1. T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (New York, 1985), chap. 3.

2. There are no precise figures on the composition of classes in Parisian suburbs in the early twentieth century. My research suggests that, although figures vary widely from one suburb to another, workers and their families constituted roughly one-third of the suburban population. On this point, cf. Jean Bastié, La Croissance de la banlieue parisienne (Paris, 1964); and Michel Mollat, ed., Histoire de l'Ile-de-France et de Paris (Toulouse, 1971).

3. On this point see Edouard Blanc, La Ceinture rouge (Paris, 1927); Pierre (Pére) Lhande, Le Christ dans la banlieue (Paris, 1927); and the works of Jacques Valdour, such as Ateliers et taudis de la banlieue de Paris (Paris, 1923) and Ouvriers parisiens d'après-guerre (Paris, 1921).

4. Rémy Butler and Patrice Noisette, Le logement social en France, 1815-1981: de la cité ouvrière au grand ensemble (Paris, 1982), p. 63.

5. Interview with Florence Aumont on 7 January 1985, Foyer Gaston Monmousseau, Bobigny.

6. One of the few major studies on French communism to focus on Party membership is Annie Kriegel, The French Communists: Portrait of a People (Chicago, 1972). See also Philippe Robrieux, Histoire intérieure du parti communiste (Paris, 1980-83); Annie Kriegel, Aux origines du communisme français , 2 vols. (Paris, 1969); Daniel Brower, The New Jacobins (Ithaca, 1968); Jean-Paul Brunet, Saint-Denis, la ville rouge (Paris, 1980).

7. The literature on French social history in the nineteenth century is vast and still growing. Important works in this field include Rolande Trempé, Les

Mineurs de Carmaux , 2 vols. (Paris, 1971); Michelle Perrot, Les Ouvriers en grève , 2 vols. (Paris, 1974); Yves Lequin, Les Ouvriers de la région lyonnaise, 1814-1914 , 2 vols. (Lyon, 1977); Joan Scott, The Glassworkers of Carmaux (Cambridge, Mass., 1974); Michael Hanagan, The Logic of Solidarity (Urbana, 1980); Ron Aminzade, Class, Politics, and Early Industrial Capitalism (Albany, 1981); and John Merriman, The Red City (Oxford, 1985). For a critique of this approach, see Tony Judt, Marxism and the French Left (Oxford, 1986).

1. Many Parisians came to Bobigny during summer weekends, giving local shopkeepers important business. The city festival in May drew especially large numbers of visitors. Registres des débats du conseil municipal, Bobigny, 1900-1939 (hereafter RDCM), 18 February 1901, and 12 March 1901; Journal de Saint-Denis , 23 May 1901, p. 3. See also Clark, chap. 3, and Maurice Agulhon, ed. Histoire de la France urbaine , vol. 4 (Paris, 1983), on the Paris suburbs as nineteenth-century weekend recreational retreats.

2. Lhande, Le Christ dans la banlieue , p. 57; Conseil général de la Seine, Etat des communes de la Seine à la fin du 19e siècle: Bobigny (Paris, 1899), pp. 25-26. On late nineteenth-century Bobigny see also Abbé Masson, Bobignylez-Paris (Paris, 1887).

3. A realization of this trend suffuses the last few pages of Masson's book ( Bobigny-lez-Paris ). See also Maurice Agulhon, "L'opinion politique dans une commune de banheue sous la Troisième République. Bobigny de 1850 à 1914," in Etudes sur la banlieue de Paris , ed. Pierre George (Paris 1950), p. 30; Michel Phlipponneau, La Vie rurale de la banlieue parisienne (Paris, 1956), pp. 398-405; Jules Ferret, Bobigny, ses maraîchers, ses nouveaux-venus, les Parisiens (Paris, 1910), pp. 36-37.

4. The highest point in Bobigny was 55 meters; the lowest, 40 meters (Conseil général de la Seine, p. 28). To the north of Bobigny lay Drancy and La Courneuve; to the east was Bondy, and to the west, Aubervilliers and Pantin.

5. Conseil général de la Seine, pp. 25-26, 28-31. In 1900 Bobigny had one butchershop, two bakeries, two grocery stores, and ten cafés (Archives nationales, Paris: Annuaire de commerce—Didot Bottin [hereafter Didot Bottin], 1900, p. 3317). For descriptions of small-town life near Paris at the turn of the century, see Mollat; and Evelyn Ackerman, Village on the Seine (Ithaca, 1978).

6. Lhande, Le Christ dans la banlieue , p. 57; Agulhon, "L'opinion politique," pp. 36-37; Ferret, pp. 36-37; Phlipponneau, pp. 245-57; René-Charles Plancke, La Vie rurale en Seine-et-Marne de 1853 à 1953 (Paris, 1984).

7. "Les quartlers de Bobigny," dossier in Bobigny City Archives, p. 4; Bastié, Croissance, pp. 27-28; Louis Chevalier, "La formation de la population parisienne au 19e siècle," Cahiers de l'Institut national des études démographiques 10 (1950): 131; Pierre Sorlin, La Société française , vol. 1 (Paris, 1969), pp. 112-18.

8. National Route no. 3 from Paris to Metz, the largest road in Bobigny, bordered the canal de l'Ourcq; between it and the canal were several industries (Conseil général de la Seine, pp. 42, 57; Didot Bottin, 1900, p. 3317; Agulhon, "L'opinion politique," p. 42).

9. Pierre Dupé and Pierre Thivollier, Ferment chrétien dans une terre sans Dieu (Paris, 1948), pp. 9-16; Lhande, Le Christ dans la banlieue, p. 60; Pierre Lhande, Le Dieu qui bouge (Paris, 1930).

10. Listes nominatives du recensement, Bobigny (hereafter LN), 1896; Didot Bottin, 1902, p. 3860; Agulhon, "L'opinion politique," p. 29; Etat civil, Bobigny (Actes de naissances, décès, et mariages) for 1900.

11. Agulhon, "L'opinion politique," p. 38; Phlipponneau, pp. 401-5. See also Bastié, Croissance , and Jean Bastié, Géographie du grand Paris (Paris, 1984), p. 35; Roger Price, The Modernization of Rural France (New York, 1984); Plancke.

12. Agulhon, "L'opinion politique," pp. 33-34; Phlipponneau, pp. 68-71; Bastié, Géographie, p. 35; Mollat, pp. 133-39.

13. The Blancmesnil family, the traditional seigneurs of Bobigny, owned land in the southwestern part of town, hence the name of the Blanc-mesnil quarter (Phlipponneau, pp. 400-402; Masson).

14. Dupé and Thivollier, p. 15; Masson.

15. From 1870 until the early twentieth century, Bobigny's farmers often supported the conservative Republicans led by Adolphe Thiers, whereas the market gardeners usually favored the left-wing Republican opposition. Bobigny's conservatives wanted to maintain public order and private property, while the Radicals were anti-clerical and defended the small producer. Neither side had developed a political program, however, and election results often revealed group identification more than ideology. On this point see chapter 4. See also Agulhon, "L'opinion politique," pp. 36, 50-51; Phlipponneau, p. 401.

16. Phlipponneau, pp. 357-62; Bastié, Croissance ; Plancke.

17. Lhande, Le Christ clans la banlieue , p. 55; Ferret, pp. 37-38. The Grande Ceinture railroad completely encircled Paris (Conseil général de la Seine, pp. 48-49). On mass transit between Paris and its suburbs, see Pierre Merlin, Les Transports parisiens. Etude de géographie économique et sociale (Paris, 1967); and Jean Robert, Les Tramways parisiens (Paris, 1959).

18. Jean Robert, pp. 41, 49-58. See also Charles Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Epoque: Entertainment and Festivity in Turn-of-the-Century France (New Haven, 1985); Ackerman; Gérard Jacquemet, Belleville au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1984), pp. 141-42.

19. Jacquemet, Belleville , pp. 45-51. One market gardener asked, "What's the use of laying pipes for drinking water here? We market gardeners each have our own wells, and therefore as much water as we need" (Ferret, p. 38).

20. On the growth of Paris in the nineteenth century, see Chevalier, "La formation"; Bastié, Croissance and Géographie ; Philippe Ariès, Histoire des populations françaises (Paris, 1948); Jeanne Gaillard, Paris, la ville, 1852-1870 (Paris, 1976).

21. Susanna Magri, Politique du logement et besoins en main-d'oeuvre (Paris, 1972), p. 49; Ariès, pp. 386-417; Chevalier, "La formation." On low natality in nineteenth-century France, see Francis Ronsin, La Grève des ventres (Paris, 1980).

22. David Pinkney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris (Princeton, 1958), p. 156; Chevalier, "La formation," pp. 164-70, 209-13. The rural population fell about 9 percent from 1875 to 1906. J. H. Clapham, The

Economic Development of France and Germany, 1815-1914 (Cambridge, 1951), pp. 158-70; Sorlin, pp. 45-73.

23. Chevalier, "La formation," p. 281.

24. Part of the increase in working-class population came from the inner suburbs annexed in 1860; their industrial structure, distinct from that of central Paris, used more unskilled labor. Magri, pp. 70-72; Chevalier, "La formation," pp. 119-48; Anne-Louise Shapiro, Housing the Poor of Paris (Madison, 1984), p. 55; Jacquemet, Belleville , pp. 281-84. Lenard Berlanstein discusses historians' overestimate of the bourgeoisie in late nineteenth-century Paris, in The Working People of Paris (Baltimore, 1984), pp. 5-9.

25. Pierre George and Pierre Randet, La Région parisienne (Paris, 1959), p. 29; Pinkney, Napoleon III , pp. 151-73; Chevalier, "La formation," pp. 104-9, 120-30; Magri, pp. 56-59, 65; Berlanstein, Working People ; Maurice Daumas and Jacques Payen, eds., Evolution de la géographie industrielle de Paris et sa proche banlieue au XIXe siècle , vol. 2 (Paris, 1976), pp. 339-449.

26. On transportation and industrial development in Paris see especially René Clozier, La Gare du Nord (Paris, 1940); Chevalier, "La formation," pp. 119-48; Magri, pp. 59-60; Daumas, vol. 1, pp. 318-35. David Harvey emphasizes the point in Consciousness and the Urban Experience (Baltimore, 1985).

27. George and Randet, pp. 29-30; Chevalier, "La formation," pp. 119-48; Magri, pp. 59, 72. The lessening of skills involved the decline of compagnonnages , associations of skilled workers that trained apprentices and sent journeymen throughout France to perfect their skills; see Jean-Pierre Bayard, Le Compagnonnage en France (Paris, 1978).

28. In addition to Pinkney's classic study, see more recent works by Pierre Lavedan, Histoire de l'urbanisme à Paris (Paris, 1975); Gaillard; Harvey; Anthony Sutcliffe, The Autumn of Central Paris (Montreal, 1971); Louis Girard, La Nouvelle Histoire de Paris: Paris, la Deuxième République et le Second Empire (Paris, 1981).

29. Residential segregation by class existed earlier in Paris, but Haussmann's renovations increased it significantly (Pinkney, Napoleon III , pp. 9-12; Chevalier, "La formation," pp. 241-49; Magri, p. 59).

30. Norma Evenson, Paris: A Century of Change, 1878-1978 (New Haven, 1979), pp. 203-5; Roger H. Guerrand, Les Origines du logement social en France (Paris, 1967), pp. 202-21; Shapiro, pp. 56, 75-76; Octave DuMesnil and Charles Mangenot, Enquête sur les logements, professions, salaires, et budgets (Paris, 1899).

31. DuMesnil, p. 55; see also the article by Gérard Jacquemet, "Belleville aux XIXe et XXe siécles," Annales—Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 30, no. 4 (July-August 1975).

32. Shapiro, p. 60; on government urban development policies and land prices in Paris, see Maurice Halbwachs, Les Expropriations et le prix des terrains à Paris (Paris, 1901); Sutcliffe; Evenson.

33. Jules Siegfried expressed this point of view in advocating working-class housing: "Shall we create people who are at the same time happy, and true conservatives; shall we combat at the same time poverty and the errors of

socialism; shall we increase the guarantees of order, of morality, of political and social moderation? Then let us create working-class housing developments!" (quoted in Guerrand, Les Origines , p. 283).

34. The Villard Commission's report to the Paris city council in 1883 reflected this bias against governmental involvement beyond the construction of model low-rent buildings to stimulate private construction. The commission feared that more low-rent housing would increase the flow of poor provincials to the capital (Shapiro, pp. 118-19).

35. Shapiro, pp. 127, 99-101. A similar lack of low-cost housing for the poor of London is described by Gareth Stedman Jones in Outcast London (London, 1971).

36. Guerrand, Les Origines , pp. 280-310; Shapiro, p. 102. On the history of the HBM, see Sanford Elwitt, "Social Reform and Social Order in Late Nineteenth-Century France: The Musée Social and its Friends," French Historical Studies 11, no. 3 (Spring 1980): 431-51; Lucien Lambeau, Ville de Paris. Monographies. Les logements à bon marché. Recueil annoté des discussions, déliberations et rapports du conseil municipal de Paris (Paris, 1897).

37. On disease and public health in late nineteenth-century Paris, see Jacques Bertillon, De la fréquence des principales causes de décès à Paris (Paris, 1906); Bertillon, De la fréquence des principales maladies à Paris pendant la période 1865-1891 (Paris, 1894); Gustave Lagneau, Rapport sur les maladies ipidimiques observies en 1890 dans le département de la Seine (Paris, 1891).

38. Lagneau, pp. 62-64, 78-83; Guerrand, Les Origines , pp. 202-14; Evenson, pp. 203-12; Magri, p. 94. See also Louis Landouzy, "La mortalité parisienne par tuberculose il y a vingt ans," Congrès international de la tuberculose (Paris, 1906), vol. 2, pp. 696-706; Charles Leroux, "Enquête sur la descendance de 442 families ouvrières tuberculeuses," Revue de médecine 32 (1912); Henri Dehau and René Ledroux-Lebard, La Lutte antituberculeuse en France (Paris, 1906); Selman Waksman, The Conquest of Tuberculosis (Berkeley, 1964).

39. Guerrand, Les Origines , p. 235; he quotes another similar song (pp. 235-36):

The landlord is a disgusting fellow,
One always has to give him money,
He ruins the people, the poor proletarian,
Yes, the landlords are dirty guys.

40. On the working-class left and the Paris housing question, see Shapiro; Guerrand, Les Origines . An imaginative, if short-term, solution to the problem was déménagement à la cloche de bois (midnight flight), in which (often organized) groups of workers moved a working-class family's furniture out of the apartment in the middle of the night to avoid its confiscation for nonpayment of rent (Jacques Borge and Nicolas Viasnoff, Archives de Paris [Paris, 1981], pp. 130-33).

41. Jacques Bertillon, Essai de statistique compareé du surpeuplement des habitations à Paris et dans les capitales européennes (Paris, 1894); Octave DuMesnil, L'Hygiène à Paris (Paris, 1890); DuMesnil and Mangenot, Enquête .

42. On the growth of the Paris suburbs in the late nineteenth century, see Bastié, Croissance and Géographie ; Mollat; Albert Demangeon, Paris, la ville et sa banlieue (Paris, 1936); Sorlin, pp. 112-18.

43. George and Randet, pp. 52-54; René Clozier, "Essai sur la banlieue," La Pensée 2, no. 4 (July-September 1945): 53-54.

44. Chevalier, "La formation," pp. 130-48; Magri, pp. 59-67, 73-75; Jean-Paul Brunet, "L'industrialisation de la région de Saint-Denis," Acta Geographica 4 (October 1970): 231-40; Bastié, Croissance , pp. 107-22.

45. Sam Bass Warner, Streetcar Suburbs (Cambridge, 1978). For a critique of transportation in suburbanization, see F. M. L. Turner, The Rise of Suburbia (Leicester, 1982); and Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias (New Brunswick, 1987).

46. Brunet, "L'industrialisation," pp. 231-41; Bastié, Croissance , pp. 107-34; Magri, p. 60; Chevalier, "La formation," p. 133.

47. Chevalier, "La formation," pp. 130-44; Magri, pp. 59-64; Bastié, Croissance , pp. 137-60.

48. Chevalier, "La formation," pp. 131-33; Brunet, "L'industrialisation," p. 247; Magri, p. 56.

49. Magri, pp. 130-44; Daumas and Payen, pp. 77-83. See also Louis Bergeron, L'Industrialisation de la France au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1979).

50. Chevalier, "La formation," p. 131.

51. Chevalier, "La formation," pp. 104-44; Magri, pp. 55-67; Daum-as and Payen, pp. 77-83, 257-84. During the nineteenth century the southern suburbs industrialized less and later than those to the north, because industrial transport facilities were concentrated north of the Seine, closest to the most industrialized parts of France (and Europe), and because most Parisian workers lived on the Right Bank (except for the thirteenth arrondissment).

52. On suburban factories in the late nineteenth century, Daumas and Payen, pp. 449-517; Berlanstein, Working People , pp. 92-107. Large suburban plants existed in other European countries as well; see Donald Howard Bell, Sesto San Giovanni (New Brunswick, 1986).

53. Bell, pp. 58-65. Chevalier explains, "The French government's decree of 13 September 1810 ordained that henceforth the suburbs would house 'cemeteries that diffuse cadaverous odors in the center of the capital, incommodious or malodorous workshops or manufactures'" ("La formation," p. 131). For discussion of production in these new industries in the late nineteenth century, see David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 249-76.

54. Brunet, "L'industrialisation," pp. 232-33; Chevalier, "La formation," pp. 250-62. In the southern suburbs, however, immigration and population growth may have depended less on industrialization; see Bastié, Croissance , pp. 213-17.

55. Bastié, Croissance , pp. 222-23; Chevalier, "La formation," pp. 250, 257.

56. Chevalier, "La formation," pp. 161, 251; Magri, p. 73; Sorlin, p. 117; Brunet, "L'industrialisation"; Berlanstein, Working People , pp. 92-107.

57. Berlanstein, Working People , pp. 55-59, 70-72, 74-121; Chevalier, "La formation," pp. 120-30, 238-48; George and Randet, pp. 29-36; Daumas and Payen; Peter Stearns, Lives of Labor: Work in a Maturing Industrial Society (New York, 1975).

58. John McKay, Tramways and Trolleys: The Rise of Urban Mass Transport in Europe (Princeton, 1976), pp. 14-15, 40-41; Warner; Fishman. On the history of tramways in Paris, see Merlin; Jean Robert; L. Lagarrigue, Cent ans de transports en commun dans la région parisienne (Paris, 1956).

59. Evenson, pp. 80-85. The failure of the suburban tramlines owed much to their arrangement with the General Omnibus Company (GOC), which had a monopoly over lines in Paris and kept the most profitable routes for itself. Tramways North and Tramways South were forced to pay GOC a large indemnity for the privilege of running their suburban lines into the capital.

60. Guerrand, Les Origines , pp. 271-90; Shapiro. On Le Play see Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, La Question ouvrière au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1899); Elwitt, "Social Reform"; Catherine Bodard Silver, ed., Frédéric Le Play: On Family, Work, and Social Change (Chicago, 1982).

61. Quoted in Evenson, pp. 209-10.

62. Shapiro, pp. 120-21. In "The Question of Working-Class Housing in Paris and London," George Picot studied a model working-class housing project near the British capital: "For all these constructions outside London, the most important question is the price of transport. The establishment of inexpensive commuter trains to the outskirts of town that enable the voyager to travel sixteen kilometers at an average cost of twenty centimes has ensured the success of these habitations" ( La Réforme sociale 14 [15 September 1885]: 258). On inexpensive mass transit in suburban London, see H. J. Dyos, Victorian Suburb (Leicester, 1961), pp. 74-77; Turner.

63. McKay, p. 161.

64. As McKay explains, "the goal was extremely cheap fares which would allow the worker to save his energy at the least, and facilitate his quest for better, more distant housing at best" (McKay, p. 117; pp. 149-50).

65. The tramways business was dominated by two firms, Thomson-Houston and the General Traction Company. Thomson-Houston, a former American subsidiary founded in 1893 and the first investor in tramways, owned the General Omnibus Company; the General Traction Company began in 1896 and owned most of the suburban lines created after 1900. The newer General Traction Company expanded more aggressively and set lower fares; those policies, and the overvaluation of its shares on the stock market, brought the Paris tramways as a whole to the brink of disaster after 1900 (McKay, pp. 125-62; Jean Robert, pp. 48-49).

66. Government concessions to the tramway companies were handled by several government agencies: some were granted by the city of Paris, some by the Department of the Seine, some even by individual suburban municipalities; contractual obligations varied from company to company. A poorly coordinated tramway system resulted, as governmental officials tried to break the near-monopoly of the General Omnibus Company in the 1890s without direct governmental regulation. McKay, pp. 146-47; Jean Robert, pp. 47-64.

67. McKay, pp. 159-60; Jean Robert, pp. 13-14.

68. Again, on governmental liberalism in urban development and poverty, the comparison with the British case is instructive; cf. Jones, Turner, and Fishman.

69. Jean Robert, p. 60.

70. Mollat, pp. 524-37; Bastié, Croissance and Géographie ; Evenson, p. 221; Gérard Noiriel, Les Ouvriers dans la socété française (Paris, 1986), pp. 120-52. The mass migration to the suburbs, and the consequent housing crisis there, became the subject of numerous newspaper articles: see L'Information sociale , 2 September 1926 and 9 December 1926; Le Populaire , 29 October 1923 and 18 December 1927; L'Humanité , 19 September 1925 and 11 February 1928.

71. Bastié, Croissance , p. 226; Arthur Fontaine, French Industry during the War (New Haven, 1926); Jean-Jacques Becker, Les Français dans la grande guerre (Paris, 1980); Patrick Fridenson, ed., 1914-1918: Vautre front (Paris, 1977).

72. Arthur Fontaine, p. 192; Bastié, Croissance , p. 225; Ariès, pp. 295-344.

73. M. Bonnefond, "Les colonies de bicoques de la région parisienne," part 1, La Vie urbaine 25 (1925): 542-45. On the Paris housing crisis during World War I, see also Sutcliffe, pp. 256-57; Evenson, pp. 212-13; Nils Hammarstrand, "The Housing Problem in Paris," Journal of the American Institute of Architects (February 1920); Tyler Stovall, "Sous les toits de Paris: The Working Class and the Paris Housing Crisis, 1914-1924," Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History 14 (1987).

74. Stovall, "Sous les toits," p. 544; Bastié, Croissance , pp. 233-34. Often ignorant of rent control laws and moving more often, working-class Parisians benefited less from rent control than those with greater incomes.

75. Bastié, Croissance , pp. 233-34; Magri, pp. 83-92; Bonnefond, pp. 532-33; Anita Hirsch, "Le logement," in Histoire économique de la France entre les deux guerres , ed. Albert Sauvy, vol. 3 (Paris, 1972).

76. On the eight-hour day see Gary Cross, "Les Trois Huits: Labor Movements, International Reform, and the Origins of the Eight-Hour Day, 1914-1924," French Historical Studies 14, no. 2 (Fall 1985): 240-68; Cross, "The Quest for Leisure: Reassessing the Eight-Hour Day in France," Journal of Social History 18, no. 2 (Winter 1984): 195-216; Jean-Luc Bodiguel, La Réduction du temps de travail (Paris, 1969).

77. Bonnefond, pp. 545-46.

78. Jacques Valdour, Le Désordre ouvrier (Paris, 1937), p. 35.

79. Butler and Noisette, p. 63. On the allotments crisis, see Bastié, Croissance ; Lhande, Le Christ dans la banlieue and Le Dieu qui bouge ; Roger Guerrand, Le Logement populaire en France (Paris, 1979), p. 160; Wladimir d'Ormesson, Le Problème des lotissements (Paris, 1928); Charles Collin, Silhouettes de lotissements (Paris, 1931); René Bouffet, Un Problème d'urbanisme: l'aminagement des lotissements difectueux (Paris, 1930); Maurice Polti, Etude théorique et pratique sur les lotissements (Paris, 1926); Pierre Combe, Les Lotissements (Lyon, 1933).

1. Charles Videcoq, Les Aspects permanents de la crise du logement dans la rigion parisienne (Paris, 1932), pp. 38-45, 70-71. The Department of the Seine was divided into the northern arrondissement of Saint-Denis with thirteen cantons (including Noisy-le-Sec), and the southern arrondissement of Sceaux with nine cantons. The canton of Noisy-le-Sec included the suburbs of Bobigny, Bondy, Drancy, Noisy-le-Sec, Pavillon-sous-Bois, Romainvllle, Rosny-sous-Bois, and Villemomble. On the northeastern suburbs in this period see Louis Cheronnet, Paris extra muros (Paris, 1929); Georges Poisson, Evocation du grand Paris, vol. 3, La Banlieue nord-est (Paris, 1961); Louis Thomas, Le Grand Paris (Paris, 1941).

2. Phlipponnneau, pp. 399-405; Bastié, Croissance , p. 254; Jean Robert, pp. 45-47; Demangeon; Mollat; Georges Archer, De Terentiacum à Drancy. Histoire d'une commune de la Seine (Montpellier, 1964); Jean-Marie Bontemps and Jacques Jolinon, ''La municipality de Montreuil-sous-Bois, 1900-1939," mémoire de maîtrise, Université de Paris-1,1971.

3. For a broader discussion of rapid urbanization, see Rosemary Righter and Peter Wilsher, The Exploding Cities (London, 1975); and Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots (Berkeley, 1983). The experience of the Paris suburbs in this period bears some similarity to the frenetic growth experienced by contemporary Third World cities; on this point see Bryan Roberts, Cities of Peasants (London, 1978); Bernard Granotier, La Planète des bidonvilles: perspectives de l'explosion urbaine dans le tiers monde (Paris, 1980); Janice Perlman, The Myth of Marginality (Berkeley, 1976).

4. Rates of growth in other Paris suburbs from 1896 to 1931 include Saint-Denis, 151 percent; Aubervilliers, 204 percent; Asnières, 262 percent; Romainville, 766 percent; and Drancy, which mushroomed, 4,668 percent ( Annuaire statistique de la ville de Paris et des communes suburbaines, 1929-1931 [Paris, 1932]).

5. Videcoq, p. 38; RDCM, 23 March 1923; Permis de construire, 1926. Since only cities with more than 10,000 inhabitants were required to keep construction permit records, 1926 was the first year in which Bobigny did so.

6. Budgets et comptes de la ville de Bobigny, 1900, 1915. On French municipal budgets in this period see Eugène Raiga and Maurice Félix, Le Régime administratif et financier du département de la Seine et de la ville de Paris , 2 vols. (Paris, 1935); Jean-Paul Brunet, Un Demi-siècle d'action municipale à Saint-Denis la rouge (Paris, 1982).

7. LN, 1896-1936. On housing densities in the Paris suburbs in this period cf. also Videcoq; Henri Sellier, La Crise du logement et l'intervention publique (Paris, 1921); Valdour, Ateliers et taudis .

8. This typical pattern of suburban growth turned isolated villages into the centers of large new residential areas. The old villages did not function as municipal centers and had little to do with the allotment areas (see Dupé and Thivollier, pp. 15-17).

9. On public transportation and life in the Paris suburbs, see Henri Bunle, "L'agglomération parisienne et ses migrations alternantes en 1936," Bulletin de

la Statistique générale de la France (October-December 1938); Jean-Paul Brunet, "Constitution d'un espace urbain: Paris et sa banlieue de la fin du XIXe siècle à 1940," Annales-Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 40, no. 3 (May-June 1985).

10. Ferret, p. 46. Tramway service led to the suburbanization of Bobigny, as the town's rates of population growth demonstrate. If the growing population had attracted the tramway, then the rate of growth from 1896 to 1901 should have been spectacular; in fact, it hardly exceeded that of the late nineteenth century. In the 1906 census the rate soared; on this point see Fishman.

11. In Paris-Est articles from 1902 on 11 January and 25 January; 15 February; 31 May; 28 June; 5 July and 12 July; and 16 August.

12. Paris-Est , 12 August 1902. See also Ferret, pp. 42-50; Agulhon, "L'opinion politique," pp. 44-45. Many open-field farmers favored the tramway and the land speculation, hoping to profit from selling their land to the developers.

13. RDCM, 24 July 1902; Paris-Est , 20 September and 27 September 1902; Journal de Saint-Denis , 18 September 1902.

14. Paris-Est , 7 March 1903; 25 March 1911; 1 April and 22 April 1911; 21 October 1911; 25 January 1913; 10 December 1921; Journal de Saint-Denis , 4 July 1915; 17 September 1921; RDCM, 10 February 1911.

15. RDCM, 7 September 1906; 18 December 1906; 21 March 1908; 9 October 1908; 23 July 1909; 10 February 1911; Paris-Est , 12 January 1907, 4 July 1908; Journal de Saint-Denis , 18 November 1906, 6 December 1906.

16. Paris-Est , 4 August 1906, 12 April 1913, and 12 July 1913; Journal de Saint-Denis , 9 August 1906; RDCM, 18 December 1909, 12 April 1922, and 18 February 1924; Le Prolétaire de Bobigny , 20 April 1929. There were also complaints about trams arriving too early.

17. RDCM, 23 April 1921, 21 October 1922, 15 December 1923, 1 August 1925, 27 April 1931.

18. RDCM, 26 June 1908, 15 December 1923, 18 February 1924, 1 August 1925; L'Aube sociale , 2 January 1926, 27 March 1926, 24 July 1926; Emancipation nationale , 26 November 1937.

19. Didot Bottin, 1927, pp. 1771-73; 1937, pp. 1950-54. The STCRP began to replace major tramlines with buses in 1930; most were closed by 1935, and the last tram disappeared from the Paris region in 1938 (Jean Robert, p. 15).

20. Workers include all those gainfully employed. Of the censuses I consulted, only that of 1931 listed workplaces, but data were spotty and incomplete—in many cases giving only the location without the name of the workplace. Since by the 1930s Bobigny had developed an industrial sector, the percentage of commuters was probably less in 1931 than in the previous decades.

21. RDCM, 12 April 1922. Before its reduction to eight hours, the average working day in France was ten hours long. On commuting, see Brunet, "Constitution"; Bunle.

22. Workers often ate lunch in inexpensive restaurants near their places of employment (Valdour, Ateliers et taudis; Ouvriers paristens ; Arnold Bremond, Une Explication du monde ouvrier [Alençon, 1927]; Simone Weil, La Condition ouvrière [Paris, 1951]; Emancipation nationale , 26 November 1937).

23. For example, in J'avais vingt ans (Paris, 1967) René Michaud describes how as a young man in Paris he would look for work by simply walking the thirteenth district from one neighborhood workshop to the next—a less fruitful prospect in Bobigny. On life and work in this Parisian setting, see also Jacques Valdour, De la Popinqu'à Menilmuch ' (Paris, 1924); Jean Bailhache, Monographie d'une famille d'ouvriers parisiens (Paris, 1905); Jacques Destray-Caroux, Un Couple ouvrier traditionnel (Paris, 1974).

24. Areas undergoing rapid urbanization often develop such a gap between the population's size and adequate physical, social, and cultural structures; cf. Jean-Jacques Peru, "Du village à la cité ouvrière, Drancy 1896-1936," mémoire de maîtrise, Université de Paris-1, 1977-1978; Righter and Wilsher, pp. 115-25; Castells, City and the Grassroots , pp. 185-90.

25. The best overview of the allotments is that of Bastié in Croissance , pp. 229-331.

26. Bastié, Croissance , pp. 241-63, 278-300.

27. Ferret, p. 43; see also Agulhon, "L'opinion politique," p. 44.

28. Bobigny, Archives communales, dossier on the city's allotments, 1900-1945; Bobigny, Associations syndicales (hereafter cited as AS), dossiers of allotments: La Bergère; Les Vignes; La Courneuve; Le Nouveau Village; André Jaouen; La Conscience; La Renaissance; Le Parc; Le Chemin de Fer; rues Herzog, Perron, and Perrusset; La Grande Denise.

29. Ferret, pp. 43-52; Paris-Est , 8 August 1908; AS dossier on Nouveau Village; Bastié, Croissance , pp. 250-54.

30. LN, 1911, 1921, 1931. Neither census nor other sources show clearly who lived in Bobigny's allotments. I arrived at these approximate figures by counting how many people lived on streets that belonged to allotments, but some streets belonged to them only in part.

31. Dupé and Thivollier, pp. 15-16. The authors' population figures for Nouveau Village and Village parisien are wildly inflated; the former had little more than one thousand residents in the 1920s.

32. LN, 1896, 1911; Conseil général de la Seine; J. F. Mangin, "Les transformations de structure d'une commune en banlieue: Bobigny, 1871-1970" (mémoire de maîtrise, Université de Paris-1, 1971-1972). The third largest group was agricultural workers. In studying the population of a suburban allotment in 1931, Jean Bastié found that 78 percent were workers and employés ( Croissance , p. 254).

33. Ferret, pp. 55-56. Outsiders describing the Paris suburbs in the interwar years noted not just their anarchic squalor but also their sharp contrast to the rational beauty of Paris (Cheronnet; Alain Meyer and Christine Moissinac, Représentations sociales et littéraires: centre et périphérie, Paris 1908-1939 [Paris, 1979], pp. 157-83).

34. AS dossier on Bobigny's allotments.

35. On this point see Bastié, Croissance , pp. 252-54; Guy Caplat, Le Problème des lotissements (Dijon, 1951); d'Ormesson; Polti.

36. RDCM, 31 January 1913; 25 January 1920; 10 September 1922; L'Aube sociale , 13 November 1926 (an article, "To get out of the mud"); 15 January 1927; AS dossier Les Vignes, 11 February 1923; AS dossier rue Perron, 25 August 1924.

37. Paris-Bobigny AS dossier, "Rapport de l'agent-voyer communal," 8 March 1926.

38. The eighth district was one of the wealthiest in Parts, and the twentieth one of the poorest. On health conditions in the Paris suburbs, see Anne Fontaine et al., Antony. Du petit village à la grande cité de banlieue (Antony, 1980); Henri Sellier, Les Banlieues urbaines (Paris, 1920); Evenson, pp. 220-21.

39. In 1911, for example, housing for a majority of Balbynians was less than one room per person (Sellier, La crise du logement , p. 84).

40. Bastié, Croissance , pp. 265-66; Evenson, p. 231; Bonnefond, pp. 552-54; Hazemann, R., "Les lotissements dans la banlieue de Paris et leur répercussion sur la santé publique (à Vitry et à Ivry)," Revue d'hygiène et médecine préventive (1928).

41. Didot Bottin for Bobigny, 1910-1939; see also Catherine Rodier and Fathi Bentabet, "L'immigration algérienne et l'hôpital franco-musulman, dans la région parisienne, entre les deux guerres (1915-1947)," mémoire de maîtrise, Université de Paris-1, 1980-1981.

42. The classic study of life in a commuter suburb remains Herbert Gans, The Levittowners (New York, 1967); see also Claude Cornau, ed., L'Attraction de Paris sur sa banlieue (Paris, 1965); Scott Donaldson, The Suburban Myth (New York, 1969); Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier (New York, 1985); Fishman; Warner.

43. The figures given in pp. 54-57 are taken from Didot Bottin.

44. Didot Bottin, 1901, 1911, 1921, 1931, 1939. On commerce in the Paris suburbs, see Alain Metton, Le Commerce et la ville en banlieue parisienne (Paris, 1980).

45. Metton; Didot Bottin, 1911, 1921, 1931, 1939.

46. Berlanstein, Working People , pp. 127-37; Michael Marrus, "Social Drinking in the Belle Epoque," Journal of Social History 7, no. 2 (Winter 1974): 115-42.

47. On French artisans, see Lee Shai Weissbach, "Artisanal Response to Artistic Decline: The Cabinetmakers of Paris in the Era of Industrialization," Journal of Social History 16 (1982); Michael Hanagan, The Logic of Solidarity (Urbana, 1980); Steven Zdatny, "The Artisanat in France: An Economic Portrait, 1900-1956," French Historical Studies 13, no. 3 (Spring 1984): 415-40.

48. In distinguishing artisan workshops from small industries, I followed the classification of Didot Bottin, listing as factories establishments labeled entreprises .

49. Before and after the Communists took over in 1920, the Bobigny municipality protested against the siting of chemical plants in the area (RDCM, 12 March 1901; 11 May 1907; 12 April 1922).

50. On the metals industry see Berlanstein, Working People , pp. 75-107; Brunet, Saint-Denis , pp. 201-2; Patrick Fridenson, Histoire des usines Renault (Paris, 1972); Sylvie Schweitzer, Des engrenages à la chaîne (Lyon, 1982); Gilbert Hatry, Renault, usine de guerre (Paris, 1978); Bertrand Gille, Histoire

de la métallurgie (Paris, 1966); Paul de Rousiers, Les Grandes Industries modernes, vol. 2, La Métallurgie (Paris, 1927); Nicholas Papayanis, "Alphonse Merrheim and Revolutionary Syndicalism, 1871-1917," Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1969.

51. Bastié, Croissance , pp. 332-36; Brunet, Saint-Denis , pp. 201-6.

52. See L'Humanité , 23 July 1933, for an article by Bobigny's Communist mayor Clamamus on problems posed by the city's low tax base; on this point see also Graham Taylor, Satellite Cities: A Study of Industrial Suburbs (New York, 1915); Harlan Paul Douglass, The Suburban Trend (New York, 1925); Brunet, Un Demi-siècle .

53. Paris-Est , 10 February 1912; see also RDCM, 25 January 1920.

54. RDCM, 3 July 1900; 2 February 1904; 16 October 1906; 23 July 1909; Journal de Saint-Denis , 10 November 1920.

55. RDCM, 15 January and 20 August 1903; 19 February 1904; 4 May 1906; 26 February 1907; and 2 August 1912.

56. Journal de Saint-Denis , 25 October 1903; Paris-Est , 26 December 1903; RDCM, 26 November 1904; 12 July 1907; 25 December 1917.

57. LN, 1896, 1911, 1921; RDCM, 21 November 1913; 6 April 1919; 17 September 1920. On French schools in the early twentieth century see Maurice Crubellier, L'Enfance et la jeunesse clans la société française, 1800-1950 (Paris, 1979); F. Pisani-Ferry, Monsieur l'instituteur (Paris, 1981); Antoine Prost, Histoire de Penseignement en France, 1800-1967 , 2d ed. (Paris, 1977).

58. RDCM, 18 February 1905; 2 July and 18 November 1906; 23 November 1907; Journal de Saint-Denis , 30 April 1921.

59. Cheronnet; Meyer and Moissinac; Bonnefond.

60. Radical municipalities in this period stressed fiscal restraint and often charged that Socialist and Communist municipalities levied high taxes. "A policy of careful and strict use of the public funds by both the state and municipalities is also a condition of national security. The Democratic Alliance is justified in warning against the demogogues, against the flatterers of the electoral clientele. . . . Taxes are heavy; any errors in municipal policy will only further burden the taxpayers, and for a long time to come" (electoral manifesto of the Democratic Republican Alliance, Le Temps , 1 May 1935, p. 1).

61. The relation between allotments like the Pont de Bondy and the center approximated in miniature that between Paris and its suburbs. Bobigny's center, however, was less urban than residential, with a population that included many of Bobigny's remaining market gardeners; few Balbynians from other parts of the community worked there.

62. Henri Lefebvre discusses this issue in Le Droit à la ville (Paris, 1972) and La Révolution urbaine (Paris, 1970), as does Harvey. I think Lefebvre's thesis useful, if we acknowledge that the development Paris underwent in the late nineteenth century stripped local workers of the power to impose a "right to the city." If living in Paris meant inhabiting tiny rooms without light or air, many workers in the early twentieth century preferred to leave.

63. Bastié, pp. 275-77.

64. d'Ormesson, pp. 2-3; see also Collin.

1. Bobigny LN, 1921, 1926, 1931; Etat civil, Bobigny: Actes de mariages 1919.

2. On the demography of the Paris area in the early twentieth century, see Ariès; Michel Huber, La Population de la France (Paris, 1937); Magri; Bastik, Croissance and Géographie .

3. Ariès, p. 294. The Department of the Seine increased its population by 79 percent over the same period.

4. Huber, pp. 66, 135, 169; Magri, p. 51; Ariès, p. 332. In 1931 the Department of the Seine had the second lowest birthrate of any department in France. On early twentieth-century urbanization, see Agulhon, Histoire ; Lequin, Ouvriers ; Leslie Page Moch, Paths to the City (Beverly Hills, 1983).

5. Moch. On the ages of urban populations, see E. A. Wrigley, Industrial Growth and Population Change (Cambridge, 1961); Adna Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1899).

6. Huber, pp. 41-42; Ariès, pp. 293-94.

7. On the lower middle class and politics, see Arno Mayer, "The Lower Middle Class as a Historical Problem," Journal of Modern History 47 (1975); Pierre Delon, Les Employés. Un siècle de lutte (Paris, 1969).

8. Magri, pp. 48-51. There is no general description of the class structure of the Paris suburbs in the interwar period; most of the communities I have read about were strongly working class or lower middle class. See the studies in Pierre George, ed., Etudes sur la banlieue de Paris (Paris, 1950); Jacques Girault, ed., Sur l'implantation du parti communiste français clans l'entre-deux-guerres (Paris, 1977); several works by Valdour ( Ateliers et taudis; Le Désordre ouvrier; Popinqu'à Menilmuch'; Ouvriers parisien ); Archer; Anne Fontaine; Jean-Emile Denis, Puteaux. Chroniques du temps des puits (Puteaux, 1969); Roger Pourteau, Pantin. Deux mille ans d'histoire (Paris, 1982); Bontemps and Jolinon.

9. Sellier, La Crise du logement . For purposes of comparison, in 1934 the natality rate in the Department of the Seine was 1.27 percent, the mortality rate 1.40 percent (Huber, pp. 135, 169).

10. On urbanization and natality in modern France, see Agulhon, Histoire , vol. 4, pp. 31-59; Ronsin; Moch; Ariès; Huber.

11. Evenson, p. 231; Bastiè, Croissance , pp. 265-66; Hazemann.

12. By 1931 at least six major allotments (Paris-Bobigny, Le Parc, rues Perron and Perrusset, l'Avenir de Bobigny, André Jaouen, and Les Vignes) had been provided with sewers and sidewalks (AS dossiers).

13. Unfortunately, the 1896 census records did not give places of birth. In Saint-Denis, by contrast, one out of every four local residents was born in that suburb (Brunet, Saint-Denis , p. 206).

14. On this point, see Moch; Stephen Thernstrom and Ralph Sennett, eds., Nineteenth-Century Cities (New Haven, 1969); Stephen Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians (Cambridge, Mass., 1973); David Crew, Town in the Ruhr (New York, 1979); Lequin, Ouvriers .

15. In 1896, 69 percent of the people of Bobigny were born in the French provinces. By contrast, the steadily rising percentage of Balbynians born in Paris—probably related to the improved mass transit—suggests that Bobigny was becoming a more classic suburb (Brunet, Saint-Denis , p. 206; Ariès; Noiriel).

16. The metropolitan region as defined here includes the Departments of the Seine, Seine-et-Oise, and Seine-et-Marne; large parts of the latter two departments were still rural. However, most Balbynians listed in Table 10 as from the Paris area came from the Department of the Seine (Demangeon; Mollat).

17. Etat civil, Bobigny: Actes de mariages 1921. For memoirs of workers from the Paris area in these years, see Michaud; Henri Vielledent, Souvenirs d'un travailleur manuel syndicaliste (Paris, 1978); Lucien Monjauvis, Jean-Pierre Timbaud (Paris, 1971).

18. Extended family networks were less disrupted than in a more distant move (Moch; David Pinkney, "Migrations to Paris during the Second Empire," Journal of Modern History 25, no. 1 [1953]: 1-12; Chevalier, Laboring Classes; Lynn Hollen Lees, Exiles of Erin. Irish Migrants in Victorian London [Manchester, 1979]).

19. Both before and after World War I parties of the French Left were generally stronger in the Paris area than elsewhere (François Goguel, Géographie des élections françaises sous la Troisième et la Quatrième République [Paris, 1968], pp. 60-97). See also Berlanstein, Working People , chap. 5; Kriegel, Aux origines ; Brower.

20. People born in the French provinces composed 47.1 percent of Bobigny's population in 1921 and 43.5 percent in 1931 (LN, 1921, 1931). Bobigny contrasts with Belleville, which also voted massively for the Left but contained mostly native-born artisans and craftworkers (Berlanstein, Working People , p. 164; Jacquemet, Belleville ).

21. Ariès, pp. 315-27; Chevalier, "La formation," and Laboring Classes ; Pinkney, "Migrations to Paris."

22. On communities of provincial immigrants in Paris, see Chevalier, "La formation"; Agulhon, Histoire , pp. 383-85; Berlanstein, Working People , p. 166; Françoise Raison-Jourde, La Colonie auvergnate de Paris au XIXe sièle (Paris, 1976); Valdour, Ateliers et taudis .

23. I found no evidence in Bobigny of social, political, or other organizations for people who came from the provinces; on this point see Etienne François, ed., Immigration et société urbaine en Europe occidentale, XVIe-XXe siécles (Paris, 1985).

24. André Armengaud, La Population française au XXe siècle (Paris, 1973), p. 48; Odile Rabut, "Les étrangers en France," Population , special issue ed. Roland Pressat (June 1974): 150. See also Gary Cross, Immigrant Workers in Industrial France (Philadelphia, 1983).

25. Few foreigners in Bobigny lived in allotments but rather in the few multifamily dwellings (LN, 1921, 1931).

26. LN, 1921. One group, the Italians, lived in various neighborhoods but preserved some sense of community and identity, since many worked in

construction. Apparently many were antifascist refugees from Mussolini's Italy, which led Communists to honor them as examples of international proletarian solidarity.

27. Of 67 Balbynians of foreign origin whose occupations were given in the 1931 census, 44 were unskilled workers and 19 were skilled; of the latter, 10 were Italian masons.

28. They were typical of populations in allotment communities (Bastié, Croissance , pp. 272-73; Noiriel; Archer; Bontemps and Jolinon; Peru).

29. Possible exceptions were many new Balbynians born in Paris who came from areas like Belleville, with strong local traditions of voting for the Left, which may have figured in their willingness to vote Communist in Bobigny (Berlanstein, Working People , pp. 159-64; Brunet, Saint-Denis , pp. 34-37).

30. Huber, p. 46.

31. Moch, pp. 123-67; Chevalier, "La formation"; Pinkney. Domenico Mastrangelo notes in his dissertation ("Bologna, 1889-1914" [University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1977], p. 105) that over 80 percent of the migrants into Bologna were under forty.

32. Public concern in France over the aging of the population preceded the First World War, but France's great losses gave the issue renewed immediacy after the war (Dyer, pp. 64-67; Ariès; Joseph Spengler, France Faces Depopulation [Durham, 1938]).

33. Stearns, Lives of Labor , p. 245; James F. McMillan, Housewife or Harlot: The Place of Women in French Society, 1870-1940 (New York, 1981), p. 40. On social class and fertility, see Michael Haines, Fertility and Occupation: Population Patterns in Industrialization (New York, 1979).

34. Abbé Ferret reported a woman's plea to him for aid in finding housing in Bobigny: "Monsieur l'abbé, monsieur Fabbé . . . help me find even a simple room. . . . I am fleeing Paris, where I just lost my son, a boy of sixteen years, my dear child. The doctor told me my daughters needed open air, so I left immediately" (Ferret, p. 42).

35. Households and families are not equivalent; however, given the difficulties of tracing families (including that of family members not living at home), it seemed reasonable to analyze household structure instead. See Michael Anderson, "Household Structure and the Industrial Revolution," in Household and Family in Past Time , ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, 1972).

36. LN, 1896, 1911, 1921, 1931. In 1931, for example, census figures listed 73.7 percent of market gardening households with four or more members; but these data sometimes included hired hands who were not members of the extended family.

37. The rich literature on nuclear and extended families includes Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York, 1975); Michael Katz, The People of Hamilton, Canada West (Cambridge, Mass., 1975).

38. LN, 1896, 1911, 1921, 1931. On French women widowed in World War I see Alain Decaux, Histoire des Françaises , vol. 2 (Paris, 1972), pp. 1002-13; Geneviève Gennari, Le Dossier de la femme (Paris, 1965), pp. 180-275; McMillan.

39. LN, 1896, 1911, 1921, 1931; Colin Dyer, Population and Society in Twentieth-Century France (New York, 1978), pp. 64-65; Decaux; Gennari; McMillan.

40. During the First World War 211 men from Bobigny died in combat (Annie Fourcaut and Jacques Girault, "Les counseillers municipaux d'une commune ouvrière et communiste," Cahiers d'histoire de l'Institut Maurice Thorez 10, no. 1 [1976]: 64). On the effects of the war on French society, see especially Antoine Prost, Les Anciens Combattants et la société française, 1914-1939 , 3 vols. (Paris, 1977).

41. For example, in 1931 58.3 percent of all adolescents in Bobigny lived with adult relatives, and 74.0 percent of them were employed (LN, 1931). On working-class youth see Berlanstein, Working People , pp. 144-47; Moch, pp. 129-42; Michael Anderson, Family Structure in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire (Cambridge, 1971); John R. Gillis, Youth and History (New York, 1974).

42. This trend was general among the French working class; see Jean and Françoise Fourastié, "Le genre de vie," and Evelyne Sullerot, "Conditions de la femme," both in Histoire économique de la France entre les deux guerres , ed. Albert Sauvy, vol. 3 (Paris, 1972), pp. 418-53; McMillan; Joan Scott and Louise Tilly, Women, Work, and Family (New York, 1978); Stearns, Lives of Labor , pp. 245-46; Shorter, Modern Family .

43. Conversely, a working class can establish its independent life-style and remain dependent on bourgeois ideology; Eric Hobsbawm discusses this point and the British working class in Industry and Empire (Penguin, 1968), pp. 287-91.

44. On working-class culture in the Paris suburbs after World War II, see Cornau; Pierre Chombart de Lauwe, Paris et l'agglomération parisienne (Paris, 1952); Fernand Dupuy, Etre maire communiste (Paris, 1975); Maurice Roncayolo, ed., Histoire de la France urbaine , vol. 5 (Paris, 1985), pp. 616-27; Raymond Pronier, Les Municipalités communistes, bilan de trente années de gestion (Paris, 1983).

45. Etat civil, Bobigny: Actes de mariages 1911, 1921, 1931. Although the majority of shopkeepers in Bobigny opposed the PCF, several shopkeepers were Communist or sympathetic to its positions, such as café owner Léon Pesch, the deputy mayor of Bobigny.

46. Metton; Berlanstein, Working People , pp. 47-52.

47. LN, 1921, 1926, 1931, 1936. On shopkeepers in the Paris area, see Philip Nord, Paris Shopkeepers and the Politics of Resentment (Princeton, 1986).

48. Even in the nineteenth century, the community's grand seigneur , the count of Blancmesnil, did not live in Bobigny (Agulhon, "L'opinion politique," p. 32). On the aversion of middle- and upper-class Parisians to suburban life, see Fishman, pp. 107-16.

49. On the growth of the tertiary sector in Paris cf. Claudie Lesselier, "Employeés de grands magasins à Paris avant 1914," Le Mouvement social 105 (1978); Theresa McBride, "A Woman's World: Department Stores and the Evolution of Women's Employment, 1870-1920," French Historical Studies 10 (1978).

50. Ariès, pp. 293-95; Louise-Marie Ferré, Les Classes sociales dans la France contemporaine (Paris, 1936), p. 190; Berlanstein, Working People , pp. 30-35, 65-73, 188-97; Mayer; Delon.

51. In fact, many employés were militant at work. I uncovered a reference to one functioning Communist workplace cell in the Bobigny area before the Popular Front of 1936; it involved railway employés in Le Bourget and Drancy (Archives nationales, Paris [hereafter cited as AN], series F7 13097, police report of 1 February 1925).

52. Theresa McBride, The Domestic Revolution. The Modernization of Household Service in England and France, 1820-1920 (London, 1976); Bonnie Smith, Confessions of a Concierge (New Haven, 1985).

53. LN, 1896, 1911, 1921, 1931; Scott and Tilly; McMillan.

54. Theodore Zeldin, France, 1848-1945: Ambition and Love (Oxford, 1979), p. 351.

55. On women's occupations in interwar France see McMillan, pp. 157-62; Sullerot; Fourastié; Scott and Tilly; Lesselier; McBride, "A Woman's World."

56. LN, 1921, 1926, 1931; Scott and Tilly.

57. Table 18 measures intergenerational mobility of brides and bride-grooms but not shifts from agricultural to industrial occupations. Information I was able to glean from the actes de mariages suggests that most children of agricultural families who left the farm became artisans or shopkeepers, not industrial workers. Mobility, both upward and downward, most commonly involved transitions between the working class and employés—the daughter of a day laborer, for example, becoming an office worker. Social divisions between the two groups, though real, were more permeable than those between these groups and others in the community, thus these groups made more political alliances.

58. Low levels of social mobility have been seen as promoting radicalism in contemporary societies; see Seymour Martin Lipset and Reinhard Bendix, Social Mobility in Industrial Society (Berkeley, 1967), pp. 3-4; William H. Sewell, Jr., "Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century European City," in Industrialization and Urbanization , ed. Theodore Rabb and Robert Rotberg (Princeton, 1981).

59. For a detailed analysis of metallurgy, see Philippe d'Hugues and Michel Peslier, "Les professions en France," Institut national d'etudes démographiques 51 (1969): 75-103; Fridenson, Histoire ; Schweitzer; Gille; Papayanis.

60. On unskilled labor in twentieth-century France, see Michel Collinet, Essai sur la condition ouvrière (Paris, 1951); Noiriel; Weil.

61. On the chemicals industry, see Chevalier, "La formation"; Arthur Fontaine.

62. On the occupations and skill levels of French workers between the wars, see Ferré, pp. 195-215; Collinet. Students of the French working class have underscored the radicalism of skilled workers, in contrast to unskilled and semiskilled factory workers (Bernard Moss, The Origins of the French Labor Movement: The Socialism of Skilled Workers [Berkeley, 1976]). Yet Lenard Berlanstein notes that in industrial suburbs at the turn of the century such

workers voted Socialist as often as more skilled workers in Parisian neighborhoods like Belleville ( Working People , pp. 159-64).

63. Commentators have noted that the skilled metalworkers' traditional radicalism continued into the twentieth century, figuring in the Communists' success in the Paris suburbs (James Cronin and Carmen Sirianni, eds., Work, Community, and Power [Philadelphia, 1983]; Noiriel; Kathryn Amdur, Syndicalist Legacy [Urbana, 1986]). Several of Bobigny's Communist city councillors were skilled metalworkers.

64. I found no indication that specific working-class occupations clustered in any Bobigny neighborhoods.

65. The argument about the absence of local elites is similar to the ''isolated mass" hypothesis of sociologists Clark Kerr and Abraham Siegel, who argue that individuals like miners and sailors, who work in isolated conditions, are more apt to strike than workers more integrated into general society. Bobigny, an isolated working-class community, exemplifies this argument to an extent (Clark Kerr and Abraham Siegel, "The Interindustry Propensity to Strike," in Industrial Conflict , ed. Arnold Kornhauser [New York, 1954], pp. 189-212). See the rebuttal to this thesis in Edward Shorter and Charles Tilly ( Strikes in France [Cambridge, Mass., 1974], pp. 287-95). Though agreeing with aspects of Shorter and Tilly's critique, I feel that Kerr and Siegel's thesis has more relevance to electoral activity than to strikes.

66. AS dossier La Favorite, letter from Louis Raymond to Mayor Clamamus, 17 September 1925. Wladimir d'Ormesson suggests that the contrast between the luxuries of Paris and the squalor of the suburbs, evident to workers who commuted into the city every day, would increase their resentment of the upper classes (d'Ormesson, pp. 7-8).

67. On this point see Stearns, p. 326; Guenther Roth, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany (Totowa, N.J., 1963).

1. Neighboring Drancy, which grew even faster, was controlled by the SFIO; Aubervilliers, also a working-class suburb, was dominated by Pierre Laval and the Radicals (Peru; Archer; Jean Jolly, Dictionnaire des parlementaires français , vol. 6 [Paris, 1970], pp. 2161-65).

2. Agulhon, "L'opinion politique," pp. 50-51; Phlipponneau, p. 401.

3. On the early years of the Third Republic and its fight for stability see Sanford Elwitt, The Making of the Third Republic (Baton Rouge, 1975); Adolphe Thiers, Notes et souvenirs, 1870-1873 (Paris, 1903); Daniel Halévy, La Fin des notables (Paris, 1930); Maurice Réclus, L'Avènement de la Troisième République, 1871-1875 (Paris, 1900).

4. Agulhon, "L'opinion politique"; Phlipponneau, p. 401; Conseil général de la Seine, p. 15.

5. On late nineteenth-century French party politics, see François Goguel, La Politique des partis sous la Troisième République (Paris, 1958), pp. 33-109; David Thomson, Democracy in France since 1870 (London, 1969); Emanuel Beau de Lomenie, Les Responsabilités des dynasties bourgeoises , 3 vols. (Paris,

1943-1954); Sanford Elwitt, The Third Republic Defended (Baton Rouge, 1986); Denis Brogan, The Development of Modern France, 1870-1939 , 2 vols. (Gloucester, Mass., 1970); Léon Jacques, Les Partis politiques sous la Troisième République (Paris, 1913); Robert de Jouvenel, La République des camarades (Paris, 1934); Peter Campbell, French Electoral Systems and Elections, 1789-1957 (New York, 1958).

6. See Agulhon, "L'opinion politique," p. 52; also Masson. On class and politics in the Third Republic, see Thomson, pp. 39-74.

7. Goguel, La Politique , pp. 110-50; Brogan, vol. 1, pp. 357-87. On the Dreyfus affair, see Douglas Johnson, France and the Dreyfus Affair (London, 1966); on late nineteenth-century French socialism, see Harvey Goldberg, The Life of Jean Jaurès (Madison, 1962); Claude Willard, Le Mouvement socialiste en France. Les Guesdistes (Paris, 1965); Georges LeFranc, Le Mouvement socialiste sous la Troisième République (Paris, 1963); Patrick Hutton, The Cult of the Revolutionary Tradition: The Blanquists in French Politics, 1864-1893 (Berkeley, 1981).

8. Ferret. The conservative Journal de Saint-Denis , which supported the municipal administration, attacked its more liberal opponents, charging that "the republic, for many of them . . . is a regime of bureaucrats, budget busters, wasters of finances, or of men thirsty for honors and for profits" ( Journal de Saint-Denis , 23 August 1903).

9. Paris-Est , 29 November 1902, p. 3. See other issues of Paris-Est : 6 September, p. 3, and 8 November 1902, p. 3; 18 April 1903, p. 3; also Agulhon. On radicalism in 1900, see Jean-Thomas Nordmann, Histoire des radicaux, 1820-1973 (Paris, 1974), pp. 115-45; Goldberg, pp. 235-92; Georges LeFranc, Les Gauches en France, 1789-1972 (Paris, 1973), pp. 158-68; Madeleine Rébérioux, La République radicale? 1898-1914 (Paris, 1975).

10. Paris-Est , 9 November 1901, p. 3.

11. Since problems in the allotments were just surfacing, the progressive Radicals did not address them then or develop any later expertise in dealing with them, judging from their propaganda. This failing was crucial, because allotments loomed large in Bobigny politics and because employés living in allotments should have been the Radicals' natural constituency. Paul Peysson was an employé d'administration; several of his followers were market gardeners ( Paris-Est , 23 April 1904, p. 3).

12. Paris-Est , 28 December 1901, p. 3. Some problems also arose from personality conflicts ( Paris-Est , 19 April 1902, p. 3; 30 May 1903, p. 3; 6 June 1903, p. 3).

13. Paris-Est , 12 April 1902, p. 3. Adrien Veber was a Republican Radical Socialist; in 1905 he took part in forming the SFIO, which expelled him in 1918 for his pro-war stance. In 1919 he ran against the Socialists for reelection to the legislature and was defeated (Jolly, vol. 8, pp. 3162-63).

14. Paris-Est , 17 May 1902, p. 3. See other comments in Paris-Est , 19 April 1902, p. 3; Journal de Saint-Denis , 27 April 1902, p. 3.

15. Paris-Est , 26 March 1904, p. 3; 7 May 1904, p. 2; Journal de Saint-Denis , 19 May 1904, p. 1; 14 August 1904, p. 4.

16. Paris-Est , 17 May 1902, p. 3; 30 May 1903, p. 3; 6 June 1903, p. 3; 26 March 1904, p. 3; 23 April 1904, p. 3. The members of the Republican Committee were its electoral candidates; most opposing candidates were market gardeners.

17. In March 1904, for example, Peysson wrote a long article in Paris-Est detailing how the growth would benefit groups in the community. It would increase the value of farmers' and market gardeners' land and reduce the amount of agricultural produce, thus lessening competition. More people would buy shopkeepers' wares; a larger city would be richer and could provide better services for workers. Some of Peysson's reasoning was tortuous, but for the leftist Radicals, growth and urbanization equaled progress, which was good for everyone ( Paris-Est , 19 March 1904, p. 3).

18. Journal de Saint-Denis , 16 August 1903, p. 3; 24 December 1903, p. 3.

19. Journal de Saint-Denis , 17 December 1903, p. 3; 30 August 1903, p. 3; 4 October 1903, p. 2. They labeled Peysson a follower of Marx and Jaurès, wanting to collectivize everything in sight, and an opportunist for allying with Veber and the socialists.

20. In the 1905 election for arrondissement council, and usually in elections for national office, the traditional Radicals backed Nationalist candidates ( Journal de Saint-Denis , 22 June 1905, p. 1; 29 June 1905, p. 1; Paris-Est , 1 July 1905, pp. 1, 3).

21. Paris-Est , 1 July 1905, p. 3.

22. Paris-Est , 18 January 1902, p. 1; 26 April 1902, p. 3. On relations between the Republican Left and the Socialists before 1905 see Goldberg, especially pp. 293-357; Nordmann, pp. 119-54; Willard.

23. In 1905, the Second Internationale's condemnation of Socialist participation in bourgeois governments led the new SFIO to withdraw its support from the governing Republican coalition (Goguel, La Politique , p. 122; Goldberg, pp. 322-57).

24. Paris-Est , 31 March 1906, p. 3; 7 April 1906, p. 3; 26 May 1906, p. 1; Agulhon, "L'opinion politique," p. 53.

25. Paris-Est , 20 October 1906, p. 3; 2 May 1908, p. 3; 4 April 1908, p. 3; 9 May 1908, p. 3; 14 May 1910, p. 1.

26. Paris-Est , 20 April 1912, p. 3; Nordmann, pp. 182-85.

27. Paris-Est , 30 December 1911, p. 4; 20 April 1912, p. 3; 4 May 1912, p. 3; Agulhon, "L'opinion politique," pp. 53-54.

28. Paris-Est , 8 May 1912, p. 3; Journal de Saint-Denis , 28 April 1912, p. 4. Montigny was elected mayor by the city council in December 1910, after Mayor Jacquelot resigned. I found little information about the Republican Socialist list, probably of remaining leftist Radicals; it opposed the city council on gas service for Bobigny.

29. Paris-Est , 25 May 1912, p. 3; see also Journal de Saint-Denis , 28 April 1912, p. 4.

30. On the Republican Left before 1914, see Jacques, pp. 223-66, 351-67; Nordmann, pp. 119-188; Rébérioux.

31. Journal de Saint-Denis , 10 April 1904, p. 1. On socialism in France before 1905 see, among others, Goldberg; Willard; Hutton; Moss; Hanagan;

Scott, Glassworkers ; Jolyon Howorth, Edouard Vaillant (Paris, 1982); Trempé; Alexandre Zevaes, Le Socialisme en France depuis 1871 (Paris, 1908).

32. Paris-Est , 1 July 1905, p. 1; Roger Price, A Social History of Nineteenth-Century France (London, 1987), pp. 255-57; Berlanstein, pp. 167-68; Henri Leyret, En plein faubourg (Paris, 1895). On politically conservative workers in the early twentieth century, see Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum (Manchester, 1971); Robert Tressell, The Ragged, Trousered Philanthropists (London, 1971).

33. Another example is city councillor Vernet, of working-class origin, who was elected as a traditional Radical but resigned in 1906 to join the SFIO ( Paris-Est , 2 June 1906, p. 3).

34. Peru; Bontemps and Jolinon; Berlanstein, Working People , pp. 156-68; Brunet, Saint-Denis , pp. 34-168; Price, Social History , pp. 257-58.

35. Journal de Saint-Denis , 10 May 1906, p. 2; Paris-Est , 12 May 1906, p. 1; 26 May 1906, p. 1; Jolly, p. 3162.

36. Nothing came of the meeting to create a People's University section. Paris-Est , 15 January 1910, p. 3; 29 January 1910, pp. 3, 4; Journal de Saint-Denis , 13 June 1912, p. 2. On the universités populaires see Goldberg, pp. 269-70.

37. Paris-Est , 28 May 1910, pp. 3, 4.

38. On the SFIO and municipal policy, see Adrien Veber, Le Socialisme municipal (Paris, 1908); Pierre Mimin, Le Socialisme municipal (Paris, 1911); M.J. McQuillen, "The Development of Municipal Socialism in France, 1880-1914," Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1973; Joan Scott, "Mayors versus Police Chiefs: Socialist Municipalities Confront the French State," in French Cities in the Nineteenth Century , ed. John Merriman (New York, 1981).

39. RDCM, 2 August, 19 October, and 30 November 1912; 31 May 1913. In 1912 workers composed roughly 40 percent of the population of Bobigny.

40. Paris-Est , 18 July 1914, p. 3. The city council resignations followed that of Mayor Jacquelot, whose reasons for leaving office I could not discover.

41. On the beginnings of World War I in France see Jean-Jacques Becker, 1914: Comment les Français sont entrés dans la guerre (Paris, 1977); Jean-Jacques Becker and Annie Kriegel, La guerre et le mouvement ouvrier français (Paris, 1964).

42. On wartime life in France see Becker, Les Français ; Fridenson, 1914-1918 ; Amdur, pp. 56-120; Alfred Rosmer, Le Mouvement ouvrier pendant la guerre , 2 vols. (Paris, 1936-1956).

43. RDCM, 8 August and 29 August 1915.

44. RDCM, 25 December 1917. Despite the Socialists' recommendation, nothing indicates that the council abolished tipping.

45. RDCM, 23 August 1914; also 13 September 1914; 21 January, 7 March, 11 April, 6 June, 18 June, and 22 June 1915; 12 March and 10 May 1916; 9 June 1918. Brunet, Saint-Denis , pp. 184-85; McMillan, pp. 102-3.

46. RDCM, 21 January, 19 September, and 14 November 1915; 23 January and 22 June 1916.

47. RDCM, 23 September 1916.

48. Goguel, La Politique , pp. 215-25; Brogan, vol. 2, pp. 556-57; Maurice Labi, La Grande Division des travailleurs (Paris, 1964); Jean-Louis Robert, La Scission syndicale de 1921 (Paris, 1980); Kriegel, Aux origines ; Robert Wohl, French Communism in the Making, 1914-1924 (Stanford, 1966); Annie Kriegel, La Croissance de la Confédération générale du travail 1918-1921 (Paris, 1966); Colette Chambelland and Jean Maitron, eds., Syndicalisme révolutionnaire et communisme: les archives de Pierre Monatte, 1914-1924 (Paris, 1968); Jean Charles, ed. Les Congrès de Tours. Texte intégral (Paris, 1980). On the international dimension, see Cronin and Sirianni; Charles Bertrand, Revolutionary Situations in Europe, 1917-1922 (Montreal, 1977).

49. Paris-Est , 22 November 1919, p. 2; Goguel, Géographie des élections , pp. 76-77; Wohl, pp. 148-52.

50. Journal de Saint-Denis , 13 November 1919, p. 1. For the first time in many years, Paul Peysson did not run for office.

51. Pronier, p. 21; see also Raymond Leslie Buell, Contemporary French Politics (New York, 1920), pp. 152-69.

52. On the SFIO and the 1919 elections, see Kriegel, Aux origines , pp. 423-39; Wohl, pp. 148-52.

53. The census figures bear out this shift (LN, 1911, 1921).

54. The independent Socialists changed their slates from election to election and never put out election manifestos; their lack of wartime representation on the city council was a great handicap.

55. Brunet, Saint-Denis , p. 236; see chapter 1, which discusses this combined development.

56. On social class, the Left, and politics in modern France, see Thomson, pp. 39-74; Kriegel, The French Communists ; Judt, Marxism ; Richard F. Hamilton, Affluence and the French Worker in the Fourth Republic (Princeton, 1967); Richard DeAngelis, Blue-Collar Workers and Politics: A French Paradox (London, 1982); Maurice Duverger, ed., Partis politiques et classes sociales (Paris, 1955).

57. Paris-Est , 27 December 1919, p. 1. The Socialists, of course, would have said they made a greater effort to keep constituents informed of city business.

58. RDCM for 1920: 6 August, 25 January, 18 November, 17 September, and 25 January.

59. Pronier, p. 22; Girault, Sur l'implantation ; Brunet, Saint-Denis , pp. 241-45; François Platone, "L'implantation municipale du parti communiste français dans la Seine et sa conception de l'administration communale," mémoire de maîtrise, Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1967.

60. Le Populaire , 24 October 1922, pp. 1, 2; Brunet, Saint-Denis , p. 267; Girault, Sur l'implantation .

61. Brunet, Saint-Denis , pp. 245-68.

62. RDCM, 23 October 1931.

63. RDCM, 23 March 1923. After Clamamus said he had verified the membership of La Prolétarienne in the PCF's Labor Sports Federation, the city council approved the endorsement over Vasseur's dissenting vote.

64. Paris-Est , 6 December 1919, p. 2; RDCM, 17 May 1925.

65. Brunet, Saint-Denis , p. 236; Girault, Sur l'implantation , pp. 108-17.

66. Denis; Bontemps and Jolinon; Peru.

67. On Bobigny's municipal elections in the 1920s and 1930s, see L'Humanité and the Journal de Saint-Denis for May 1925, May 1929, and May 1935. In 1928 the prefect of the Seine annulled the results of the regular legislative election in Clamamus's district because of suspected voting irregularities; Clamamus easily won the special election held in October 1928, in spite of vigorous campaigns by both the SFIO and the Right (AN, series F7 13112, police reports of 7 July, 20 September, 15 October 1928; F7 13017, police reports of 4 October, 6 October, 9 October, and 11 October 1928; F7 13260, police reports of 5 October and 13 October 1928).

68. The legend of the Red Belt has obscured the SFIO's presence in the Paris suburbs between the wars, running the city halls of Suresnes, Champigny, Puteaux, and Boulogne-Billancourt, the largest suburb and site of the giant Renault plant (Archer; René Sordes, Histoire de Suresnes [Suresnes, 1965]; Denis; Pourteau).

69. Bernard Chambaz, "L'implantation du parti communiste français a Ivry," in Sur l'implantatation du parti communiste français dans l'entre-deux-guerres , ed. Jacques Girault (Paris, 1977), pp. 156, 158; Brunet, Saint-Denis , pp. 245-60.

70. Bobigny, Archives communales, PCF electoral manifesto for 1929 municipal elections.

71. Fourcaut and Girault, p. 70.

72. Bobigny, Archives communales, PCF 1935 electoral manifesto.

73. "La ruine de la petite commerce" (Bobigny, Archives communales, PCF pamphlet, 1935).

1. For a detailed analysis of this law, see Léon Morgand, La Loi municipale (Paris, 1923).

2. William Munro, The Government of European Cities (New York, 1927), pp. 230-34. The prefect of the Seine was not a complete autocrat, however; he worked with the Conseil général de la Seine, whose members were elected by the public. On the council's deliberations, see its Procès-verbaux , 1900-1939.

3. "It is well known that those passions which incline either toward a surprise coup against the established government . . . or toward a new distribution of wealth by pillage and by ferment in large cities . . . form a powerful base of support on which revolutionaries know they can always rely. The state itself is therefore singularly interested in watching over everything that happens in a city like Paris" (Albert Lavallée, Le Régime administratif du département de la Seine et de la ville de Paris [Paris, 1901], pp. 1-2). On the special legislation governing the Department of the Seine, see also Raiga and Félix.

4. On conflicts between municipalities and the national government, see Berlanstein, Working People , pp. 159-64; Brunet, Saint-Denis and Un Demi-siècle; Scott, "Mayors versus Police Chiefs." Brunet asserts that, at least in the Paris area, conflicts between leftist mayors and the prefecture were sharper before World War I than in the 1920s and 1930s.

5. Scott, "Mayors versus Police Chiefs," pp. 233-34; Willard, pp. 181-97; McQuillen. During an electoral campaign in Lille, Guesde informed a crowd of listening workers that, whereas they could take city hall by ballots, they could take the prefecture only by gunfire (quoted by Albert Treint, "Les élections municipales," Cahiers de bolchévisme , February 1925, p. 787).

6. "Le parti communiste et le parlementarisme," Thèses, manifestes et résolutions adoptés par les Ier, IIe, IIIe, et IVe congrès de l'Internationale communiste , p. 68. On the beginning of the Communist International, see Helmut Gruber, ed., International Communism in the Era of Lenin (New York, 1972); Jane Degras, ed., The Communist International, 1919-1943 (London, 1971); Dominique Desanti, L'Internationale communiste (Paris, 1970); Fernando Claudin, The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform (New York, 1975).

7. Although brief, this Comintern statement had a major impact upon the PCF's position in the 1920s and 1930s. I came across paraphrasings of it in many articles in the PCF press: for example, in Cahiers de bolchévisme , February 1925, pp. 785-90; 15 May 1925, pp. 1187-95. Cf. a series of articles on municipal policy in L'Humanité , April 1929.

8. "Quatre ans de réalisations ouvrières à Clichy," L'Humanité , 18 April 1929, p. 2 (original author's emphasis). This article was part of a series that L'Humanité ran in April 1929 on Communist municipalities in the Paris suburbs, to impress their accomplishments on working-class voters before the municipal elections of May 1929.

9. That this was no idle fear is shown by the career of Jacques Doriot; he used his position as longtime mayor of Saint-Denis to lay the base for a fascist political party after his expulsion from the PCF in 1934 (Brunet, Saint-Denis , pp. 363-435). On PCF dissidents in the 1920s and 1930s see Girault, Sur l'implantation , pp. 108-17.

10. Pierre Semard and Victor Cat, "Circulaire sur le contrôle de l'action municipale," Cahiers de bolchévisme , February 1926, p. 385.

11. The 1925 PCF Congress decreed that in areas with Communist municipalities, local Party organizations should set up municipal commissions to advise city politicians. These commissions were to be directed by the Central Municipal Commission, under Victor Cat; the CMC set up a National Union of Communist Municipalities to coordinate the work of PCF city governments, especially in the Paris area (Victor Cat, "Fonctionnement de l'union nationale des municipalités communistes," AN, series F7 13092, undated police report).

12. Cf. on this point jederman, La «Bolchévisation» du parti communiste français (Paris, 1971), pp. 37-64; Philippe Robrieux, Histoire intérieure du parti communiste , vol. 1 (Paris, 1980), pp. 225-69. Bolchévisation restructured the PCF's organization, away from that of the old SFIO in particular and of

traditional French political parties in general, and toward that of the Communist party in the Soviet Union.

13. The Central Municipal Commission drew up municipal election campaign programs and submitted them to the national PCF Congress for approval before their use in individual municipalities; the Party wanted uniform municipal campaigns without personality contests between PCF candidates ( Cahiers de bolchévisme , April 1925, p. 1116).

14. Among those expelled were six Paris city councillors and the majority of the Clichy city council (Pierre Semard, "Le tournant décisif dans notre politique municipale," Cahiers de bolchévisme , April 1930, p. 356).

15. In January 1937 the PCF was able to pressure Léon Blum's Popular Front government into investigating corruption in the Saint-Denis city hall; it uncovered significant irregularities, prompting Doriot's resignation and his crushing defeat by the PCF in a special election in June 1937 (Brunet, Un Demi-siècle , pp. 190-202).

16. AN, series F7 13131, police report of 17 March 1933; Girault, Sur l'implantation , p. 117.

17. Jean Garchery, "Programme municipal préparé pour le congrès de Lyon en 1924," Cahiers d'histoire de l'Institut Maurice Thorez 36, no. 2 (1980): 89; Danielle Tartakowsky, "Ecoles et éditions communistes, 1921-1933," doctorat du troisième cycle, Université de Paris-8, 1977. Giving Party militants jobs as city workers also funded PCF activism, since they often did Party tasks on the job.

18. Victor Cat, "Thèse sur l'application du mot d'ordre du 'Bloc ouvrier et paysan' à l'action municipale," Cahiers de bolchévisme , December 1924, pp. 256-57 (original author's emphasis); see also Cahiers de bolchévisme , March 1926, pp. 660-63; 1 February 1927, pp. 118-20.

19. "Rapport auto-critique sur le 1er aôut," Cahiers de bolchévisme , January 1930, pp. 60-67.

20. Jacques Girault makes this point in his chapter on "L'Implantation du parti communiste français dans la région parisienne," in Girault, Sur l'implantation , pp. 110-17; see also Jerome Milch, "The PCF and Local Government," in Communism in Italy and France , ed. Donald Blackmer and Sidney Tarrow (Princeton, 1975), pp. 343-44.

21. L'Humanité , April 1929; Brunet, Un Demi-siècle , pp. 115-81; Girault, Sur l'implantation , pp. 113-16.

22. Cahiers de bolchévisme , April 1930, p. 360; February 1927, pp. 118-20; Cahiers de bolchévisme , August 1930, pp. 836-40.

23. La Voix de l'Est , 19 June 1936, p. 4; Victor Cat, "Les municipalités communistes et le chômage," Cahiers de bolchévisme , February 1927, pp. 118-20; L'Humanité , 8 February 1933, p. 2.

24. On this point see Tony Judt, "Une historiographie pas comme les autres: the French Communists and their history," European Studies Review 12, no. 4 (1982): 465. For a different viewpoint, cf. the preface by Aristide R. Zolberg to Kriegel, The French Communists , pp. xvi-xvii.

25. AN, series F7 13112, police report of 12 May 1928. The Journal de Saint-Denis charged that the Bobigny municipality used a city truck to drive

Clamamus's son to school in Paris (6 April 1929, p. 5); printed PCF leaflets in city hall (27 December 1930, p. 3); dismissed non-Communists from unemployment relief (17 March 1934, p. 6).

26. Jean Maitron, ed., Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier français, 1914-1939 (Paris, 1982-1984), vol. 22, pp. 325-29.

27. Roland Gaucher obtained this information from his interview with Clamamus ( Histoire secrète du parti communiste français [Paris, 1974], p. 6). See also Jules Humbert-Droz, L'OEil de Moscou sur Paris (Paris, 1964); Jules Humbert-Droz, Les Partis communistes des pays latins et l'Internationale communiste dans les années 1923-1927 (Boston, 1981); Jenny Humbert-Droz, Une pensée, une conscience, un combat: la carrière politique de Jules Humbert-Droz (Neuchâtel, 1976).

28. The account of this event indicated the interpenetration of Bobigny's municipality with the local PCF section; "the municipality and the secretariat of the section, represented by Pesch, Duval, Menou, Langlois, took the first honor guard"—all four were city councillors ( La Voix de l'Est , 27 November 1936, p. 1; 14 May 1938, p. 4; 7 October 1938, p. 1; 20 January 1939, p. 4).

29. Journal de Saint-Denis , 17 February 1934, p. 3; L'Humanité printed the full text of the prefectural order (24 October 1925, p. 2). On the strike see Ronald Tiersky, French Communism 1920-1972 (New York, 1974), pp. 42-44.

30. L'Humanité, 13 November 1925, p. 1 (emphasis in original). Clamamus's claim that municipal employees were acting on their own was inaccurate.

31. Fernand Grenier, Ce Bonheur-là (Paris, 1974). Cf. also jederman; A. Bernard, "L'école de Bobigny," Cahiers de bolchévisme , October 1925, pp. 1961-67.

32. "L'école de Bobigny," Cahiers de bolchévisme , October 1925; Tartakowsky; Grenier.

33. Jacques Duclos, Mémoires , vol. 1: 1896-1934 (Paris, 1968), p. 174. See also Grenier, who remembers Duclos as the school's star pupil.

34. Quoted in Gaucher, p. 174.

35. L'Humanité , 7 December 1924, p. 1; 10 December 1924, pp. 1, 2.

36. L'Humanité , 8 December 1924, p. 1; AN, series F7 13188, police report from 1924.

37. One exception was the city council's endorsement of a resolution by the Communist municipality of Ivry to liberate Henri Dumoulin, a mutineer in the Black Sea fleet revolt; Dumoulin was elected to the Ivry city council in a June 1927 byelection (RDCM, 3 August 1927). On the fleet revolt, see Jacques Raphael-Leygues, Les Mutins de la met Noire (Paris, 1981).

38. RDCM, 1 September 1921; 26 May 1936; 5 June 1937. Most of these grants were for very little money, and therefore had symbolic importance only. For a comparison with prewar Socialist municipalities, see Berlanstein, Working People , p. 160.

39. Many grants were made during the Popular Front, which explains why a PCF municipality would honor the author of the French national anthem (on this point see Brower).

40. RDCM, 7 October 1925.

41. RDCM, 11 March 1930.

42. RDCM, 22 June 1931; 18 June 1926.

43. RDCM, 1 August 1925.

44. Perhaps the city council did not have much money for political causes; it rarely voted political motions without some subsidy.

45. La Banlieue rouge , 28 January 1922, p. 3; 25 February 1922, p. 3.

46. AN, series F22 224, report of 14 June 1932.

47. La Voix de l'Est , 19 June 1936, p. 4; 26 June 1936, p. 4; 15 January 1937, p. 4; 20 January 1939, p. 4; 24 February 1939, p. 4.

48. During my conversations with Christine Mercier, Mathilde Lacroix, and Jean Cortot, they all emphasized the urban reforms as the reason for the Communists' strength in Bobigny (interviews conducted 7 January 1985, Foyer Gaston Monmousseau, Bobigny).

49. For a detailed example of budgetary analysis, see Brunet, Un Demisiècle . The actual work of drawing up the budgets was done by the city tax inspector ( receveur municipal ), an official appointed by the president of the republic and subject to the Ministry of Finance. This system made city budgets one of the aspects of municipal administration least subject to mismanagement, since a municipality could not easily falsify its budget without higher authorities taking notice (Brunet, Un Demi-siècle , pp. 127-28).

50. Archives de la Seine, Budgets et Comptes, Bobigny (hereafter cited as BC). The system of budget keeping that prevailed among French municipalities in the interwar period was complex. All budgets were divided into receipts and expenditures; each of these two sections was divided into three parts: ordinary, extraordinary, and supplemental. Moreover, a city government drew up two budgets each year: one, the budget primitif , estimated receipts and expenditures for the coming fiscal year and was submitted to the prefect for his approval; the other, the compte administratif , stated the amounts the municipality actually collected and spent during the year. In analyzing the four city budgets, I used the comptes administratifs.

51. The centimes additionnels were based on four national taxes: on land, on movable property, on doors and windows, and on commercial licenses ( patentes ). The national government limited the number of centimes additionnels to prevent local governments from exhausting their tax bases (which would endanger the national government's source of funds) (Brunet, Un Demi-siècle , p. 137).

52. For the PCF, see Cahiers de bolchévisme , April 1925, p. 1049; for the SFIO, see Le Populaire , 23 November 1927, p. 1; see also Brunet, Un Demi-siècle .

53. See Bobigny, Archives communales, for the PCF section's program for the 1935 municipal elections.

54. For example, few Bobigny taxpayers were affected by the patente , one of the four national taxes (see note 51, above).

55. BC; L'Humanité , 8 February 1933, p. 2.

56. BC. By contrast, in other suburbs in the 1920s and 1930s public assistance constituted 27 to 30 percent of the budget in Saint-Denis, 21 to 27 percent in Boulogne, and 20 to 25 percent of the budget in Levallois-Perret. In

1930 and 1931 education was 9 percent of expenses in Neuilly, 13 percent in Boulogne, and 16 percent in Saint-Denis (Brunet, Un Demi-siècle , pp. 151, 158).

57. BC, 1936. RDCM for 1931: 2 March, 22 June, 29 July, and 28 October; for 1932: 7 June, 1 August, 21 October, and 29 December; 15 December 1933; for 1934: 13 March and 31 July; 13 July 1935; 29 December 1936.

58. La Voix de l'Est , 31 January 1936, p. 3.

59. BC, 1931.

60. On the laws concerning allotments in this period, see Geo Minvielle, Traité pratique des lotissements (Paris, 1936); J. Cazenavette, Extension des villes et lotissements (Paris, 1936); Pierre Bénoist d'Etiveaud, Le Régime juridique des lotissements (Paris, 1939); d'Ormesson; Bouffet; Polti.

61. RDCM, 23 October 1921; 18 November 1920; 19 December 1921; 18 February 1924.

62. RDCM, 8 November 1924; 18 February 1924. The report does not mention what percentage of the sewer's cost the developer was asked to pay, or if the developer did pay it.

63. RDCM, 1 August 1925. See also RDCM for 1924: 31 May, 22 August, and 6 December; for 1925: 14 February and especially the session of 19 April, during which the council ruled on six allotments.

64. RDCM, 14 February 1925.

65. RDCM, 3 April and 13 October 1926. This money was taken from the funds for the maintenance of the local road network.

66. The full text of the 1924 law is reprinted in Paul Rouilly, Les Lotissements: droits et obligations des acquéreurs et des vendeurs (Paris, 1925), pp. 83-100; see also Bénoist d'Etiveaud; Polti; Minvielle, Traité pratique .

67. The municipality won the case, winning significant damages of over 4,000 francs ( L'Aube sociale , 31 July 1926).

68. RDCM, 18 February 1924. Other municipalities also took on the lotisseurs ; in Antony Mayor Mounié had posters put up and leaflets distributed at city expense, warning potential buyers of the risks involved in buying land in an allotment (Anne Fontaine, p. 63).

69. In legislative elections, Bobigny also gave him the largest percentage of votes in the district; on the Noisy-le-Sec area see Thomas, pp. 158-61.

70. L'Humanité , 19 September 1925, p. 2; 7 February 1926, p. 2; 15 March 1926, p. 2; 10 April 1926, p. 2; 11 February 1928, p. 2; 26 January 1931, p. 2; 24 April 1932, p. 2.

71. La Banlieue rouge , 25 February 1922, p. 2.

72. L'Aube sociale , 13 March 1926, p. 2; the article illustrates Clamamus's ability to blend the general lines of PCF policy on this issue with the specific needs of his city government.

73. Bouffet, pp. 23-28; the text of the proposed law is reprinted in L'Aube sociale , 4 September 1926, p. 2.

74. Legislators had found it difficult to separate individuals who bought a lot for their own use from small developers (Bouffet, pp. 25-28; Paul Barbier, La Question des lotissements défectueux [Levallois-Perret, 1931], p. 78).

75. L'Humanité , 7 October 1928, p. 3 (emphasis in original). For other examples of the PCF's position, see L'Humanité , 27 November 1927, p. 2, and 10 December 1927, p. 2. Although Clamamus's proposed law was relatively harsh on the allotment developers, it did not live up to the PCF's vow to make them pay for everything; this slogan was, not surprisingly, extremely popular among the mal-lotis but was unrealistic because of the terms of the allotments' contracts.

76. The PCF's poor performance in the 1928 and 1929 elections in the Paris area and elsewhere had more to do with its new ultrasectarian line than with the Sarraut Law.

77. Annie Fourcaut argues that the Sarraut Law did hurt the PCF among the mal-lotis in Bobigny (Annie Fourcaut, ''Bobigny, banlieue rouge," Communisme 3 [1983]).

78. RDCM for 1928: 22 May, 19 July, and 31 October. Most often the municipality asked the Department of the Seine to come up with the money.

79. For an explanation of the 1912 law's effect on associations syndicales, see Bouffet, pp. 54-67.

80. AS dossier André Jaouen, undated letter from the Union amicale des maires de la Seine.

81. On the mal-lotis ' reaction to the Sarraut Law, see Bastié, Croissance , pp. 310-11; Combe, pp. 89-90.

82. See for example AS dossiers: La Renaissance, letter of 29 January 1924; Les Vignes, letter of 12 February 1926; André Jaouen, documents dated 25 June 1925, 31 October 1926; La Bergère, document of 5 March 1931; RDCM, 23 October 1933.

83. AS dossier La Renaissance, letters of 31 July, 4 August, and 28 November 1927.

84. RDCM, 23 October 1933. See also RDCM, 31 October 1928, 27 November 1929, 2 March 1931, and 18 June 1926; AS dossiers: Les Vignes, letters of 21 November 1927 and 13 July 1929; La Bergère, letters of 20 July 1932 and 9 June 1934; Paris-Bobigny, letters of 17 February 1926, 7 August and 18 August 1927; La Favorite, letters of 19 April 1921, 17 September 1925, and 30 January 1926.

85. AS dossier rues Perron and Perrusset, letter of 25 August 1924.

86. AS dossier La Renaissance, letter of 31 December 1925.

87. On the repair of defective allotments in the Paris suburbs, see Bastié, Croissance , pp. 301-31; Anne Fontaine, pp. 63-64; Peru.

88. RDCM, 18 November 1920; these were peripheral areas like the Pont de Bondy and Six Routes.

89. RDCM, 6 December 1924. See also RDCM for 1926: 15 February, 3 April, 10 May, 18 June, 27 July, 2 September, and 13 October; for 1927: 10 October and 14 November; for 1928: 19 March and 22 May.

90. RDCM, 27 November 1929; Bobigny, Archives communales, PCF section's 1929 municipal election platform.

91. RDCM, 29 July 1931.

92. La Voix de l'Est , 9 November 1935; Bobigny, Archives communales, PCF section's 1935 municipal election platform; RDCM for 1930: 25 March,

20 May, and 30 December; 29 July 1931; for 1932: 7 June and 29 December; 16 May 1933; 26 February 1935.

93. RDCM, 23 October 1921; 21 October 1922; for 1923: 23 January and 15 February.

94. RDCM for 1924: 31 May, 22 August, and 8 November; Bobigny, Archives communales, PCF section's 1929 municipal election platform.

95. RDCM, 18 November 1920; 1 March 1925. The Suburban Gas Company, which had supplied the gas lighting, submitted a proposal in November 1920 to install electrical power in Bobigny; the proposal sat in committee for years. In 1923 the city council received a more favorable bid from the North-East Parisian Power Company and got the Suburban Gas Company to cede part of its monopoly, paying Suburban Gas a 5 percent royalty for this concession.

96. Journal de Saint-Denis , 21 March 1925. The contract was not officially ratified until 1927.

97. RDCM, 15 February 1926; Le Prolétaire de Bobigny , 20 July 1929.

98. RDCM, 20 May 1930; 21 May 1938.

99. On utilities in the interwar period, see Fourastié; Michelle Perrot, "Histoire de la condition féminine et histoire de l'électricité," in Electricité dans l'histoire, problèmes et méthodes . Actes du colloque de l'Association pour l'histoire de l'électricité en France (Paris, 1985); Françoise Werner, "Du ménage à l'art ménager: l'évolution du travail ménager et son écho dans la presse féminine française de 1919 à 1939," Le Mouvement social (October-December 1984). I am grateful to Robert Frost for his suggestions on this issue.

100. Le Prolétaire de Bobigny , 30 March 1929; RDCM, 25 January 1920; 17 January 1922.

101. RDCM, 12 August 1922.

102. RDCM for 1922: 3 July and 26 December; for 1923: 23 March, 7 September; 2 September 1926; 21 October 1932.

103. La Voix de l'Est , October 1937. The city council explained its decision: the growing population of the area and traffic in local streets made the old, sidewalk marketplace more inconvenient (RDCM, 7 November 1935).

104. Parti communiste français (PCF), Compte rendu du congrès national du parti communiste français (Villeurbanne, 1936), pp. 253-54.

105. LN, 1911, 1921, 1931. For example, in February 1919 the council talked of establishing a summer camp for needy children; nothing came of this proposal (RDCM, 23 February 1919).

106. Many children from the Pont de Bondy were sent to Bondy's schools; for this service Bobigny paid a certain amount of money per pupil to Bondy (RDCM for 1919: 6 April and 7 June; for 1920: 28 March, 27 June, 26 August, and 17 September.

107. RDCM, 3 April 1926.

108. La Voix de l'Est , 23 September 1935, p. 4.

109. RDCM, 29 July 1931. Before 1931 the only nursery school in Bobigny was located downtown in the girls' school.

110. La Voix de l'Est , 19 May 1939. On the building of the Pont de Bondy's nursery school, see RDCM, 6 October 1930; 5 December 1930; 27

April 1931; 28 October 1931; 18 December 1931; 19 June 1934; 8 December 1936; 27 April 1937; 5 June 1937. Voix de l'Est , 19 May 1939.

111. RDCM, 23 July 1937; 28 February 1939.

112. RDCM, 23 February 1919; 30 June 1921; La Voix de l'Est , 24 July 1936. La Machine's summer camp was so inexpensive because it was not a traditional summer camp; the municipality built no facilities in La Machine but sent children from Bobigny to live with families in the area. Life with "the workers of La Machine" was not just a boarding arrangement; it was intended to be integral to a child's summer experience. The campers did have programs directed by supervisors hired by the municipality of Bobigny. In the summer of 1936 Deputy Mayor Léon Pesch was a head counselor there.

113. RDCM, 10 March 1933. The land for the Ile d'Oléron's camp cost 170,000 francs; this expense was shared by the city's school chest and the municipality.

114. RDCM, 10 April 1930; La Voix de l'Est , 24 July 1936; camp fees were higher for children from outside Bobigny. On the general economic situation of workers, see Sauvy, vol. 2, pp. 510-26.

115. Le Prolétaire de Bobigny , 4 May 1929 (emphasis in original).

116. L'Emancipation nationale , 27 August 1937, p. 4. Given the extreme right-wing and anti-Communist bias of this newspaper under Jacques Doriot, this citation must be accepted with some caution. Yet it reflects the general nature of life at Bobigny's summer camps. Clamamus had been elected Senator in 1936.

117. La Voix de l'Est , 14 February 1936; RDCM, 4 July 1929; 27 November 1929; 16 November 1937; 30 May 1920; 30 June 1921; 22 August 1924; 19 April 1925; 18 June 1926; 27 July 1926; 13 January 1927; 11 May 1927; 19 July 1928; 26 December 1928; 2 August 1929; 7 June 1932.

118. RDCM, 18 February 1924. I came across over twenty city council resolutions protesting conditions of public transit or recommending changes in service, for example those of 26 May 1921, 12 April 1922, 18 February 1924, 16 May 1933, and 21 January 1938.

119. RDCM, 21 October 1922; 1 August 1925; 15 February 1926; 25 March 1930. Intersuburban public transit is still underdeveloped in the Paris area.

120. RDCM, 3 August 1927.

121. RDCM, 11 March 1930; 2 March 1931; 28 October 1931; 1 August 1932; 21 October 1932; 15 December 1933; 31 July 1934; 13 July 1935; 29 December 1936.

122. RDCM, 25 March 1929. City councils in the first decade of the twentieth century also protested such pollution.

123. RDCM, 14 November 1921.

124. Brunet, Saint-Denis , p. 340; Girault, Sur l'implantation , pp. 61-203; Fourcaut, "Bobigny."

125. Jolly, vol. 7, p. 2531; Anne Fontaine, pp. 63-66.

126. Sordes, pp. 529-37; Evenson, 212-13, 220-25. Important works by Henri Sellier on the Paris suburbs include Les Banlieues urbaines and La Crise du logement .

127. Merriman, The Red City , pp. 201-10. See also Scott; McQuillen; Amdur; Trempé.

128. Brunet, Un Demi-siècle , pp. 143-75; Girault, Sur l'implantation , pp. 110-16. The issue of allotments was crucial; the Communists addressed it more thoroughly and had more consistent success with the mal-lotis than the Socialists had.

1. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (New York, 1961), p. 41. On French working-class popular culture in the early twentieth century, see Fourastié; Zeldin; Agulhon, Histoire , vol. 4; pp. 434-70; the works of Valdour, like Ateliers et taudis , are also useful.

2. McMillan, pp. 9-16; Scott and Tilly; Tamara K. Hareven and Robert Wheaton, eds., Family and Sexuality in French History (Philadelphia, 1980); Zeldin, pp. 179-223.

3. The historical data on rates of marriage in France are unclear, but the percentage of couples living out of wedlock appears to have increased in the nineteenth century, whereas that of married couples increased in the early twentieth century (Scott and Tilly, pp. 91-92, 96-98).

4. LN, 1921; see also Gillis.

5. LN, 1921. For a discussion of cohabitation among nineteenth-century Parisian workers, see Michel Frey, "Du mariage et concubinage dans les classes populaires à Paris (1846-1847)," Annales—Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 33, no. 4 (July-August 1978): 803-29.

6. This and other such posters are reproduced in Guerrand.

7. Interview with Jean Lallet, on 19 February 1982, Hôtel de ville, Bobigny.

8. Ferret, pp. 49-50; in the end the fictional couple decides to buy the lot.

9. Berlanstein, Working People , pp. 139-40; Brunet, "Constitution." On American suburbia and family life, see Fishman, pp. 150-53; Jackson, pp. 47-52.

10. LN, 1921; McMillan, pp. 157-58; Scott and Tilly.

11. "Where are the factories in Ivry where the 8-hour day is observed? Through general and unpunished violation, the 9 1/4-hour day, normal through the adoption of the English system, is increased to 10 hours and more" (Bremond, p. 54).

12. On workplace conditions in interwar France, see Bremond; Sauvy; Tom Kemp, The French Economy, 1913-1939 (London, 1972); Charles Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe (Princeton, 1975); Valdour, Ateliers et taudis, Le Désordre ouvrier, Popinqu'à Menilmuch', Ouvriers parisiens ; Fridenson, Histoire ; Schweitzer.

13. Tilly and Scott, p. 176; Werner.

14. Bastié, Croissance , p. 267; Ferret.

15. Jean Cortot, one of the people I interviewed on this subject, insisted that Bobigny was a working-class community where people did not have much leisure time (interview of 7 January 1985, Foyer Gaston Monmousseau, Bobigny).

16. Berlanstein, Working People , pp. 127-33. Some Balbynians did frequent a movie theater in Noisy-le-Sec (Cortot interview on 7 January 1985).

17. La Voix de l'Est , 6 January 1939, p. 4; 17 January 1939, p. 3; RDCM, I September 1921.

18. RDCM, 25 January 1920. See also RDCM, 13 June 1914; La Voix de l'Est , 28 August 1937, p. 1.

19. Cf. Berlanstein, Working People , on commercial leisure facilities in Saint-Denis. Much larger than Bobigny, Saint-Denis had developed more such facilities; it was exceptional among Paris suburbs in this regard.

20. Richard Holt, Sport and Society in Modern France (Hamden, Conn., 1981), pp. 202-6; Didot Bottin, vol. 2, Bobigny, 1930s. The local press contained little reporting on team sports nor did the people I interviewed mention them in their comments on leisure life in Bobigny.

21. La Voix de l'Est , 9 April 1938, p. 4; interview with Jean Cortot. By the late 1930s Bobigny had a fishing goods store to serve local fishermen.

22. Interview with Florence Aumont on 7 January 1985, Bobigny.

23. Marrus, pp. 129-32. By contrast, Paris had one café for every eighty-seven residents in 1909.

24. Dupé and Thivollier. See also Lhande, Le Christ dans la banlieue and Le Dieu qui bouge ; Pierre Pierrard, L'Eglise et les ouvriers en France (Paris, 1984).

25. Etat civil, Bobigny: Actes de naissances et de mariages; Paroisse de Bobigny, actes de baptêmes et de mariages.

26. Dupé and Thivollier; Agulhon, Histoire , pp. 448-58; Pierrard.

27. Berlanstein, Working People , pp. 127-34; Agulhon, Histoire , pp. 457-70; Joffre Dumazedier, Vers une civilisation du loisir (Paris, 1962).

28. Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 179-238. Isolation seems to have been a key aspect of working-class life in both Britain and France. Zeldin notes, in a poll taken among French workers in the 1960s, that many respondents felt that an inability to meet and interact comfortably with different kinds of people was one of their greatest disappointments (Zeldin, pp. 272-74).

29. On the political culture of the Red Belt, see Pronier; Dupuy; Roncayolo, pp. 616-27.

30. RDCM, 19 June 1934.

31. AN, series F7 13112, police report of 20 September 1928; 13119, police report of 28 December 1930; Le Prolétaire de Bobigny , 27 April 1929, p. 2; 4 May 1929, p. 1. This theme played the greatest role during the ultraleft "class against class" period from 1927 to 1934.

32. AN, series F7 13112, police report of 14 October 1927; undated police report; 13119, police report of 12 November 1929. Solidarity with Republican Spain was a very popular cause in Bobigny during the late 1930s; Communist meetings often finished with donations to help this cause ( La Voix de l'Est , 7 August 1936, p. 4; 14 August 1936, p. 4; 28 August 1936, p. 4; 22 May 1937, p. 4; 5 February 1938, p. 4; 4 June 1938, p. 4; 10 February 1939, p. 4.

33. La Voix de l'Est , 26 June 1936, p. 4.

34. For example, "The direct administration of Bobigny's markets, the work of our Communist municipality, thus shows the world what the workers

can do when called to run a city government" ( Le Prolétaire de Bobigny , 30 March 1929, p. 3).

35. AN, series F7 13017, police report of 11 November 1929.

36. A police report describing a Communist demonstration in Bobigny noted that "a militant of the Association républicaine des anciens combattants (Bobigny section) took the floor to protest against the abuse made of the victims of war by . . . nationalist ceremonies; he also attacked the capitalist regime, which contains in itself the seeds of war" (AN series F7 13017, police report of 4 September 1927).

37. La Voix de l'Est , 19 May 1939, p. 4; 14 February 1926, p. 4.

38. La Voix de l'Est , 19 February 1937; 8 May 1937; 7 May 1938; L'Humanité , 25 June 1934; AN, F7 13119, police report of 12 November 1929; AN, F7 13522, police report of 4 February 1927.

39. Brogan, vol. 2, p. 641; see also Lhande, Le Christ dans la banlieue ; Pierrard, pp. 505-7. With a very different political orientation, the church reached out to the workers of the Paris suburbs in the successful "worker-priest" movement of the 1940s (Oscar Arnal, "A Missionary 'Main tendue' toward the French Communists: The 'Témoignages' of the Worker-Priests, 1943-1954," French Historical Studies 13, no. 4 [Fall 1984]: 529-56).

40. Dupé and Thivollier, p. 66.

41. Pierrard, pp. 534-35; La Voix de l'Est , 14 February 1936, p. 3.

42. Note the similarity to the socialist civil baptisms described by Scott in "Mayors versus Police Chiefs," pp. 241-43.

43. L'Humanité , 13 October 1925; 17-18 October 1925. The PCF held a massive funeral to honor Sabatier and made the struggle to free Sacco and Vanzetti a major Communist cause during the 1920s (Brunet, Saint-Denis , pp. 274-75).

44. Not all people in Bobigny were happy with these name changes. Louis Cagnani protested sharply against renaming his street rue Leningrad and submitted a petition to this effect signed by twenty-three of the street's residents to the city council (RDCM, 20 May 1930).

45. The debate over the importance of community sentiment in modern life has been especially sharp among sociologists. See, among others, Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Society (New York, 1957); Shorter, Modern Family , pp. 227-44; Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (New York, 1958); Herbert Gans, The Urban Villagers (Glencoe, N.Y., 1962), and Gans, The Levittowners ; William F. Whyte, Streetcorner Society (Chicago, 1955).

46. Italian immigrants were the only exception to the general absence of ethnic groups in Bobigny, but the city's Italian population was too small to dominate any one neighborhood.

47. William Dobriner, Class in Suburbia (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963); Ruth Crichton, Commuter's Village (Dawlish, 1964)

48. On this point see Suzanne Keller, The Urban Neighborhood (New York, 1968); Young and Willmott; Gans; and Elizabeth Bott, Family and Social Network (London, 1957).

49. Brunet, "Constitution."

50. Using marriage records to measure community sentiment has drawbacks: the profound relationships they register may tell little about the casual sociability often found among neighbors; marriage records may also have less relevance in rapidly growing communities like Bobigny. Nonetheless, these data do indicate the relative weight of neighborhood relationships (I am grateful to Elinor Accampo for her observations on this matter).

51. Etat civil, Bobigny: Actes de mariages 1921.

52. Etat civil, Bobigny: Actes de mariages 1923, 1927, 1933, 1937.

53. On the importance of workplace friendships, see Valdour's and Brémond's works listed in the bibliography; see also Claude Fischer, To Dwell Among Friends (Chicago, 1982).

54. Etat civil, Bobigny: Actes de mariages 1921, 1911.

55. Gans; see also Tamara K. Hareven, ed., Family and Kin in Urban Society (New York, 1977); Hareven and Wheaton; Shorter, Modern Family .

56. Le Prolétaire de Bobigny , 15 June 1929, p. 2. Florence Aumont, whom I interviewed on the subject, also insisted on the prevalence and importance of mutual aid in interwar Bobigny (interview on 7 January 1985, Bobigny).

57. Le Prolétaire de Bobigny , 15 June 1929, p. 2; this article continues: "Several comrades from Nouveau Village, bothered by this anarchic way of practicing solidarity, thought of organizing it . . . while remaining true to the practice of solidarity with, of course, a minimum of indispensable regulation and complete honesty. A society [of mutual aid] was created a few years ago, with dues of one franc per week."

58. R. N. Morris and John Hogey, The Sociology of Housing (London, 1965), pp. 41-44.

59. RDCM, 1919-1939. See for example RDCM, 26 May 1936; 7 November 1935; 10 November 1936; 28 March 1920; 25 January 1920; 20 May 1930; 6 October 1930.

60. La Voix de l'Est , 7 May 1936, p. 4. Léon Pesch, the premier adjoint (deputy mayor) of Bobigny during most of the 1920s and 1930s, dominated the LIC of Nouveau Village and figured in community organizations in the Pont de Bondy. He was elected mayor of Bobigny in 1944.

61. The LICs and the associations were often very close. Many associations were founded by local LICs; in some smaller neighborhoods there was little difference between them (AS dossier Les Vignes, letter of 15 June 1927; AS dossier Le Chemin de Fer, letter of 25 October 1928; AS dossier La Renaissance, letter of 1 February 1924).

62. AS dossier Les Vignes, letter from Dumontier to Clamamus, 15 June 1927.

63. On American urban political machines, see Alexander Callow, ed., The City Boss in America: An Interpretative Reader (New York, 1976); John Haeger and Michael Weber, eds., The Bosses (St. Louis, 1974); Bruce Stave, ed., Urban Bosses, Machines, and Progressive Reformers (Malabar, Fla., 1984); Seymour Mandelbaum, Boss Tweed's New York (New York, 1965).

64. A striking characteristic of Communism in Bobigny was the contrast between the PCF's large vote totals and its few militants. Even during the Popular Front, when the PCF section was at its largest point between the wars,

the ratio was usually one militant to ten PCF voters (Fourcaut, "Bobigny, banlieue rouge").

65. Etat civil, Bobigny: Actes de mariages 1923, 1927, 1933, 1937. On urban neighborhoods and class consciousness, see James Cronin, "Rethinking the Legacy of Labor, 1890-1925," in Work, Community, and Power , ed. James Cronin and Carmen Sirianni (Philadelphia, 1983), pp. 35-36; Hanagan; Daniel Walkowitz, Worker City, Company Town (Urbana, Ill., 1978), pp. 156-70; Alan Dawley, Class and Community (Cambridge, Mass., 1976).

66. RDCM, 31 May 1924; 20 May 1930; 16 May 1933; La Voix de l'Est , 15 January 1938, p. 4; 19 March 1938, p. 4; 28 May 1938, p. 4; 10 February 1939, p. 4; 16 June 1939, p. 4.

67. La Voix de l'Est , 29 June 1935, p. 3; AN, series F7 13119, police reports of 13 July and 14 July 1930.

68. AN, series F7 13103, police report of 25 February 1926. The twenty-first rayon was a subunit of the Paris area PCF, which included Bobigny and nine other northeastern suburbs, from 1924 to 1928 (Fourcaut, "Bobigny, banlieue rouge," pp. 15-16).

69. AN, series F7 13103, police reports of 2 August 1925 and 11 July 1926; RDCM, 11 May 1927.

70. Journal de Saint-Denis , 2 April 1932, p. 9. One of the main organizers of the Blue Blouses was Hermann Berlinski, a German Communist refugee (and a Jew) who lived in Bobigny during the 1930s. He belonged to the French Workers' Theater Federation and gave piano lessons locally (Maitron, vol. 18, p. 425).

71. RDCM, 20 May 1930; La Voix de l'Est , 26 March 1938, p. 4; 13 January 1939, p. 4.

72. These cafés often advertised in the local PCF press, which frequently used them as distribution centers. Among the more important were the café Séné, 74, rue de la République; the maison Hory, 3, rue de la Courneuve; and—above all—the maison Pesch, at 78, rue Sacco-Vanzetti.

73. The people I interviewed in Bobigny all remembered various festivals and celebrations, but no one noted their political content (interviews on 7 January 1985, Foyer Gaston Monmousseau, Bobigny).

74. Joffre Dumazedier notes that whereas intellectuals tend to take leisure time as an opportunity for self-education, workers are not so willing to give their free time to such pursuits; these attitudes mirror the ones we have indicated among Bobigny's Communist activists and the local working class as a whole.

75. The activities of local unions in Bobigny were covered fully by the local Communist press, especially Le Prolétaire de Bobigny and La Voix de l'Est .

1. Le Populaire , 13 May 1935, p. 3. I connsider a political party to have control of a municipality when the mayor and a majority of the city council members belong to that party.

2. Statistics for municipal elections in this period are often fragmentary and difficult to come by; for the most part I have relied on the national press, especially Le Temps, Le Populaire , and L'Humanité .

3. Le Populaire , 13 May 1935, p. 3.

4. On the PCF during the Popular Front see Brower, The New Jacobins ; Georges LeFranc, Histoire du front populaire (Paris, 1965).

5. On life at work in the Paris area during the early twentieth century, see Fridenson, Histoire ; Schweitzer; Alain Touraine, L'Evolution du travail ouvrier aux usines Renault (Paris, 1955); Noiriel, Les Ouvriers dans la société française ; Collinet, Essai sur la condition ouvriére ; Jean Depretto and Sylvie Schweitzer, Le Communisme à l'usine (Lille, 1984); Michael Seidman, "The Birth of the Weekend and the Revolts against Work: The Workers of the Paris Region during the Popular Front," French Historical Studies (Fall 1982).

6. Berlanstein, Working People ; Fridenson, Histoire ; Touraine; Amdur, pp. 15-30.

7. Such fears were most notably voiced by Alphonse Merrheim, the leader of the French Metal Workers' Federation (Papayanis).

8. On French labor during World War I, see Amdur; Fridenson, 1914-1918 ; Becker, Les Français ; Arthur Fontaine.

9. Touraine, pp. 100-124.

10. On rationalization and French labor see Touraine; Maier; Fridenson, Histoire ; Schweitzer; Arthur Fontaine; Collinet; Cronin and Sirianni, eds., Work, Community, and Power .

11. Touraine, pp. 84-86. Unfortunately, these statistics do not distinguish unskilled from semiskilled workers. Touraine and others do note that in this period semiskilled workers usually replaced unskilled, not skilled, workers.

12. For criticism of the traditional view of rationalization, see Amdur; Yves Lequin, "La rationalisation du capitalisme français: A-t-elle eu lieu dans les années vingt?" Cahiers d'histoire de l'Institut Maurice Thorez 16 (1976).

13. Ariés, Histoire des populations françaises , pp. 315-32; Noiriel, pp. 145-46.

14. Noiriel; Schweitzer; Touraine; Weil.

15. Schweitzer, pp. 79-82; Noiriel, p. 149.

16. Schweitzer, pp. 117-24; Bremond; Valdour.

17. See on this point Moss; Hanagan; Scott, Glassworkers ; Aminzade; Maurice Agulhon, Une Ville ouvrière au temps du socialisme utopique (Paris, 1970); Shorter and Tilly.

18. Schweitzer, pp. 155-70; on the labor movement in interwar France see Georges LeFranc, Le Mouvement syndical sous la Troisième République (Paris, 1967); Chambelland and Maitron; Val Lorwin, The French Labor Movement (Cambridge, Mass., 1966).

19. Bremond, pp. 81-82; Vielledent; Valdour, Ateliers et taudis .

20. Schweitzer, pp. 118-21; Valdour.

21. The counterpart to the rise of the Left in the suburbs was the rise of the Right in Paris. Twentieth-century Paris has always given a majority of its votes to the moderate and conservative side of the political spectrum (Campbell and Goguel).

22. On class consciousness and working-class politics in twentieth-century France, see Judt, Marxism and the French Left ; Hamilton; DeAngelis.

23. In my interview with Florence Aumont she emphasized that one of the main things women in Bobigny would talk about was their hopes for the future (interview on 7 January 1985, Bobigny).

24. On urban social movements and their political implications see especially the works of Manuel Castells: The Urban Question (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 324-78, 459-62; also, his City, Class, and Power (London, 1978), and The City and the Grassroots (Berkeley, 1983).

1. Maitron, vol. 22, pp. 325–29; Jolly, vol. 3, p. 1056.

2. Maitron, pp. 325–26; RDCM, 12 March 1916; 10 May 1916; 22 June 1916; 9 June 1918. During the war Clamamus also helped set up soup kitchens and food cooperatives. On working-class life in Paris during World War I see also Brunet, Saint-Denis , pp. 169–209; Becker, Les Français .

3. Maitron; Jolly; see also Brunet, pp. 233–61; Wohl, pp. 208–354; Kriegel, Aux origines , pp. 757–863; Girault, Sur l'implantation , pp. 87–117.

4. Maitron; Jolly; on Clamamus's work for the allotments, see Barbier. Clamamus submitted his proposal to deal with defective allotments to the Chamber of Deputies on 8 July 1926. His stand on reproductive rights sharply diverged from that of the majority of French legislators who, responding to a strong pronatalist campaign in the 1920s and 1930s, enacted stiff penalties for abortion and for dissemination of birth control information (McMillan, pp. 189–90).

5. Maitron; Jolly. Clamamus worked closely with Auguste Mounié, the activist Radical senator from the allotments-plagued suburb of Antony.

6. Maitron; Jolly; on the banning of the PCF in 1939 see Robrieux, Histoire intérieure du parti communiste , vol. 1, pp. 494–505; Stéphane Courtois, Le PCF dans la guerre (Paris, 1980), pp. 41–80.

7. Maitron.

8. Maitron; Jolly; see also Robert Paxton, Vichy France (New York, 1972), pp. 196–97; John Sweets, Choices in Vichy France (Oxford, 1986); Ivan Avakoumovitch, "Le PCF vu par le commandement des troupes d'occupation allemande," Le Mouvement Social 113 (October-December 1980): 91–101.

9. On Jacques Doriot see Brunet, Saint-Denis , pp. 363–435; Gilbert Allardyce, "The Political Transition of Jacques Doriot," Journal of Contemporary History 1, no. 1 (1966): 56–74; Bertram Gordon, Collaborationism in France during the Second World War (Ithaca, 1980). In addition to Doriot and Clamamus, other suburban Communist mayors who became collaborators were Fernand Soupé of Montreuil, Albert Richard of Pierrefitte, and Marcel Marshal of Saint-Denis (David Pryce-Jones, Paris in the Third Reich [New York, 1981], pp. 64–66).