Susan Mary Patten went to Dior’s first collection, and, as one of the
vendeuses
had become a friend of hers, ‘I was allowed into the fitting-rooms afterwards to try on some models. This was more dangerous than entering a den of female lions before feeding time, as the richest ladies in Europe were screaming for the models, shrill cries of “WHERE is ‘Miss New York’? I had it and someone has stolen it right from under my eyes!”’
Daisy Fellowes, on the other hand, did not have to fight with the crowd in the Avenue Montaigne – the clothes which everyone desired so desperately came to her at the Ritz. ‘She is living in the most magnificent apartment on the first floor,’ wrote Duff Cooper, ‘and there
vendeuses
from Dior were showing her dresses and drinking her champagne. It was an exhibition of great wealth.’
The conspicuous extravagance of Dior’s clothes was offensive to those for whom the war had meant five years of misery. ‘People shout
ordures
at you from vans,’ wrote Nancy Mitford to Eddy Sackville-West, ‘because for some reason it creates class feeling in a way no sables could.’ Just how offensive was proved by a photographic session organized in March 1947, which was designed to display Dior’s clothes in typically Parisian surroundings. Among the obvious settings such as the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Élysées someone thought of a street market in Montmartre.
The clothes were dispatched to Montmartre in great wooden packing cases on board a
camionette
. The models changed into them in the back room of a bar. But when, proud and graceful, the first one walked out into the rue Lepic market, the effect was electric. The street sank into an uneasy silence; and then, with a shriek of outrage, a woman stallholder hurled herself on the nearest model, shouting insults. Another woman joined her and together they beat the girl, tore her hair and tried to pull the clothes off her. The other models beat a hasty retreat into the bar, and in a very short time clothes and models were heading back to the safety of the Avenue Montaigne.
Even in the conservative confines of the 7th
arrondissement
Dior clothes provoked some hard stares. Nancy Mitford was wearing her Dior suit when ‘a strange woman said would I excuse her asking but does it come from Dior? This was in the bistro I go to – and of course everybody knows about Dior’s prices. So I made up a sort of speech about how I saved up the whole war for a new coat etc.! But I know mine will soon be the same fate of
l’élégante de la rue Lepique
[
sic
]. Between the Communists and the ménagères one’s life is one long risk.’
But despite the disapproval of the great and the good, and the outrage of the poor, there was no turning back: the New Look was in such demand that it represented 75 per cent of the total export sales from France’s fashion industry for 1947. It was also relentlessly copied. ‘The London New Look made me die laughing,’ wrote Nancy Mitford. ‘Literal chintz crinolines. Apparently Dior went over: and when he reflected on the fact that he was responsible for launching it, he was ready to kill himself.’
23
A Tale of Two Cities
The Communist view of Paris was not just of a city of stark contrasts, but of two different cities juxtaposed. ‘There is the Paris of banks, of boards of directors, of ministries, of American films, of insolent GIs, of American cars from the embassy of which the government is an annex; the Paris of nauseating luxury, of town houses inhabited by elderly dowagers who are lost in the labyrinth of their rooms.’ Then there was ‘the other Paris… at the same time much older and much younger’ – the working-class Paris of ‘Belleville, La Chapelle, la rue Mouffetard, Charonne, Ménilmontant…’
Political rhetoric aside, the stark division of Paris between
beaux quartiers
and
quartiers pauvres
came largely from Baron Haussmann’s drastic reshaping of the city under the Second Empire. The populous slums in the centre were razed after their inhabitants had been evicted by force, and a golden boomof unrestricted property speculation began along his strategic boulevards laid out for the field of fire they offered against revolutionary mobs. Haussmann’s dictum that ‘architecture is nothing else than administration’ made town-planning akin to a military campaign, waged on behalf of a brashly triumphant bourgeoisie. There can be no doubt, as the sociologist J. F. Gravier wrote in 1946, that Haussmann’s cleansing of the lower orders from central Paris ‘strongly reinforced class consciousness’.
The shift in population created new slums around the northern, eastern and southern perimeter of Paris. This became known in the 1930s as the ‘
ceinture rouge
’, even though it never encircled the city. The uprooted poor and successive waves of migrants to the capital were to live in cheaply built tenements and houses, which soon began to crumble. At the end of the war over a sixth of all buildings in Paris were in a seriously dilapidated state, and this proportion rose to well over a quarter in working-class districts. The central problem was that rents were so over-controlled and so low – in 1945 rent took up only 4 per cent of the family budget as opposed to nearly 19 per cent in 1908 – that landlords never spent any money on repairs, let alone improvements to their property. Nearly a quarter of the houses and apartments depended on a tap in the courtyard or on the landing, and nearly half had no inside lavatory. The lack of hygiene extended to cooking, which was dangerous in the cramped conditions. The Prefect of the Seine, in a report to the Municipal Council, spoke of ‘slums which ruin the health and morals of our working people’.
Some 450,000 people, roughly a tenth of the population of Paris and its suburbs, were defined with bureaucratic euphemism as ‘
les plus défavorisés
’. Worst of all were ‘
les îlots insalubres
’, the slum pockets in sunless, narrow streets, with squalid little apartments where a total of 186,594 people lived in 4,290 buildings, often with four or five people to a room. Up to 30 per cent of such inhabitants succumbed to tuberculosis, a record as bad as that of 1918. In one slum, the death rate reached 43 per cent. The Prefect, however, appeared to be most concerned with the moral aspect of parents and children sharing beds. ‘We are faced with a major crisis of disastrous social implications… Family life exists in an atmosphere of disintegration, where the degree of promiscuity is appalling.’
In the waves of immigration before the war, the ancient and beautiful town of Saint-Denis on the northern boundary of Paris was swamped. ‘One cannot,’ wrote Gravier, ‘forgive the architects, the developers, and the property companies who built the cheap rented accommodation in Saint-Denis, for having changed a lively city full of history into a sordid concentration camp for immigrants.’
A large proportion of the migrants to Paris came from Brittany and the Auvergne. Although devout Catholics, they had far fewer children once they reached the city than the average in the communities from which they had sprung. In a country obsessed with increasing its birth rate after the slaughter of the First World War, Paris was therefore seen as a vampire, depopulating the countryside by attracting its young, then reducing their fertility at a stroke. One writer argued that the loss in births from internal migration to Paris between 1921 and 1936 came to the equivalent of the total French casualties during the Second World War. The main causes for this abrupt demographic change were brutally simple: the physical restrictions of tiny tenement apartments and the cost of food. All too many young wives had to resort to back-street abortionists.
In eastern Paris, the districts of Belleville and Ménilmontant lay mainly between the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, the Porte des Lilas and the cemetery of Père Lachaise, burdened with the memory of the massacre of Communards in 1871. Alleys, steep little cobbled streets, and houses with grey shutters and peeling grey stucco bore testimony to a very different sort of history from that of the spacious and grandiose centre of the city.
After the thick slush of winter, the only colour in spring came from the blossom of a few stunted and polluted lilacs or optimistic shoots from ruthlessly pollarded plane trees. The begrimed romanesque façade of Notre-Dame-de-la-Croix in the Place de Ménilmontant appeared to belong to an industrial city of the north, not to Paris. Few buildings matched in height and the chaotic roofscape was completely unlike the Haussmann-imposed discipline of central Paris. There were not many shops: the odd under-provisioned grocer optimistically entitled ‘
Alimentation Générale
’, the dingy little establishments run by migrants from the Auvergne selling wine, firewood and coal, and bare cafés with little more than a zinc counter for those in cloth caps and blue overalls who needed a
petit vin blanc
to start the day. Housewives still did almost all their shopping in the street markets, like the one on the rue de Ménilmontant.
As well as the Jewish leather-workers and cobblers and garment workshops in Belleville, the area was filled with artisans of every description: watchmakers, woodcarvers, caners, cabinetmakers, monumental masons for the gravestones in Père Lachaise, all working in tiny ill-lit premises, in most cases no more than a cubbyhole with a workbench, pigeonholes and a single bulb on a flex above.
From the water towers overlooking the cemetery of Belleville round to the abattoirs of La Villette, to the marshalling yards and railway workshops of La Chapelle, eastern and northern Paris were areas of great working-class solidarity, however fragmented their population.
In the 18th
arrondissement,
which included the central workshops of the French railways, young Communists hero-worshipped their elder brothers who had taken part in the Resistance – the centre for their activities had been the basketball club.
On Sunday mornings, the men of the Gager family put on their Sunday suits and went off to sell Communist Party newspapers. Hersz Gager, the father, sold
L’Humanité,
and the elder son, Georges, sold
L’Avant-garde
. Each had his own pitch in the rue de l’Olive next to the market.
Activities for Communist youth were taken as seriously as the Church’s activities for young Catholics. There were outings to politically approved plays, the cultural programme of the Association France-URSS, which usually involved watching films about the heroism of the Red Army, and camping for boys and girls in a very puritan atmosphere. The only relaxation came when young Communists in the 18th
arrondissement
used to organize a dance known as
la goguette,
the name coming from Saturday-night parties on the banks of the Marne before the First World War. They danced
le swing
and loved
le bebop
. The Communist Party decided not to maintain its anti-jazz line too strictly – it needed to recruit the young.
Hersz Gager’s weekly cell meeting took place in the rue Jean Robert and started after supper. He always shaved carefully before setting out. (Cell meetings in factories took place after work, but most workers preferred to avoid a cell linked to their job because if the boss found out you would be the first to be fired.)
The Communist year had its feast-days and days of political observance. Supposedly the happiest, like an ancient spring rite, was the
fête des remises de cartes
. This was a family event, with cakes and wine, and singing and dancing to an accordion. The cell secretary would make a speech, and then present the party membership cards with jocular remarks, such as ‘Perhaps this year you’ll manage to sell a few more copies of
L’Huma
!’ Other major festivals included May Day, the mass pilgrimage up to the Mur des Fédérés at Père Lachaise where the Communards had been shot, and the Fête de l’Humanité. Even protest marches were a social event, however serious their purpose.
At the opposite end of Paris from the artisan workshops of Belleville lay the vast, disciplined Renault complex at Boulogne-Billancourt. Sirens regulated the day. Each morning, the crowd of capped workers assembled at the tall entrance gates, and when they opened, the men ambled forward under the eyes of the security guards. Then the gates closed again. A young intellectual who joined the workforce to share the experience compared it in an article in
Les Temps modernes
to entering a prison each day.
Food remained the greatest cause for concern in poor districts of Paris. Their inhabitants, whether industrial workers or state employees, were the most vulnerable in all of France. The country, as a SHAEF report put it, suffered from ‘a chronic shortage of food made worse by an imbalance in consumption’. With average incomes still 20 per cent lower than before the war, the urban poor and those on weekly salaries were receiving 30 per cent less of the share of national income.
Nine months after the Liberation, SHAEF reported that ‘the food position in France continues to be grave. Urban France has never approached the ration of 2,000 calories per head.’ The ration target for the ‘non-farm population’ in the summer of 1945 was 350 grams of bread a day, 100 grams of meat a week and 500 grams of fats a month. In April the population of Paris averaged only 1,337 calories a day, but this overall figure hid terrible imbalances between the
beaux quartiers
and working-class districts, where many, especially the old, virtually starved to death. The effect of malnutrition on the young should not be underestimated either. The average height of children was to fall dramatically.
Subsequent improvements during 1945 were short-lived. The announcement that bread rationing, which had been relaxed, was to be reintroduced on 1 January 1946 had provoked turmoil in the last few weeks of de Gaulle’s administration. Groups which had nothing in common politically, from the newly formed Comité de Défense de la Petite et Moyenne Boulangerie to the Communist-dominated Union des Femmes Françaises, protested vociferously. And just before New Year, people stormed bakeries in a surge of panic buying. Customers at the back of the queue attacked those coming out with several loaves, even though they too had planned to buy as many as they were allowed.