Paris of 20th Century

Despite these convulsions, in the years leading up to World War I (1914-1918) Paris enjoyed what was called the belle époque (“beautiful epoch”), an exhilarating period of economic prosperity and progress. During this era, Paris became renowned as the world’s scintillating center of entertainment.

Paris during the World Wars ~~~
The outbreak of World War I in 1914 put an end to the carefree atmosphere of the belle époque. The city’s population decreased by a third, dropping to less than 2 million.

Parisian streets were empty during the war, as most automobiles had been requisitioned for military use. (The city’s automobile industry was given a boost, however, and also diversified into arms manufacturing.)

Paris experienced harsh winters, in particular that of 1917, when bitter cold and shortages of food and medicine combined to stimulate the spread of epidemics.

Repeated bombings caused damage and casualties, especially in 1918 with the development of German long-range siege artillery.

In their final offensive campaigns of the war, German armies came within 130 km (80 mi) of Paris, but never reached the city.

In 1919, after the end of the war, Paris’s fortification wall was demolished and it became an open city once again. Low-income housing estates were built in place of the wall and around the city’s periphery to deal with acute housing shortages.

After the war, unemployment, food and transportation shortages, the high cost of living, and the influence of the Bolshevik Russian Revolutions of 1917 fueled social discontent among the working class of Paris once more.

At the same time, the middle and upper classes were reveling in the Roaring Twenties, known in France as les années folles (“the crazy years”).

Into the 1930s, music halls, cafés, and cinemas were packed with fun-seekers while working-class demonstrations and strikes often ended in violent clashes between radicals and the extreme right.

The violence came to a head in February 1934 when a bloody demonstration triggered by the extreme right provoked the resignation of the French cabinet.

During World War II (1939-1945) German forces occupied Paris from June 16, 1940, until August 25, 1944.

The oppressive occupation brought about nightly curfews, food rationing, and persecution of the city’s Jewish population.

In July 1942 the police force rounded up 13,000 Jews and sent them to their deaths in German concentration camps. The Germans fled the city on August 25, 1944, and General Charles de Gaulle, leader of Free French, entered Paris the following day.

Postwar Troubles ~~~
Paris suffered less than many European cities from World War II bombing, yet postwar reconstruction proved slow.

The city’s chronic housing shortage worsened in the postwar years due to a sharp rise in birthrates and the arrival of large numbers of migrant workers.

In 1954 the population reached 2,850,000, 135,000 of whom were foreigners. North Africans, mainly Algerians, were the largest group and worked predominantly in factories.

Many of the city’s Italians went into building construction, and many of the Spaniards into domestic service.

Recurrent racial tension between native French and Algerians was exacerbated further in the early 1960s during the Algerian War of Independence.

On February 6, 1962, dozens of Algerians were killed during a demonstration at the Charonne Métro station in eastern Paris.

The alarming housing situation was Paris’s main preoccupation throughout the 1950s.

In 1954, 80 percent of homes lacked bathrooms and many people lived in slums.
The worst slums were clustered close to railway stations or sprawled along the city’s periphery.

To remedy this, city planners launched the large-scale construction of low-income housing projects, often in the suburbs. In the same period, most heavy industry moved out of the city. The subsequent demographic shift lowered the population of the inner city to just over 2 million

Recovery and Development ~~~
The city’s full recovery took place in the 1960s as the economy improved. Civic leaders cleared many of the slums and passed a law requiring the cleaning of the exteriors of all of the city’s buildings, which had been blackened by decades of pollution. Paris subsequently regained its characteristic light-colored allure.

New and taller structures began to modify the previously horizontal skyline of Paris. Notable new high-rises included the business center at La Défense, on the western edge of Paris; Le Front de Seine, west of the Eiffel Tower; and the development near Porte d’Italie in the south.

The Montparnasse Tower was built in 1969 and in the same year, the central market at Les Halles was moved outside the city and replaced by a modern shopping center.

The new RER express trains linked the inner city to the suburbs, putting an end to the age-old separation between them.

A student uprising in 1968 caused havoc in Paris. Largely a protest movement against conservatism in the French education system, it also expressed anxiety about a rapidly changing world.

The protest began at the University of Nanterre, in the northwestern suburbs, but soon moved to the Latin Quarter, where street riots took place in May. The uprising led to long-overdue educational reforms, including the splitting of the University of Paris into several autonomous faculties.

Most of these faculties were shifted to other parts of Paris and its suburbs, partly to handle the growing student population, but also to remove the threat of political dissidence from the Latin Quarter.

In the late 1970s shortage of land in western Paris triggered the development of eastern Paris, where cheap property was plentiful.

Construction of the Parc de La Villette cultural and entertainment complex on the site of the old slaughterhouse was begun in the early 1980s.

The development of eastern Paris increased during the decade, notably in the 12th arrondissement, at Bercy.

Bercy’s old wine warehouses were razed and replaced by the Parc de Bercy, and the French Ministry of Finance also moved into the neighborhood.

The presidency of François Mitterrand (1981-1995), who undertook many monumental projects, was the most architecturally creative period in Paris since Haussmann.

Its legacy includes the Opéra de la Bastille, the Institut du Monde Arabe, the renovated Louvre, the Grande Arche de la Défense, the Cité de la Musique (City of Music), and the new Bibliothèque Nationale de France-François Mitterrand.

The development of eastern Paris has helped to reduce the imbalance between the poorer east and the richer west. Development in southern Paris has likewise helped diminish the endemic gap between the commercially-oriented Right Bank and the more culture-oriented Left Bank.