Suburban Development in the Late Nineteenth Century

The growth of population throughout the Department of the Seine was every bit as dramatic as that of Paris alone. The great waves of immigration that brought hundreds of thousands of people from the provinces to the capital in the late nineteenth century affected both the city and its suburbs (Table 2). Yet impressive as these figures are, the growth rates recorded by the Paris suburbs (that is, the department excluding Paris) are even more spectacular (Table 3). From 1861 to 1866, for example, the rate of population increase in the Paris suburbs was over three times as great as that in the capital.^[42] In 1861 the suburbs composed only 13 percent of the population of the Department of the Seine; by 1901 they had doubled their share to 26 percent. With the stabilization of the city's population and the even more explosive growth of the suburbs in the early twentieth century, by the 1940s the Paris area contained as many suburbanites as Parisians.^[43]

The industrial sector of the capital's suburban belt, the most important initial cause of suburbanization, began to grow before the middle of the nineteenth century. Although it established itself as a suburban industrial economy part of and yet distinct from that of Paris only after Paris expanded to its present boundaries by annexing the inner suburbs in 1860, development had already begun in the 1840s. This period created a crucial element of industrial suburbia, a modern commercial transportation network.^[44]

It has become a truism to point to the role of transportation in the history of urban expansion.^[45] Nonetheless, industrial transport, especially by rail, supplied growing industrial suburbs just as, around the turn of the century, mass transit swelled the population. In the north, the opening of the Saint-Denis canal in 1821 and the canal de l'Ourcq the following year linked the northern suburbs with the river transportation network of the Seine as a whole. In the southern suburbs, the river

traffic on the Seine had allowed the earlier industrial development of Ivry and Charenton; the opening of the Paris-Orléans railway in 1843 further spurred the expansion of the industrial sector in this area of the suburbs.

Perhaps the key development in industrializing the Paris suburbs was the opening of large freight railway stations outside the city in the 1870s. Suburban industrialists had depended on the freight stations at La Chapelle, in northern Paris, to import raw materials and export their manufactures by rail. In 1872–1873 the La Chapelle—annex freight station was built to transport heavy industrial materials like iron and stone. Later in the same decade other major freight stations were

created in the northern suburbs, at Saint-Ouen and in the Plaine Saint-Denis, followed by one at Le Bourget in 1884, and one at Pantin in 1890. By the last decade of the century a separate industrial railroad had been created to serve Aubervilliers, Gennevilliers, and the Plaine Saint-Denis. Partly because of this freight railway network, the 1870s marked the turning point in the rise of heavy industry in the northern suburbs of the Department of the Seine.

The southern suburbs did not keep pace with their northern counterparts in industrial development in these years. There was no freight station of any consequence in this area; the Seine therefore remained the major means of industrial transport.^[46] The southern suburbs of Paris industrialized later and to a lesser extent than those to the north, where heavy industry had established itself by the late 1870s. Except for Ivry and Charenton, the southern suburbs began to develop a heavy industrial sector only in the 1890s.^[47]

The first industries to develop in the Paris suburbs were chemicals and textiles, which dominated the economies of certain suburbs, like Clichy, Saint-Denis, and Gentilly, in the first half of the nineteenth century. Clichy had 137 bleaching establishments (blanchisseries ) in 1848, with a work force of fifteen hundred, and by 1855 Saint-Denis had over three thousand textile workers employed in manufacturing printed fabrics. After the midcentury, however, the textile industry in the Paris region declined, as more and more plants relocated to the provinces. Employing 11 percent of Parisian laborers in 1847, the textile industry accounted for only 3.4 percent by 1860.

Well before their eclipse, textiles contributed to the rise of the chemical industry, prominent in the Paris suburbs in the middle third of the nineteenth century. A large number of the suburban textile firms produced printed colored fabrics, for which they needed a constant, ample supply of dyes and other colorants from the chemical industry. Because it was close to Paris, the suburban chemical industry had a steady source for raw materials: bones, hides, animal fats, and other by-products came from Parisian slaughterhouses. The slaughterhouse of La Villette, for example, led to the creation of the Floquet tannery in Saint-Denis during the 1860s.^[48]

The first chemical factories, producing white lead, were established in the Paris suburbs in 1809, and similar factories followed in the next decades. It was in the period from 1840 to 1870, however, that the chemical industry carved out a dominant position in suburban manufacturing. In 1847 the Combes tannery was founded in Saint-Denis, followed by the Guibal rubber factory in 1851 in Ivry, the Saulnier

bone treatment plant in Aubervilliers in 1860, and the Saint-Denis branch of the Central Pharmacy of France in 1867. By 1870, nine thousand of the twelve thousand industrial workers employed in Saint-Denis worked in the chemical industry.

After 1870 the chemical industry continued to expand in the Paris suburbs, but it was increasingly overshadowed by another branch of manufacturing, whose rise completed the nineteenth-century suburban industrialization and gave these communities much of their characteristic twentieth-century appearance. This was the metallurgical industry, and it was built on both the chemical industry and the railroad network. The expansion of the railways led to a greater need for metal parts and thus to the establishment of a new industrial sector composed of foundries, rolling mills, mechanical construction firms (carrosseries ), and repair shops. Before 1870 such firms had existed; the Letrange foundry, for example, was founded in Saint-Denis in 1855. Only in the 1870s and 1880s, however, did they begin to assume real importance. Their need for certain chemical products, such as varnishes, led them to locate in the suburbs with the chemical firms, whose market they enlarged. The development of these two industries was mutually reinforcing.

Their development involved the railways as well: the expansion of heavy industry increased imports of raw materials, which intensified the traffic on the network of railways, thus necessitating its expansion, and so on. After 1880 a new branch of the metallurgical industry, automobile manufacturing, began in the Paris suburbs; the first such factory was founded in Puteaux in 1883, followed by three others in 1888, 1897, and 1900. By the turn of the century half of the ten thousand workers employed in Saint-Denis worked in the metallurgical industry, with another quarter employed in chemical plants.^[49]

Before concluding this outline of the rise of a heavy industrial sector in the Paris suburbs during the last half of the nineteenth century, we must look at the ways suburban industries differed from those that started at the same time in the city of Paris. Louis Chevalier defines the early stages of industrial suburbia:

The entreprise, factory, workshop, or entrepot is no longer at the immediate service of the clientele, but at the service of one or several entreprises that maintain with the public, or only with commerce, direct exchange relations. The fashioning of primary materials that will be enabled by a further technique, the utilization of by-products and waste materials, marginal and preliminary tasks, such is the domain of this industrial zone.^[50]

Chevalier accurately describes the economic structure of the Paris suburbs by the end of the nineteenth century. Much of the Parisian economy was specialized, oriented toward satisfying the needs of the consumer market. Thus industries such as food and clothing, which catered most directly to this market, were most likely to locate within the capital. Conversely, industries such as metallurgy, whose products served other industries, would derive little advantage from a Parisian location. Since their markets were national and international, access to modern transportation facilities was important in determining their location; the northern suburbs supplied these facilities.^[51]

Two other related differences between Parisian and suburban industries in this period were the size of factories and the nature of production. In both city and suburbs the size of the average factory grew from 1850 to 1900; by the closing decades of the century a trend toward establishing the largest plants outside Paris was apparent. In 1896 the percentage of factories employing more than one hundred workers was almost twice as high in the suburbs of the Department of the Seine as in Paris; in 1906 the percentage of factories employing over five hundred workers was over three times as high in the Paris suburbs as in the city. The suburbs had more room (and cheaper land) than Paris had, so plants needing more space would be inclined to locate in the suburbs. It is also true that suburban industries, whatever their reasons for locating there, tended to produce on a larger scale. Thus, by the opening of the twentieth century a combination of factors had produced the classic division of the manufacturing sector into a city of small and medium workshops and a suburban constellation of large plants.^[52]

Suburban industries tended to be more "modern" not only in their larger size and production, but also in their greater mechanization and simplified production procedures, which decreased the need for a skilled labor force. Again, the character of the industries that chose to locate in the suburbs explains much of this modernity: industries requiring the least skill situated themselves in suburbia. This geographical division of functions operated in the metallurgical industry, which located more skilled assembly work (travail de montage ) in the city of Paris and less sophisticated operations like foundry work and sheet metal production in the suburbs.^[53]

In general, the late nineteenth-century growth of modern, large-scale heavy industry was not distributed evenly throughout the Paris area. It was concentrated instead in the suburbs of the Department of the Seine,

especially those north of the capital. The expansion of employment in the tertiary sector of banking and commerce in Paris, which did not occur in the suburbs, accentuated the economic differences between the two areas after the turn of the century. We must emphasize, however, that Paris and its suburbs were not two separate economies but rather geographically specialized functions within one economy. Their distinct development showed in spatial terms the growing specialization of consumption- and production-oriented sectors, the latter located more and more outside Paris.

Turning from industrial development to immigration patterns and population structures, we discover similar differences. To a large extent the history of the peopling of the Paris suburbs is the history of the forming of a modern industrial proletariat. In both a physical and a social sense, it developed on the margins of the preexisting order, in an isolation that heightened the impact of its novelty.

Looking at the social composition of the Parisian suburbs around midcentury, before the development of a heavy industrial sector, we find that the local populations generally consisted of small landowners, artisans, shopkeepers, and rentiers; only Saint-Denis had an industrial bourgeoisie during this period. Although the government of Louis Philippe built new fortifications around Paris in the 1840s, bringing workers and soldiers into suburban communities like Aubervilliers, the basic social structure of the Paris suburbs remained constant. There were no significant long-term increases in population until the 1860s and 1870s.^[54]

In the suburbs as in Paris itself, the population increased in the late nineteenth century almost entirely by immigration, the excess of births over deaths being low as well. Immigrants into suburbia in this period came from poorer, less developed areas of France. Of those who settled in the southern suburbs, a large percentage came from relatively backward departments of southern France. This pattern held also in the northern suburbs, which were situated in the path of immigrants arriving from the more advanced northern and eastern parts of the country. In 1869, only 45 percent of the immigrants into Saint-Denis came from these areas (which included the Paris region); the rest came from the massif Central, the west, and the mountainous areas of the country.^[55] This pattern that Saint-Denis somewhat precociously experienced was soon duplicated in much of the remaining suburban area.

A second distinguishing characteristic of suburban immigration was its occupational composition. To a greater extent than the capital, the

suburbs received unskilled workers. In 1871, for example, they composed 61 percent of the working population of Gentilly. It is not surprising that immigrants coming from economically backward, rural France should possess few skills. Even more advanced areas of the country, however, such as the Nord and the Moselle, which continued to export large contingents of migrants to the Paris region, sent a disproportionate number of their unskilled workers to the suburbs; the more highly trained were able to find jobs in Paris.

As heavy industry developed in the Paris suburbs, it attracted more unskilled workers, especially to the northern suburbs. The rise of heavy industry and the influx of this unskilled working-class population paralleled and reinforced each other. In the pattern that emerged, unskilled immigrants from rural France came to Paris, found jobs (and housing) more easily in the suburbs than in the city itself, and moved into the suburb where they worked. Many immigrants went directly to the suburbs from the provinces without passing through Paris. Just as Paris rejected the least attractive urban installations and assigned them to suburbia, so it did with the least desirable workers.^[56]

The differences in economic structure and immigration patterns between Paris and its suburbs meant different experiences of industrialization for the two communities. For Paris, rich in small workshops and a large population of skilled workers and independent artisans with their own proud traditions, the transition to an industrial economy was gradual and complicated. For the suburbs, by contrast, this process was much simpler. Most employers did not face the delicate task of subduing independent artisans and turning skilled workers into machine operatives, since much of their work force was unskilled and of rural origin. It was in the suburbs, therefore, that the industrial proletariat was to be found.^[57]