Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

concerned with the moral aspect of parents and children sharing beds. ‘We are faced with a major crisis of disastrous social implications… Family life exists in an atmosphere of disintegration, where the degree of promiscuity is appalling.’
    In the waves of immigration before the war, the ancient and beautiful town of Saint-Denis on the northern boundary of Paris was swamped. ‘One cannot,’ wrote Gravier, ‘forgive the architects, the developers, and the property companies who built the cheap rented accommodation in Saint-Denis, for having changed a lively city full of history into a sordid concentration camp for immigrants.’
    A large proportion of the migrants to Paris came from Brittany and the Auvergne. Although devout Catholics, they had far fewer children once they reached the city than the average in the communities from which they had sprung. In a country obsessed with increasing its birth rate after the slaughter of the First World War, Paris was therefore seenas a vampire, depopulating the countryside by attracting its young, then reducing their fertility at a stroke. One writer argued that the loss in births from internal migration to Paris between 1921 and 1936 came to the equivalent of the total French casualties during the Second World War. The main causes for this abrupt demographic change were brutally simple: the physical restrictions of tiny tenement apartments and the cost of food. All too many young wives had to resort to back-street abortionists.
    In eastern Paris, the districts of Belleville and Ménilmontant lay mainly between the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, the Porte des Lilas and the cemetery of Père Lachaise, burdened with the memory of the massacre of Communards in 1871. Alleys, steep little cobbled streets, and houses with grey shutters and peeling grey stucco bore testimony to a very different sort of history from that of the spacious and grandiose centre of the city.
    After the thick slush of winter, the only colour in spring came from the blossom of a few stunted and polluted lilacs or optimistic shoots from ruthlessly pollarded plane trees. The begrimed romanesque façade of Notre-Dame-de-la-Croix in the Place de Ménilmontant appeared to belong to an industrial city of the north, not to Paris. Few buildings matched in height and the chaotic roofscape was completely unlike the Haussmann-imposed discipline of central Paris. There were not many shops: the odd under-provisioned grocer optimistically entitled ‘
Alimentation Générale
’, the dingy little establishments run by migrants from the Auvergne selling wine, firewood and coal, and bare cafés with little more than a zinc counter for those in cloth caps and blue overalls who needed a
petit vin blanc
to start the day. Housewives still did almost all their shopping in the street markets, like the one on the rue de Ménilmontant.
    As well as the Jewish leather-workers and cobblers and garment workshops in Belleville, the area was filled with artisans of every description: watchmakers, woodcarvers, caners, cabinetmakers, monumental masons for the gravestones in Père Lachaise, all working in tiny ill-lit premises, in most cases no more than a cubbyhole with a workbench, pigeonholes and a single bulb on a flex above.
    From the water towers overlooking the cemetery of Belleville round to the abattoirs of La Villette, to the marshalling yards and railway workshops of La Chapelle, eastern and northern Paris were areas of great working-class solidarity, however fragmented their population.
    In the 18th
arrondissement,
which included the central workshops of the French railways, young Communists hero-worshipped their elder brothers who had taken part in the Resistance – the centre for their activities had been the basketball club.
    On Sunday mornings, the men of the Gager family put on their Sunday suits and went off to sell Communist Party newspapers. Hersz Gager, the father, sold
L’Humanité,
and the elder son, Georges, sold
L’Avant-garde
. Each had his own pitch in the rue de l’Olive next to the market.
    Activities for Communist youth were taken as seriously as the Church’s activities for young Catholics. There were outings to politically approved plays, the cultural programme of the Association France-URSS, which usually involved watching films about the heroism of the Red Army, and camping for boys and girls in a very puritan atmosphere. The only relaxation came when young Communists in the