Chapter 1
The Suburbanization of the Paris Region

Bobigny at the Turn of the Century

A casual visitor to Bobigny would have noticed little that distinguished the community from any of the other villages that dotted the countryside of the Ile-de-France at the turn of the century. Our hypothetical visitor—probably a Parisian who had come to Bobigny on a Sunday to escape briefly the oppressive urbanity of the capital^[1] —would have observed a small town center of a few blocks around the place Carnot, consisting of small, solid two-story houses separated by rutted, poorly paved streets. Dominating the place Carnot was the church of the parish of Bobigny, an unadorned structure barely thirty years old. Extending away from the church in all directions were little more than "vast blackish-colored fields slowly worked by a silent 'gardener,' pushing his plow yoked to a Percheron."^[2] Nothing suggested the integration of the community into what is today referred to as the agglomération parisienne . Although Bobigny is located just ten kilometers from the towers of Notre Dame, in 1900 Paris seemed far away.

Yet by the turn of the century such a view was more than a little illusory; Paris was getting closer all the time. Adjacent communities that lay nearer to Paris, such as Aubervilliers and Pantin, had already lost much of their rural character and been transformed into working-class industrial suburbs. Bobigny could no longer realistically claim to be a small provincial village. For centuries its agriculture had been

integrated into the capital's food market; the "silent gardener" described by père Lhande might well have spent that morning hawking vegetables or melons at the central marketplace of Paris, Les Halles. Abbé Jules Ferret, who as parish priest of Bobigny at the turn of the century was well placed to record the changes in his community, observed that the market gardeners of Bobigny had little desire for increased contacts with Paris or Parisians. Unfortunately for Balbynians who held this attitude, the Parisians were not so standoffish: more and more of them were coming to the small community to spend time in "the country."^[3] By 1900 Bobigny was firmly established as a recreational exurb. And soon weekending Parisians would be followed by many others who saw in Bobigny not merely a pleasant pastoral refuge but a place to live as well.

Thus Bobigny in 1900, on the eve of a rapid process of urbanization, was a society whose integration into the fast-expanding metropolitan area of Paris was already well established. In taking a more detailed look at turn-of-the-century Bobigny, we do well to keep in mind that the community was in transition.

Even though many Parisians visited Bobigny on weekends, it was by no means a spot of great natural beauty. Its dominant physical characteristic was homogeneity. Lying in the middle of the Aubervilliers plain, Bobigny was almost perfectly flat and regular; not a single hill rose within the town's boundaries. In fact, it had no distinguishing physical hallmarks other than the small stream in the western part of the community known as the its rû de Montfort. No physical boundaries separated Bobigny from its neighbors to the north, east, and west; it was bordered on the south by the unsightly canal de l'Ourcq. Nothing remained of the almost legendary forest of Bondy that, at the eastern edge of the city, had provided a haunt for brigands in earlier centuries.^[4]

Then as now the legal territory of Bobigny consisted of 671 hectares; yet in 1900 most of this area was uninhabited. The local open-field farmers (cultivateurs ) lived in the center of town, which included no more than thirty-five hectares of the total with only five paved streets. The rest of Bobigny consisted of their farms. The town's public institutions—the church, the city hall, the post office, and a boys' and a girls' primary school—were located in the city center. Here too clustered most of the few cafés, bakeries, and other small shops that served the needs of the local populace.^[5]

One indication of the beginnings of the urbanization of Bobigny comes when we examine the outlying areas of the community in greater detail (Map 1). The sharp division between housing and agricultural

Map 1.
Bobigny around 1900.

land of a half century earlier had begun to blur, as in the southwestern part of the town, the Blanc-mesnil quarter. This area was inhabited mostly by market gardeners (maraîchers ), who specialized in growing fruits and vegetables for the Paris produce markets. Unlike the open-field farmers, their more established neighbors, the market gardeners usually built their houses next to their plots of land and away from one another. The Blanc-mesnil quarter was thus neatly divided into small fields surrounded by low walls. Next to each plot stood the residence of the market gardener who owned it: generally a modest one- or two-story structure isolated from its neighbors.^[6]

To the north of the Blanc-mesnil quarter, in northwestern Bobigny, lay La Courneuve, one of the most traditional areas of town in 1900, composed mostly of farmers' fields with few houses. Yet even here the presence of Paris could be felt, for in the southwestern corner of La Courneuve lay the greater part of the Parisian cemetery of Pantin-Bobigny. For decades the city of Paris had resorted to the practice of locating various unhealthy, noxious, and land-intensive municipal establishments outside the city's borders, in the suburbs of the Department of the Seine. The opening of the cemetery in 1884 (over the strident protests of the Bobigny city council) marked Bobigny's first experience of this practice, and thus a new stage in the suburbanization of the community. Paris was already sending its dead to Bobigny; the living would soon follow.^[7]

To the south of the town's center, between it and the adjoining suburbs of Romainville and Noisy-le-Sec, extended the Limites area. Sliced up by railway lines and hemmed in by the canal de l'Ourcq, Limites was one of the more isolated neighborhoods of Bobigny. Yet the canal and the adjoining National Route no. 3 made it the section most integrated into the Paris area. Most important, it was the only section of Bobigny that had any industry. The canal de l'Ourcq, beginning in the industrialized nineteenth arrondissement of Paris and passing through Pantin before reaching Bobigny, was one of the great commercial highways of the Parisian basin. Largely because of its influence, the Limites neighborhood had a lubricants factory, a glue factory, a woodworking shop, and a harnessmaker. Resembling suburbs like Saint-Denis or Aubervilliers more than the rest of Bobigny, Limites exemplified the crucial role of transportation in industrializing the suburbs of Paris.^[8]

Throughout our period, the Limites area remained the most industrialized section of Bobigny. Industrialization had little impact on other

sections of the town until after the Second World War, although some important industrial development occurred in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Therefore the area that best symbolized the new, suburban, Bobigny of the interwar years was not the Limites neighborhood but the Pont de Bondy, which lay on the town's eastern fringes. It was not a neighborhood in 1900, since nobody lived there; like La Courneuve, the Pont de Bondy consisted of farmers' fields. Located farthest from Paris, the Pont de Bondy seemed so remote and unimportant that most city maps of the period did not even show it. And yet it was this area, untouched by the first stage of Bobigny's integration into the Paris area, that was transformed by the second stage of change, which made Bobigny into a working-class suburb.^[9]

Turning from geographical to sociological description, we find the best indication of Bobigny's changing nature in the composition of its population. The census records of 1896 listed 1,678 inhabitants for the town; by 1902 this figure climbed to 1,946, representing a population increase of 536 percent from the population of 363 in 1856. The two major population groups were open-field farmers and market gardeners; with their dependents they made up two-thirds of the town's inhabitants. The remainder consisted of artisans, shopkeepers, railroad clerks, workers, and rentiers (pensioners).^[10] Since the farmers and market gardeners dominated the town's economic and political life in the late nineteenth century, I limit analysis of Bobigny's population in this period to them, for the contrasting ways of life of these two groups, and the relations between them, bring into sharpest relief the changes associated with the initial stages of suburbanization in Bobigny.

Open-Field Farmers and Market Gardeners

After the middle of the nineteenth century the open-field farmers of Bobigny abandoned their exclusive concentration on the production of cereals and began to grow vegetables as well. The farmers had been the most important group in Bobigny; at the turn of the century they still cultivated three-fourths of the land. Yet this dominance was called into question after the 1860s, when many market gardeners began to settle in Bobigny. Henceforth Bobigny's farmers had to compete with gardeners for both land and access to the Paris vegetable market. Vegetables were more profitable than wheat, yet the competition from market gardeners led many Bobigny farmers to return a larger part of their efforts to the wheat crop in the late nineteenth century.^[11]

Many market gardeners who moved into Bobigny after 1860 came from Paris, where the urban renovation unleashed by Baron Haussmann forced many Parisian market gardeners from neighborhoods like the Bastille and Vaugirard, where they had traditionally lived and worked. A larger number, however, came from the provinces, especially from the regions of Bourgogne and Morvan. These provincials were usually peasants who left their villages as a greater percentage of the agricultural land there was shifted to pasturage; the dynamism of the Paris vegetable market in the late nineteenth century attracted many to the metropolitan area.^[12] The high quality of Bobigny's wet, marshy soil, the flatness of the terrain, and the large amounts of open space all attracted market gardeners. The major impetus to invade Bobigny, however, was provided by the count of Blancmesnil, the town's largest (and absentee) landowner; after 1860 he began dividing up much of his land into small market-gardening plots (marais ) and renting them out. By 1900, when this wave of immigration was nearing its end, Bobigny had become a major center of market gardening in the Paris region, and the market gardeners composed more than half the population of the town.^[13]

In the words of two later chroniclers of local life, the period from 1860 to 1900 was a golden age for Bobigny's market gardeners.^[14] Parisians' desire for fresh vegetables kept the gardeners prosperous, and they were able to build a strong sense of community among themselves. Unfortunately for the social cohesion of the town as a whole, this sense of community did not extend to the farmers, whom they now outnumbered by about three to one. Farmers and market gardeners were rarely neighbors; the former usually lived in the center whereas the latter lived next to their plots south and west of the place Carnot. The two groups seldom socialized. The farmers limited their communal social life to a few religious festivals each year, which they held in Bobigny itself; the market gardeners usually went to Paris to celebrate.

Relations between the two groups were tense in this period. Maurice Agulhon notes that at the turn of the century less than 3 percent of the marriages recorded were between farming and market-gardening families. Even in politics the two groups were divided. The farmers generally voted for the Party of Order, whereas the market gardeners tended to vote for the Radical or the Radical Socialist party. The new Bobigny of the late nineteenth-century market gardeners was simply superimposed onto the traditional farming community, not integrated into it.^[15]

Certainly any community that experiences the massive population shifts Bobigny underwent in the late nineteenth century is bound to experience tension between different social groups; established groups rarely react with equanimity to large-scale invasions of their territory by outsiders. Yet the problem centered on the dislocations that integrating Bobigny into the Paris area's economy caused, and on the different roles that farmers and market gardeners played. By 1900 traditional open-field grain farming was declining in the Department of the Seine, and the market gardeners' superior organization and techniques stymied the farmers' attempts to switch to vegetable production.^[16]

Yet if the transition from a rural to an exurban community sharply divided Bobigny's two primary social groups, neither welcomed the prospect of Bobigny developing into a full-fledged Parisian suburb along the lines of neighboring Pantin or Aubervilliers. Paris had little to offer that the farmers wanted; as for the market gardeners, the capital was a place to sell their produce and to go to for occasional celebrations, little more. Both groups were largely self-sufficient in basic necessities and felt little need for the urban goods and services that close ties to Paris would bring.

A detailed description of the urban structure of Bobigny demonstrates what this attitude involved. The government was dominated by market gardeners, who had devoted little effort or attention to upgrading it. In spite of the growing economic links between the town and Paris, Bobigny's institutions in 1900 consequently suggested those of a small rural village rather than those of a metropolitan area. The transportation system, for example, was simple. Five large highways passed through Bobigny, which itself maintained twenty thoroughfares, nine of them unpaved rural roads. The total length of the eleven remaining streets, which composed Bobigny's urban grid, was less than seven kilometers. Public transport was minimal, a fact that is not surprising since farmers rarely went to Paris and most market gardeners drove there in their produce wagons.

The sole means of public transportation to Paris available to Balbynians was a stop on the Grand Ceinture railroad line, which ran through the community. Established in 1882, this stop enabled local residents to ride the train from Bobigny to Noisy-le-Sec, where they changed trains for Paris. The requirement of changing trains, plus the relative isolation of the stop from the center of Bobigny and its service by only five trains a day, made the Grande Ceinture railroad an inconvenient way to reach the capital; few people used it. So although

the connections were not bad for what was still a small town, only in 1902 did the extension of tramway service to the community make working in Paris and living in Bobigny practical.^[17]

Bobigny lacked many other services that urbanites take for granted. The town had no hospital or health care facility, and no physicians, pharmacists, or midwives resided in the community; the municipal government sent ill residents for treatment to hospitals in Paris. Bobigny had only one post office (built in 1893) and no municipal marketplace. There was a volunteer fire department but no police department; police service was provided by the first Noisy-le-Sec gendarme brigade located in Pantin. The commercial life of the community closely resembled that of a rural village. The retail stores in Bobigny numbered fewer than twenty at the turn of the century, most of them small establishments catering to the basic needs of the population. Located in the center of the community, these establishments hardly added up to anything approaching a downtown shopping district.

In 1900 Bobigny had a fairly extensive cultural life for a small town but did not offer the amenities of an urban area; the most significant cultural institutions were the cafés. The community did possess a municipal library with about two thousand books, mostly novels. The municipality also sponsored an annual festival, usually held for three days during Pentecost in the place Carnot. The major event and symbol of the well-attended festival was the launching of a giant hot-air balloon. Rounding out the panorama of Bobigny's cultural establishment was a music society, the Réveil balbinien, with twenty members. The town had no theaters, music halls, or other places of mass entertainment.^[18]

Bobigny had nothing approaching a modern system of utilities. The town had no supply of running water, which the majority of the population saw as unnecessary. The community also lacked a sewer system; given the flat and swampy local terrain, this deficit would create serious health problems as the population grew. Bobigny did have gas service, but only for street lighting. Electrical power and telephone service were as yet unheard-of luxuries in the town.^[19]

In general, the rudimentary sociocultural institutions and city services of Bobigny were characteristic of a small, rural community where social life was above all family life and where people were used to depending on their own resources. Not all Balbynians liked this state of affairs; some advocated developing and modernizing local services. Yet by 1900 these people had been able to do little against the more

traditionalist farmers and market gardeners, who had no wish to pay for services they did not need. Bobigny's urban structure was significantly modernized only when the agricultural sector dwindled to a minority of the town's population and lost control of the municipal government.

Janus-like, Bobigny presented two faces to the world at the turn of the century. One was that of a peaceful, stable provincial hamlet. Although it was already changing, a sizable percentage of the local population nevertheless believed in this image of their community and hoped to preserve it. The town's other aspect showed important changes Bobigny had already experienced in the previous half century, and even more drastic ones it was to witness in the next thirty years. The conflicts between farmers and market gardeners produced by Bobigny's transition from rural village to exurb had been important; but old conflicts were overshadowed by new tensions between the two dominant groups and a newly arrived working-class population. The bucolic image of Bobigny in 1900, dear to farmers and market gardeners alike, was to vanish in a short time.

The Growth of Paris in the Late Nineteenth Century

The transformation of Bobigny was part of the general development of a suburban belt around Paris after 1860. Paris had suburbs well before the late nineteenth century (the Latin Quarter was originally one); but in this period its suburban area increased to cover most of the Department of the Seine. In the process the city of Paris itself was transformed (Map 2). Suburbanization was merely the most visible redivision of urban functions that population growth and economic change produced, in their increasing capitalist imprint on the metropolitan area. The patterns of production and consumption, of work and leisure that developed in the suburbs differed in many ways from those of Paris; in effect the suburbs were a new urban form.

In the first half of the nineteenth century Paris grew at an impressive rate, from a population of 546,856 in 1801 to one of 1,174,346 by 1846. The population's increase in the second half of the century was even more spectacular. By 1901 the population had increased to nearly two and one-quarter times that in 1851 (Table 1).^[20] In the most dramatic period of population increase, from 1851 to 1856, Paris grew by over 20 percent, adding a quarter of a million inhabitants.

Map 2.
Paris after 1860. From Norma Evenson,  Paris: A Century
of Change, 1878–1978  (New Haven, 1979), p. 363.

As was the case from 1800 to 1850, the growth of Paris in the late nineteenth century derived from immigration, not natural increase. The excess of births over deaths in Paris was even lower than in the first part of the century; at no point did it exceed 1 percent from 1860 to 1900. More than ever before in its history, the population of Paris was failing to reproduce itself and turned to the provinces to renew its ranks.^[21]

Although immigration dominated in peopling the city throughout the nineteenth century, immigrants who came after 1850 differed in many ways from those who had preceded them. They no longer came mostly from northeastern France but came increasingly from all over the country. The number of immigrants from Lorraine (incorporated into Germany in 1871) declined, whereas from Brittany and the massif Central the number rose. Thus a much larger percentage of the new Parisians came from poor, less developed areas. The Great Depression of the 1870s to the 1890s brought hardship to many French peasants and forced those living a marginal existence off the land altogether; the development and expansion of the national railways ensured that many of the dispossessed eventually made their way to Paris.^[22]

The greater percentage of immigrants from impoverished regions may explain why the new immigrants were more homogeneously working class than the old; no longer could it be said that migration to Paris was "a conquest and not a defeat."^[23] In addition, more of these workers were unskilled, in contrast to the skilled workers and artisans that the city had traditionally attracted. The annexation of the inner suburbs in 1860 had already added a working-class population of 350,000 to Paris; the new immigration further increased the proletarian character of the city's population.^[24]

This proletarian shift arose from changes in the Parisian economy of the late nineteenth century. The wave of immigrants in the early 1800s had been prompted by an expansion of the traditional artisanal industries of Paris. The growth of the city itself increased the need for workers, especially in the construction industry. The high point of this expansion came in the 1850s and 1860s, when the renovations of Paris directed by Baron Haussmann produced an unparalleled boom in both construction and immigration.

Yet after 1860 modern large-scale industries began to assume a larger role in the economy of the Paris area. More traditional sectors like textiles declined, whereas newer sectors like the metallurgical industries employed an increasing share of Parisian workers. By the turn of the century the metropolitan area was home to a large and

prospering heavy industrial sector organized along more modern lines of production. Even though most industries were located in the suburbs of Paris, by 1896 the city itself had well over two thousand factories employing more than twenty workers, of which over two hundred utilized a work force greater than one hundred. By 1900 Paris had definitely entered the industrial age.^[25]

The rise of a modern industrial sector in Paris depended not on any natural resources or advantages the region possessed, but rather on the city's position as the national capital and largest urban area in France. Of crucial importance was its place as the national center of railroad freight traffic. Major merchandise railway stations created at La Chapelle, Saint-Ouen, and elsewhere in Paris and its adjacent suburbs in this period facilitated the shipment of raw industrial materials to the city's factories. Developing freight railways and a system of ports gave Parisian manufacturers increased access to national and international markets, so that the rise of Paris as an industrial center in the late nineteenth century was linked to the development of an integrated national market.^[26]

This period's increasingly complex industrial organization and more sophisticated investment banking made access to credit markets a factor in the success or failure of a given firm. Since Paris was the country's financial center, it gave an advantage to French industrialists who located their operations there. And in this cyclical process, the presence of a large and diverse working-class labor force in Paris, attracted by the capital's broad range of employment opportunities, provided a further incentive for businessmen to establish factories in the area. The high quality of this labor force, no longer dominated by trained and highly specialized artisans but still skilled, was an additional attraction. After 1860, through its economic power and geographic distribution, industrial capitalism had a large part in shaping the landscape of the Paris area and contributed significantly to the rise of suburbia.^[27]

In analyzing the rise of a suburban belt around Paris in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, we must examine the changing living conditions that faced workers in Paris. The city's increasing inaccessibility to the working class in the late nineteenth century was a key factor in developing the suburbs of the Department of the Seine.

We have touched on Baron Haussmann's renovation of Paris after 1860 and the changes it caused in the social fabric of the City.^[28] The impact on the Parisian popular classes was twofold. First, by demol-

ishing many ancient slums in the Ile de la Cité and the central Right Bank, Haussmann's reforms drove many workers out of central Paris into the outer districts (especially the nineteenth, twentieth, and thirteenth arrondissements) annexed to the city in 1860. (The new social configuration emerged in the failure of the communards to hold the city center during the last bloody days of the Paris Commune of 1871, when they retreated to make a final stand on the city's eastern periphery.) By depopulating the center, Haussmann's reforms sharply increased Parisians' residential segregation, for as the working class moved to the northern and eastern edges of the city, middle-class and wealthy inhabitants moved into newer quarters in the western part of Paris, especially the sixteenth arrondissement. The Parisian working class was more spatially marginalized and isolated from its neighbors; before long the majority of this class would be forced out of the city altogether.^[29]

Concomitant with the greater concentration of Parisian workers in the outer districts of the north and east was their intensified overcrowding. The Parisian population increased most in the outer districts. From 1861 to 1896 the population from the eleventh arrondissement through the twentieth grew by 103 percent, whereas that of the first arrondissement through the tenth grew by only 7.1 percent. These areas had been sparsely populated suburbs fifty years earlier and were thus poorly equipped to house large numbers of newcomers. In many cases people moved into former single-family houses, subdividing them into small individual housing units. Attics, basements, and even stables were converted into apartments. Many working people, both individuals and families, lived in furnished single rooms known as garnis, notorious at the time for their unsanitary condition. Some of the poorest Parisians even resorted to building their own shacks on open land at the edges of the city; these squatters' settlements were merely the most dramatic example of the dire shortage of moderately priced housing in Paris during the late nineteenth century. The 1896 census revealed that 14.9 percent of the city's population lived in overcrowded housing; the percentages for the thirteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth arrondissements were 64.2, 65.5, and 66.0 percent respectively.^[30]

Haussmann's renovations of Paris helped create this overcrowding, but they cannot explain it. Of greater immediate importance were the patterns of housing construction in Paris during this period. The housing industry was active in the late nineteenth century, with the construction of new dwellings reaching a peak in the years 1875

through 1884; most houses were built in the outer districts, which had the greatest vacant space. Yet it was the wealthier arrondissements of the western end of Paris that benefited, not the more proletarian ones to the east. From 1878 to 1889 the amount of available housing in the sixteenth district rose by 62.7 percent, while its population increased by 47.2 percent; by contrast, the thirteenth district experienced a 41.6 percent increase in population but only a 29 percent rise in available housing stock. Moreover, much of the housing in the poorer arrondissements was built for middle-class residents. While new buildings in more prosperous neighborhoods stood vacant for lack of tenants (at least of tenants able to pay the high rents), those Parisians who most desperately needed good housing were least able to find it.^[31]

There were several reasons for the failure of the Parisian construction industry to build sufficient low-cost housing in this period. To a much greater extent than before, housing in Paris was built by large companies that purchased extensive tracts of land for speculation rather than immediate construction. Speculation made it imperative to realize the greatest possible profits, and such profits did not come from building for working-class occupants. Much more lucrative was renting to members of the large new middle class, employed in branches of the tertiary sector like banking and commerce, whose incomes were both higher and more stable.

Government policies also discouraged the construction of low-cost housing. Municipal charges on owners of buildings adjoining public thoroughfares were steep and increased with each road improvement: these costs were passed on to tenants, and those with little to spend on rent could not afford them. Also, taxes on inexpensive buildings were proportionately heavier than on costly ones. Yet the essential problem lay elsewhere: the Paris construction industry in the late nineteenth century was composed of private entrepreneurs who built housing for monetary reward, not to fulfill a social need. Since there were plenty of middle- and upper-income people to build housing for, it is easy to see why the construction industry neglected the housing needs of the Parisian working class.^[32]

Only major government intervention into the housing industry could have made a difference in this period. Yet neither city nor national government took significant action to deal with this crucial problem. Throughout the period many public officials expressed concern over the poor condition of working-class housing, seeing it as conducive to the spread of disease, moral degeneracy, and political instability.^[33] Yet

these officials, holding fast to the tenets of economic liberalism, rejected state intervention in the housing market as illegitimate and as a first step on the road to collectivism.^[34]

The sharp increase in population of the 1880s and the decrease in construction after 1884 did lead the Paris city council to consider a number of proposals to deal with the housing crisis, such as municipal guarantees for bank loans on low-cost housing and tax exemptions to builders of inexpensive rental units. The prevalent belief in the efficiency of the free market, however, prevented all such ideas from winning approval; a proposal by socialist city councillor Jules Joffrin for the construction of municipal housing was voted down in 1884 by a margin of four to one. Advocates of housing reform limited themselves to encouraging the efforts of private charitable societies. Yet these organizations contributed little to resolve the problem, either because construction was too unprofitable to attract outside investment or because the rental units that were built were too expensive for most working-class tenants.^[35] The same logic that ruled the private construction industry effectively circumscribed philanthropic efforts for working-class housing.

The major example of government intervention to deal with the housing crisis came in 1894. Widespread public concern over the problem had led to the foundation of the Société française des habitations à bon marché (HBM) in 1889. A private organization, the society viewed its role as advisory, to encourage the construction of low-cost housing by private individuals, companies, and charitable organizations. Five years later the national government voted to subsidize the work of the society by offering fiscal exemptions and low-interest loans to builders of inexpensive housing units that met certain government specifications. Yet because local and departmental governments, charged by the national government with implementing the law, took few steps to do so, the society accomplished little in this period. Between 1895 and 1902 it built only 1,360 HBM dwellings in all of France.^[36] Clearly, Parisian workers in the late nineteenth century frantically searching for affordable housing of decent quality could expect assistance from neither the Paris city council nor the national government.

One consequence of the insufficient low-priced housing in Paris was a rise in rents. Most workers in this period could not afford to pay rents of more than 300 to 350 francs a year. Yet because of the patterns in housing construction, the percentage of rental units available at such

prices was in decline. In 1880, 67.6 percent of housing units in the city rented for less than 300 francs; this percentage dropped to 47.6 percent by 1900. The absolute number of such units fell by 69,093 from 1880 to 1889, whereas the total number of rental units rose by 104,836. Parisian workers were forced to spend more of their meager earnings on housing: the proportion of an average working-class budget devoted to rent rose from 13.5 percent in 1862 to 18 percent in 1900. The shortage of low-cost housing and the resultant overcrowding of the working class in Paris also had serious implications for public health. The inadequate sunlight and air that characterized many modest dwellings undermined the health of their occupants, as did the rudimentary sewage and trash collection in poor neighborhoods; the crowded living conditions of the poor and working class facilitated the spread of contagious diseases. Consequently, in poor neighborhoods more than in wealthy ones mortality rates were high, especially for infants: from 1893 to 1897 the rate was 25 percent in the thirteenth arrondissement, 11 percent in the eighth.^[37]

It is true that this gap cannot be attributed to housing alone; the poor quality and quantity of food consumed, among other factors, also had their effect. Yet if we look at death rates from tuberculosis, a disease closely related to housing conditions, we see an even more drastic gap. From 1896 to 1900 the rate of death from tuberculosis was close to five times as high in the poor twentieth district as in the wealthy eighth. The housing crisis was thus a factor in the inequality before death that separated Parisians in this period.^[38]

It must not be thought that Parisian workers accepted their situation with equanimity. Hatred of the landlord was a common theme of the period, as reflected in popular songs referring to the landlord as "M. Vautour" (Mr. Vulture) and suggesting that he be hanged from the nearest lamppost:

If you want to be happy
In the name of God,
Hang your landlord!^[39]

Political groupings that appealed to a working-class clientele played up the poor living conditions of the Parisian working class. Yet the political dominance of capitalism and the government's determination to preserve housing as a free-market activity forestalled any solution to the crisis of working-class housing conditions. In spite of a slight easing of these conditions after the 1880s, any real solution seemed to be as far

away as ever.^[40] Bertillon and DuMesnil studied the housing problem in the poorer areas of Paris near the end of the century, noting the persistence of overcrowding and poor sanitary conditions.^[41] By 1900 the basic question—Where is one to live?—still had no answer for the workers of Paris.

Within the context of this question we must now shift our focus from the city of Paris to the Paris suburbs in the late nineteenth century. In the rise of the suburbs we will find a partial answer to this question.

Suburban Development in the Late Nineteenth Century

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rise of Mass Transit in the Paris Area

So far this chapter has focused on communities in the Department of the Seine closest to Paris, and their integration into the economy of the Paris metropolitan area. Towns like Montrouge, Ivry, Pantin, and above all Saint-Denis became the French symbols of industrial suburbia by 1900. Yet the Department of the Seine contained many other communities, such as Bobigny, which lay at a greater distance from the capital and were untouched by the earlier transformation (Map 3). Moreover, the suburbs discussed so far generally lacked that attribute

Map 3.
 Paris and the Department of the Seine in 1920.

which has come to be seen as a hallmark of suburbia, a large commuting population. Not until the twentieth century did the Paris area develop a major residential suburban sector in Bobigny and other exterior communities of the Department of the Seine. The Parisian housing crisis and the development and restructuring of the metropolitan economy contributed to this phenomenon. But before moving on to analyze its manifestation in Bobigny, we must consider one specific change in late nineteenth-century Paris that had great significance: the construction of mass transit. It was the mass transit system, especially the tramways, that helped solve the Paris housing crisis and restructure

the metropolitan area by creating what were, in effect, new working-class ghettos outside the city.

The growth of Paris during the Second Empire made some form of mass transit almost inevitable. Annexing the outer districts in 1860, moving the population toward the periphery, and restructuring central Paris into a nonresidential central business district-these changes made commuting a fact of life. Moreover, experiments in American cities suggested that tramways were the best available urban mass transit.^[58]

The first extensive tramway network in Paris was created in 1873. In that year the French government granted the General Omnibus Company a concession to operate a tram network of eleven lines within Paris. Two other companies, Tramways North and Tramways South, also received concessions to operate ten tramlines from Paris into the suburbs. Thus right from the outset commuting was part of modern mass transit in Paris. By 1884 Tramways North had built extended lines as far as Saint-Denis, Gennevilliers, Suresnes, and Pantin, and Tramways South had instituted service between Paris and Charenton, Vitry, and Clamart. While the Paris tramway network prospered in the 1870s and 1880s, both suburban companies soon encountered major financial problems and by 1884 had gone out of business. But suburban mass transit went on: in 1890 the bankrupt lines were taken over by two new companies, the Tramway Company of Paris and the Department of the Seine (Compagnie des tramways de Paris et du département de la Seine, or TPDS), and the Parisian General Tramways Company (Compagnie générale parisienne de tramways, or CGPT).^[59]

The takeover by TPDS and CGPT showed that, despite the financial vicissitudes of individual companies, suburban mass transit was an idea whose time had come. As the city grew and an important economic sector arose in the suburbs, commuting became necessary for much of the working population of the Department of the Seine. Also, given the entrepreneurial nature of the construction industry and the high price of land in the capital, public and private planners in the late 1880s saw little likelihood for decent and inexpensive housing in the capital. Therefore a solution to the lack of working-class housing would have to involve the suburbs.

A key component of suburban working-class housing was the "worker-landowner" (ouvrier-propriétaire ) concept. Developed by Fredéric Le Play and his followers in the journal La Réforme sociale, this idea held that the poor quality and collective conditions of working-

class lodgings in Paris weakened family life and thus caused moral degeneracy among the working class.^[60] This decay led to political instability: "If family life does not exist among the working classes, it is linked to the smallness and filth of the dwellings. The cabaret thus becomes a place of meeting and relaxation: one becomes there at the same time envious, greedy, revolutionary, skeptical, and finally a Communist."^[61]

The solution was to move workers from crowded urban slums to their own homes in the countryside. Such a program would improve the physical health of workers and reinforce their family life by giving it a more fitting center. Moreover, home ownership would teach workers the virtues of thrift and sobriety, and strengthen the political system by removing the housing question as a source of workers' discontent and by instilling in them respect for property rights.

Since it was obviously impossible to resettle Parisian workers en masse in the countryside, individual working-class housing would have to be constructed in the saburbs. The problem was to make these suburbs accessible to those who worked in Paris. An inexpensive mass-transit system linking city and suburbs was the only feasible way to accomplish this goal; many planners who proposed resettling workers in the suburbs both as a practical solution to the Paris housing crisis and as a means of fighting socialism were strong proponents of it. Together, private mass transit and private individual housing would solve the "social question."^[62]

The decades from 1890 through 1910 represented the high point of tramway development in Paris. In 1890 there were twenty-five tramlines, each of which carried over four million passengers annually; this figure had almost doubled to forty-six lines by 1909. After 1900 the tramways faced formidable competition from a new source, the Paris métro, or subway. Yet although subway patronage went from sixteen million rides in 1900 to three hundred twelve million in 1909, figures for tramway patronage remained stable during this period. Since the métro served only the city of Paris, this seeming stability in fact represented a tremendous growth in traffic between Paris and its suburbs.^[63]

A substantial reason for the popularity of the tramways was their low fares. A ride in a second-class tramcar anywhere within Paris cost a flat ten centimes (roughly the price of two pounds of potatoes); rides beyond the city limits cost an extra ten to fifteen centimes. One company, Left Bank Tramways, charged no supplement at all for

suburban trips, so that anyone could travel from southern suburbs like Vanves or Montrouge into the heart of Paris for only ten centimes. Contributing to the trams' popularity was the practice of running "working-class trams." After 1891 government concessions for electric tramlines required that during commuter hours (generally before 7 A.M. and from 6 to 8 P.M. ) admittance to certain tramcars would cost only half the normal second-class fare. This fare, open to all, made it possible for workers to commute between suburbs and city for only five centimes each way.^[64]

The competitive Paris tramway lines and their low fares, added to the expense of electrical equipment, produced a crisis in the industry at the turn of the century. Overspeculation and an unstable stock market throughout Europe in 1900 were also contributing factors. By 1900 several large tramway lines were operating at a loss; Left Bank Tramways' expenses were almost twice as high as its revenues, to take the worst case.^[65] In spite of an impressive performance in the 1890s, in the first few years of the new century the Paris tramway network was in danger of collapse.

At this point the national government stepped in. Previously the government had opposed any public involvement in tramway development other than regulating it and granting concessions, both of which were handled by municipal and departmental authorities.^[66] Yet the service furnished by the Paris tramways was so important that if the private tramway companies were allowed to go bankrupt, the government would be forced to take a more direct role of maintaining mass transit in Paris.

National officials therefore dealt with the crisis through a two-pronged strategy of temporary expedients. They allowed the tramway companies to raise fares for both Paris and the suburbs by about five centimes, which wiped out the operating deficits of several Parisian tram companies. In addition the national government overruled the Paris city council to let tramway companies place electrical lines overhead within the capital. The change freed the companies from the greater expense of equipping their Paris lines with surface conduit conductors. These measures provided short-term relief for the Paris tramway companies, which soon experienced further difficulties; the great floods of 1910 threw the system into chaos, necessitating additional government intervention. Private mass transit in Paris came to an end in 1921, when the national government took over the tramway companies. It united them into the Société des transports en commun de

la région parisienne (STCRP), under the control of the Department of the Seine.^[67]

There is a certain contrast between the French government's reluctant intervention to maintain mass transit in the Paris area and its inability to resolve the crisis in working-class housing within the city. It did not deliberately and consciously promote mass transit in order to resettle working-class Parisians in the suburbs. The law on low-cost housing proposed a level of governmental involvement that went beyond anything done for the tramways. Within the dominant economic liberalism of the period, it was possible to ensure mass transit, whereas to solve the housing problem would have required an unacceptable level of public investment. Opening up the outer suburbs to working-class settlement through mass transport was one way to ease the Paris housing crisis. Although we cannot argue that the government consciously chose this expedient as a policy, its position on public intervention meant the de facto adoption of this solution.^[68]

In any case, by 1914 mass transit had a permanent place in Parisian life. In 1909 the system carried over three hundred thirty million passengers; the largest line, linking Montrouge with the capital's Gare de l'Est, carried over seventeen million alone that year.^[69] By this time the system served most communities in the Department of the Seine and even more distant areas, such as Versailles and Saint-Germain. The development of mass transit in the Paris area created a subculture: life in the suburbs and work in Paris. The shape of the Paris housing market and low tram rates meant that many commuters would be working class. By World War I, therefore, the transportation system necessary to create and maintain a vast ring of working-class suburbs around Paris was in place.

Suburbanization in the Interwar Years

Unprecedented growth took place in the suburbs in the 1920s and the 1930s: it involved more than one million new residents. The early 1920s saw a flood of immigrants invade this area, surpassing all earlier migration and causing for many immigrants miserable living conditions that in turn became a major social issue in the region during the interwar years.^[70] At the source of this phenomenon lay the increase in the working-class population of the Paris area caused by World War I. The occupation by German troops of the most advanced industrial areas of France—where, for example, 53 percent of the country's

prewar metallurgical capacity had been located—necessitated a geographical shift in French industry. Because the Paris area had a large industrial labor force and was the seat of government (and was thus the place where wartime contracts were handed out), many of the new factories opened up there. This wartime activity greatly stimulated the chemical and metallurgical industries, which were already well established in the Paris region. Much of the industrial expansion, following patterns already described, took place in the suburbs. Fed by the reconstruction of the war-devastated regions and the takeoff of the new automobile and aviation industries, the area's industrial boom continued well after the armistice of 1918.^[71]

Not surprisingly, one consequence of this industrial activity was to increase the number of Paris-area workers. After the first year of the war, in which the army's massive mobilization produced dislocations and severe unemployment in Paris, the needs of the wartime economy caused a labor shortage in the region. Employment figures in the metallurgical industry, for example, were 125 percent of prewar levels. The expansion of the central administration to direct the wartime economy also required more clerks and other lower level white-collar workers. Wartime refugees from occupied areas also flooded into Paris. Many of these new Parisian workers stayed on after the war as both employment and wage levels remained high. As a result, from 1911 to 1921 the population of the Paris agglomeration as a whole increased by 350,000 people.^[72]

This sharp population increase would have created a housing shortage in any case, since before the war Paris already lacked inexpensive dwellings. But the housing crisis in Paris during and after World War I owed its severity to additional factors. The reorientation of the French economy to meet the needs of war brought housing construction to a halt after August 1914; many buildings in Paris that had been partially completed when hostilities broke out remained exactly as they were until the war's end. The lack of available labor, the high cost of construction materials, and the laws preventing rent increases and evictions for nonpayment all discouraged the building of new housing.^[73] As always, it was the moderately priced dwellings, ones low-income families could afford, that were the hardest to find.

The immediate postwar years brought no easing of the Paris housing crisis. Priority in housing construction was given to the formerly occupied areas of northern and eastern France; even there, the building of new housing proceeded slowly. More important, the government's

decision to maintain rent control in the Paris area and to increase regulation of the whole French housing market made capitalists reluctant to invest in residential construction. The general shortage of capital in France and the relatively high wages prevalent in the construction industry further exacerbated the problem. Moreover, property owners not only refused to build more housing but declined to invest money in maintenance, allowing existing housing stock to fall into disrepair. Finally, some residential buildings were converted into office buildings, movie theaters, and the like, which offered greater possibilities for profit.^[74]

The combined result of these factors was a housing crisis of unparalleled proportions in Paris by the early 1920s. Parisians, especially those with limited resources, crowded into smaller living spaces; the number of people in the Department of the Seine living in garnis —furnished rooms—rose from 295,000 in 1914 to 390,000 in 1921. Unlike the housing shortage during the late nineteenth century, the one after 1914 affected not only the city of Paris itself but also the built-up areas of the inner ring of suburbs. It was only natural that many Parisians, hard pressed to find living space, therefore began to consider moving out into "the country," to those areas of the Seine that were still underdeveloped.^[75]

Settling in the outer reaches of the Department of the Seine was a more attractive option for those of low incomes than it had previously been. The tramways existed, as we have noted. High wages and low unemployment during World War I and the 1920s meant that more workers were willing to consider the long-term financial commitment of buying suburban housing. Also of great importance was the enactment of legislation in 1919 granting French workers an eight-hour day. The additional time workers gained allowed commuting from the suburbs and greater choice of suburban location. Of course, many workers were forced to sacrifice part or all of their new leisure time to dealing with the housing crisis, whether they wanted to become suburban commuters or not.^[76]

While some deliberated, many low- and moderate-income people indeed wanted to move out of the slums of Paris to give their children space to grow in and fresh air to breathe. The war intensified this desire in many Parisians. During the war the government had encouraged working-class families to set up gardens in the "zone" immediately surrounding the capital; many became accustomed to the joys of a garden and began planning to live where they could have one perma-

nently. The fact that many soldiers sent their wives and children to live in the country with relatives also certainly had an impact; the old rooms in the city slums must have seemed drearier than ever when they returned. Finally, many poilus undoubtedly felt at war's end that, having sacrificed for their country, they and their families deserved something better out of life; now was the time to think seriously about acquiring that long-desired dream house in the country.^[77]

After the war of 1914–1918 the ambition of almost all workers was to own their own homes. The rise in wages, which outstripped increases in the cost of living, made this possible. The abundance of work for nearly a decade seemed to have exorcised the phantom of unemployment. . . . The allotments, multiplying in the Paris suburbs and on the fringes of large cities, allowed the realization of this ardent desire. In all the factories where I worked between 1920 and 1930, this was a frequent theme of conversation between workers. The Communists were every bit as attracted to the right of property as others were.^[78]

The phenomenon that grew from these dreams of suburbanization in the interwar years is known as the allotments (lotissements ), in which nearly seven hundred thousand people, the majority of those who moved into the suburbs in the 1920s and the 1930s, were lodged in the Paris region.^[79] Allotments were unimproved housing subdivisions, created by developers (lotisseurs ) from farmland. Sold most often to lower-class families escaping the vicissitudes of the Paris housing market, they usually included no provision for utilities, sanitary facilities, or even sidewalks. Consequently, the allotments quickly degenerated into suburban slums in the fields. As the case of Bobigny demonstrates, living conditions in such areas were usually not better, and sometimes worse, than the poorer Parisian neighborhoods they replaced.

The suburban region, both industrial and residential, that sprang up around Paris in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century was merely the most extreme manifestation of the economic specialization and physical segregation reshaping the Paris metropolitan area. This tendency ultimately demonstrated in urban space the growing importance of capitalist values in France, and their ability to transform physical landscapes. The functional specialization of land use was the urban equivalent in space of the division of labor; both were important components of capitalist efficiency. Rising land prices in central Paris prompted industrial capital to transform the inner suburbs into a vast

urban workshop and accentuated the physical separation of heavy from light industry in the metropolitan area. These same prices also restricted the supply of low-cost housing in the capital, thus increasing social segregation and pushing workers toward the periphery of the city.

The same process affected both city and suburbs but to a different degree. Paris was reshaped by capitalist urbanization; but its dense precapitalist urban structure resisted major change. The suburbs, by contrast, were created by industrial capital; their past was not so much reshaped as simply submerged. Far more than Paris, therefore, the suburbs embodied the capitalist vision of the city in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century.

Two aspects of specialization were particularly important in the rise of the Paris suburbs in this period: residential segregation by class, and division between production and consumption. The former transformed the suburbs into great working-class ghettos, representations in urban space of the political weakness and marginal status of their inhabitants. The latter allocated to the suburbs those economic activities, like metals and freight activities, most separated from consumer markets. It was the convergence of these two aspects in the early twentieth century that transformed Bobigny and other villages on the fringes of the Department of the Seine into suburbs. These suburbs represented a greater specialization than their more developed neighbors; whereas the older suburbs contained both workplaces and homes, the new suburbs were residential. By dividing working-class life more sharply between workplace and residence—between production and consumption—capitalist urbanization produced a situation in Bobigny and similar suburbs in which community issues could emerge as a predominant and separate form of politics. At the same time, residential segregation by class in the metropolitan area meant that working-class attitudes had a consequential role in shaping the political life of these suburbs. The changes that overtook Bobigny in the early twentieth century were part of the evolution of the Paris area from the 1860s to the 1930s. The rise of residential working-class suburbia had great consequences for the small community.