same time much older and much younger’ – the working-class Paris of ‘Belleville, La Chapelle, la rue Mouffetard, Charonne, Ménilmontant…’
    Political rhetoric aside, the stark division of Paris between
beaux quartiers
and
quartiers pauvres
came largely from Baron Haussmann’s drastic reshaping of the city under the Second Empire. The populous slums in the centre were razed after their inhabitants had been evicted by force, and a golden boomof unrestricted property speculation began along his strategic boulevards laid out for the field of fire they offered against revolutionary mobs. Haussmann’s dictum that ‘architecture is nothing else than administration’ made town-planning akin to a military campaign, waged on behalf of a brashly triumphant bourgeoisie. There can be no doubt, as the sociologist J. F. Gravier wrote in 1946, that Haussmann’s cleansing of the lower orders from central Paris ‘strongly reinforced class consciousness’.
    The shift in population created new slums around the northern, eastern and southern perimeter of Paris. This became known in the 1930s as the ‘
ceinture rouge
’, even though it never encircled the city. Theuprooted poor and successive waves of migrants to the capital were to live in cheaply built tenements and houses, which soon began to crumble. At the end of the war over a sixth of all buildings in Paris were in a seriously dilapidated state, and this proportion rose to well over a quarter in working-class districts. The central problem was that rents were so over-controlled and so low – in 1945 rent took up only 4 per cent of the family budget as opposed to nearly 19 per cent in 1908 – that landlords never spent any money on repairs, let alone improvements to their property. Nearly a quarter of the houses and apartments depended on a tap in the courtyard or on the landing, and nearly half had no inside lavatory. The lack of hygiene extended to cooking, which was dangerous in the cramped conditions. The Prefect of the Seine, in a report to the Municipal Council, spoke of ‘slums which ruin the health and morals of our working people’.
    Some 450,000 people, roughly a tenth of the population of Paris and its suburbs, were defined with bureaucratic euphemism as ‘
les plus défavorisés
’. Worst of all were ‘
les îlots insalubres
’, the slum pockets in sunless, narrow streets, with squalid little apartments where a total of 186,594 people lived in 4,290 buildings, often with four or five people to a room. Up to 30 per cent of such inhabitants succumbed to tuberculosis, a record as bad as that of 1918. In one slum, the death rate reached 43 per cent. The Prefect, however, appeared to be most