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).