We’ll Always Have Paris?

Google Street View, I recently discovered, also permits time travel. Take the Café de l’Église, opposite the Saint-Vincent-de-Paul church in Paris’s tenth arrondissement. The most recent Street View capture from March 2023 provides as fine an example as any of a certain mediocrity found in France’s capital, where I’ve lived for the past six years. The restaurant’s awning is crowned by a garish arrangement of fake flowers. In a Parisian corollary to perhaps the worst motif in contemporary décor, the café has also been known to host a human-size teddy-bear at one of its empty tables. The undoubtedly so-so specialties of the day are priced in the high teens, although you can’t entirely make out what’s written on the ardoise.

Click back to 2008 and that same street corner was occupied by a shabby café-tabac called Le Weekend, a masterpiece of twentieth-century brasserie design. It is a stunning afternoon in May. A motley crowd of people are hanging out on the terrace, where laptops are noticeably absent; by the look of their grip, those with hands to their ears are clasping flip phones. Onlookers have gathered around what looks to be an amateur film shoot next door. To have been that young man, hunched over a book on the terrace’s far side, unaware of the forces remaking his city …

Nostalgia, of the Street View variety or not, is the tenor of much critical writing about cities, so one of the main advantages of journalist Cole Stangler’s 2023 book is to put us on more solid footing. Paris Is Not Dead, his title stubbornly affirms, but it is becoming more and more difficult for most people to keep their heads above water in a place that seems intent on surrendering to the juggernaut of real estate speculation and finance capital.

A concise overview of the past, present, and future of working-class Paris, Stangler’s book bucks the wistful Gallophilia that typifies the genre in Anglo- American publishing. For starters, his Paris is decidedly Right Bank, a refreshing corrective to the sclerotic Left Bank that still dominates the popular view of the city. In fact, a good deal of the book’s drama is not “Parisian” at all but instead concerns the vast suburbs on the other side of the Périphérique highway, where the overwhelming majority of the urban area’s population lives today.

Avoiding what he calls the “sob story” narrative of many antigentrification jeremiads, Stangler writes with the subdued pessimism that will be familiar to those who’ve followed his reporting and commentary on French politics for outlets such as Jacobin, The Guardian, and the New York Times. While the book is directed at international readers—it grew out of a 2020 report published in The Nation—its knowledge of the levers and policies that can still be used to make Paris more livable for the many is deeply local. One of its key subtexts is directed at the French: Much of what’s good about your country can be traced to those periods when Paris felt the weight of its masses, while their retreat has gone hand in hand with the hollowing out of the republican ideal.

Because for now, all the markers are flashing red. When the Olympics kick off this summer, its backers hope it will cement Paris’s place among the top rung of “global cities” and its transition into an oasis for the superrich and their professional-class retinue. In the decade following the 2008 financial crisis—little more than business- page murmurings on that sunny day in May—apartment sale prices soared in Paris by 73 percent, crossing the €10,000 per square meter average in 2019. Without support from family wealth, Stangler notes, “there is not a single arrondissement in the French capital where median-income renters under the age of forty-five can afford to purchase an apartment.”

An astronomical share of Parisians’ living expenses is swallowed by housing, as rents have been tugged upward by rising property valuations. Investors who have poured wealth into the housing stock are eager to cash in: The average tenant in Paris now pays roughly €1,200 per month (around $1,300). The median income for a salaried private sector worker in France is approximately €2,000 per month, after taxes and welfare contributions. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2021 Cost of Living Index lists Paris as the world’s second most expensive city, bested only by Tel Aviv; New York, the scale’s benchmark, ranked sixth.

A painstaking transformation of the demography of the city is now well underway, as once dense working-class neighborhoods are reduced to tiny pockets or are engulfed entirely. In their place, well-heeled apartment seekers are looking farther and farther beyond the traditional bourgeois districts in the western precincts of the capital, or on the rive gauche, toward the historical quartiers populaires in the north and the east. According to the French government’s own statistics, just 26 percent of Parisians today qualify as “working-class”—down from 35 percent at the end of the 1990s. Meanwhile, 45 percent of the population is now made up of so-called cadres, the “investment bankers, consultants, publicists for luxury fashion brands, and armies of mid-level managers at companies listed on the CAC 40 stock exchange” whom Stangler ridicules from time to time.

In these moments, he indulges in some justified disgust:

Stangler is at his best when he describes these dynamics from the ground up. His opening chapters closely map the contours of daily life in two neighborhoods that are among the last working-class redoubts within the ring highway that separates Paris proper from the suburbs: the Goutte d’Or (literally, “drop of gold”), in the northern eighteenth arrondissement, and Belleville, the greater part of which spans the nineteenth and twentieth arrondissements, farther to the east.

Barring two historical chapters—one on the nineteenth-century glory days of proletarian Paris and another on the fecund (and affordable) ground that popular militancy laid for the twentieth-century avant-garde—Stangler weaves in profiles of a dozen or so contemporary Parisians struggling to get by. A longtime resident of the Goutte d’Or, Soumia is unemployed and lives with her partner, Amin, a warehouse worker, in a ground-level apartment that measures twenty-two square meters (just under 240 square feet). As she puts it to Stangler, they pay €800 a month for a “rat hole.”

The couple know they could afford better in the suburbs, but Soumia can’t imagine leaving the neighborhood where she has lived since arriving in 1999 as a teen from Algeria. Clearing the waiting list for social housing is hardly a sure thing and would likely mean having to move far away, possibly outside the city’s inner ring. On average, Paris loses some 12,000 residents per year, mostly to the sprawling suburbs: The city’s two million–plus residents are dwarfed by the nine million or so inhabitants of the banlieues, concentrating some four-fifths of the population of the broader metropolitan area and much of its working class.

Cândida Rodrigues moved to the Sainte-Marthe neighborhood near Belleville in the 1980s and was able to get a mortgage for her small flat thanks to her stable job contract. Then largely derelict, the area has since been the scene of a wholesale transformation, in part at the instigation of Rodrigues and her neighbors, who formed an association to push for city investments to revive the housing stock. Sainte-Marthe has become particularly fashionable thanks to its relatively low buildings, central square, and calm side streets which insulate it from the surrounding rush.

Ironically, the neighborhood was originally conceived in the 1920s as a workers’ cité by a socially progressive entrepreneur, whose family sold the land in 1942 to a developer from Normandy. Besides selling off apartment units to individuals like Rodrigues (“one of the lucky ones,” writes Stangler), that developer held onto much of the property until it was gobbled up by a major investor in 2019. She and her neighbors lobbied unsuccessfully for the city to intervene and purchase the remaining properties to remove them from the private market; as she points out to Stangler, “if this neighborhood was renovated, it was thanks to taxpayer money!”

The sentiment gets at the substance of the book’s argument: There is nothing inevitable about the way cities change, which above all is the sum of competing priorities, policies, and pressures. This is especially clear in Paris, a city whose built environment has been shaped more than most by a vibrant tradition of working-class organization and insurrection and the socially violent—if not outright bloody—attempts from on high to reign those forces in.

Haussmann’s beautification of Paris, covered in chapter three, was a reconquest. The grand roadways the baron drove through the medieval city improved sanitation, streamlined the circulation of traffic, and, of course, delimited a safe harbor for capital investment—all to the applause of the nascent bourgeoisie. This emergent ruling class cheered on the boulevard-bestriding troops sent out to quash the pesky uprisings that emerged like clockwork out of the faubourgs, the term originally used for the poorer areas outside the city walls before being applied to the ballooning working-class neighborhoods of industrial Paris. As Haussmann wrote in his memoirs, it would help to “attack the faubourg from the rear,” referring to the decision to pave over the lower end of the Canal Saint-Martin with what is now the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, just above Bastille in the eleventh.

This was the age of the barricades, but Stangler’s heroes are figures like Georges Cochon, a legendary housing activist from the early twentieth century who headed the Tenants Union. Cochon staged his own eviction, inviting the press and fellow activists to turn it into what Stangler calls “agitprop avant la lettre.” Though the union helped Parisians forcibly removed from housing, it did so with an eye toward shaping public opinion, turning evictions into vibrant mini-demonstrations. “They transformed what could be a private moment of shame into an expression of collective power, making clear that responsibility for housing problems lay not with individuals struggling to make ends meet, but with landlords and city officials,” writes Stangler.

Such pressures were in part responsible for a wave of pro-tenant legislation that kept rents in check for much of the twentieth century. Labor organizations and left-wing parties made the question of housing into a key political issue. In 1912, Paris’s city council proposed an ambitious program of affordable housing, which quickly got the green light from Parliament. Amid the upheaval of World War I, the government ordered a moratorium on rental payments and evictions, which was followed by a 1919 law on real estate speculation designed to keep rents at their 1914 levels. That legislation stayed on the books until after World War II, with a major 1948 law restricting market-rate rents to constructions after that date.

Following in Cochon’s footsteps are activists like Jean-Baptiste Eyraud, of the association Droit Au Logement (DAL)— “right to housing”—which claims to have helped 33,000 people find housing or avoid eviction since its founding in 1990. DAL organizes rallies and street protests alongside providing legal and administrative aid to those facing eviction or seeking to claim a right to social housing. The association even has a way of rewarding activism, with a “struggle bonus” that prioritizes assistance for people who show up to its demonstrations. Eyraud looks to cities like Berlin, which approved a 2021 referendum to expropriate large landlords, as an example of the type of activism that needs to be developed. “There, they organize building by building, neighborhood by neighborhood,” he tells Stangler. “And when they take to the streets there are tens of thousands of them.”

The pushback to Paris’s housing crisis is gaining traction, however. The city council, where the housing portfolio is in the hands of the Communist Party, has put pressure on the moderate Socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo, whose decade-long tenure would otherwise be focused entirely on the fifteen-minute city scheme geared toward cadres. A goal to reserve 30 percent of Paris’s residential stock for social housing by 2030 exceeds stipulations in national law that will require, by 2025, towns with over 3,000 residents to reserve 25 percent or else risk a steep fine. (Some of Paris’s wealthy suburbs, like Neuilly-sur-Seine, have opted to pay.) One barrier to this plan is lack of space: There is very little land on which to build within Paris, meaning that half of the projected new housing will have to come from public purchases of private properties. The arrangement will provide a much-needed cushion to the private market, but it is no panacea, especially if it goes uncoupled with more aggressive policies to reign in yield-seeking real estate. Moreover, the generous standard for qualifying for social housing means that many residents are solidly middle class. Rodrigues, from Sainte-Marthe, tells Stangler about her appeals to the owner of a nearby hair salon whose prices cater to the neighborhood’s newcomers. They turned down her request for a locals’ discount.

For all its focus on the violence of the housing market, Paris Is Not Dead doesn’t probe the deeper reasons for the decline of the Parisian working class—namely, people’s leverage over how they work and for how much. This is curious, given that Stangler’s specialty really is labor. We meet anti-eviction activists, people getting by on shoestring wages, and unionized workers at a Monoprix supermarket, but the detail given to historical strikes and worker organizing underscores the impression that labor power is a thing of the past—a shift Stangler doesn’t confront head-on. Beyond a brief mention of the phasing out of rent control regulations in the 1980s, there is relatively little in the book about the crisis years of the late twentieth century, the evisceration of industrial employment, and what made liberalization seem like a reasonable objective for city governance.

Some of these issues are addressed in the final chapter, on the suburbs that really are the battlefield for the future of the city. Many of Paris’s surrounding towns are even denser than the capital itself and some are posh enough to give Westchester County a run for its money. But large parts of the banlieues are synonymous with the problems of urban poverty, home to wage-earning descendants of France’s postcolonial immigrants and the housing blocs left over from the postwar boom.

A recent push for a massive expansion of the subway network promises to bring the banlieues and the metropolitan core into closer contact. But without popular oversight, increased social investment, and forms of wealth-building that actually favor these communities, the Grand Paris Express (as the project is known) risks acting as a beachhead for real estate speculation beyond central Paris. This is the dark hypothetical—“Isolated bubbles of development where middle-class residents stick to themselves? Complexes of condos and chain stores where consultants congratulate themselves about their mortgages and gossip about the problems of the nearby housing projects?”—that Stangler portends in his conclusion.

The book likely went to print before last summer’s riots, kicked off by the police killing of seventeen-year-old Nahel Merzouk in Nanterre, a city west of central Paris. Primarily a rejection of racism in French policing, the Nahel uprising took on the scale of a national crisis because it channeled the deep exhaustion with the segregation and economic oppression experienced beyond the Périphérique. It was spontaneous, disorganized, and without a political outlet in a country hurtling toward the hard right. Yet, it was a reminder that Greater Paris, the valley of concrete from Eurodisney to Poissy, still has some fight in it.