Over its 5,000-year history,
Paris has established itself as a true capital.
The scene of 3 revolutions and 2 empires,
it overthrew the monarchy that had dominated it for centuries.
Despite its status as the cradle of Liberty and the Rights of Man,
many citizens lived in squalor and poverty.
With its artistic reputation and Haussmann's redevelopment,
the city proudly entered the modern era.
At the dawn of the third millennium,
the capital dreamt of becoming a Greater Paris.
Paris has now set itself a new challenge:
to pursue its evolution in harmony with its prestigious heritage
and the cosmopolitan nature of its population.
A Capital Tale
Capital of Modernity
The 19th century transformed Paris.
The Industrial Revolution
forced the capital back to the drawing board.
Thanks to its wealth of factories and the arrival of the railway,
Paris's population grew and grew.
The rural exodus had the city bursting at the seams.
Saint-Lazare, Montparnasse. In the east and the north
the city's stations handled over 30,000 passengers a day.
The population in the booming capital
reached one million.
Confined in narrow streets, the city suffocated.
Large-scale capitalist industry,
which was new in France, came from England,
and brought a lot of people to Paris. It caused overpopulation.
The living conditions were appalling.
In the slums people lived 20 to a room.
This massive influx of workers
plunged some areas of the capital into poverty.
People lived in cramped, inhuman conditions.
Before Haussmann arrived in 1853,
Paris was still essentially a medieval city.
This was especially true of the centre.
There were no trees, the water was polluted...
There wasn't enough water to meet the population's needs.
Near the Gobelins factory, around the Biévre,
which ran through the Faubourg Saint-Marcel,
the tanners' and dyers' workshops gave off a foul stench.
The squalor of Paris was especially evident in 1832,
at the time of the great cholera epidemic,
which killed tens of thousands of people in Paris,
particularly in the centre and the area around the City Hall.
At this point,
theorists appeared on the scene,
speaking of hygiene, quality of life, new towns...
This influenced many people, in particularly Napoleon Ill,
who was in exile in England before becoming President.
He was in a modern city - London -
the most modern in Europe at the time.
Proclaimed Emperor in 1851,
Napoleon III intended to turn Paris into the flagship of a modern state.
He found the man to make his dreams a reality.
The old walls of Paris would tumble, giving the city a much-needed lustre.
Napoleon III handed the keys to the new Prefect of the Seine,
Baron Haussmann.
In choosing Haussmann,
Napoleon Ill made the right decision.
Firstly, he was a burly man, six-feet tall.
That obviously made an impression on people.
Also, he was a thoroughly upright administrator,
who had a huge, incredible capacity for work.
Everyone said so:
if you went past the City Hall at 1 a.m.,
the light would be on because Haussmann was working.
At 5 a.m. Haussmann would be working.
He had an unbelievable capacity for work.
For the first time,
here was someone who was going to rethink Paris as a whole
while the city carried on living.
The city limits were extended
as far as the fortifications,
which had been built by Adolphe Thiers in 1840
to protect Paris.
By annexing the suburbs lying within this defensive wall,
the city's total surface area practically doubled in 1860.
Napoleon Ill clearly wanted to create a Greater Paris.
In 1860, the annexation of the villages of Auteuil,
Passy, Les Batignolles, Montmartre and Belleville
increased the number of arrondissements from 12 to 20.
It was time for a complete overhaul.
So Napoleon Ill decided to open up Paris.
The mission he gave Haussmann
was to bring air, water and light to the city.
In 17 years, some 30,000 buildings were demolished.
That's about 2,000 a year.
Imagine that in Paris today!
30,000 buildings were demolished,
but the majority, at least 99%,
were totally unfit for human habitation.
Haussmann tackled the lie de la Cité first.
As a student he had crossed it in disgust
on his way to the law faculty on the Left Bank.
The city's historic centre became one big building site.
The police headquarters and the commercial court
replaced the area's dilapidated houses and grimy cabarets.
The city's oldest hospital, the Hétel-Dieu, was rebuilt.
The clearing of the area in front of Notre-Dame
revealed the Cathedral's immense beauty.
On the Right Bank, the trading heart of the city since the year 1000,
Napoleon III instructed Haussmann
and his architect,Victor Baltard,
to build "vast umbrellas of glass".
The market halls designed by Baltard,
which were sadly demolished in 1970,
were absolutely sumptuous.
They would have made a fabulous shopping centre or arts centre today.
The Les Halles markets were the belly of Paris and its environs.
But they also supplied over 25% of the national market.
Day and night, surrounded by a profusion of colours and smells,
Parisians jostled each other between the food stalls.
Les Halles was another world,
frequented by traders and customers,
outsiders and the lower middle classes.
The streets bustled with traders of all kinds.
But such a concentration of activities
caused major traffic problems.
To relieve congestion in the capital,
the option chosen by Napoleon Ill and Haussmann
was not to widen the existing roads,
as had been attempted in the past,
but instead to build new roads through the blocks themselves.
And so,
on a map he drew two main roads running parallel to one another
on either side of the Seine,
and a straight road running from south to north,
which became the Boulevard de Sébastopol.
Having done this,
Haussmann planned Paris
around these two main roads, know as "the Great Axis".
This constituted the framework
for the subsequent transformation of the city.
The budget allocated by Napoleon
was not sufficient to finance these ambitious projects.
Haussmann had to appeal to private investors
in order to find a further one billion francs.
He tried his luck with the Pereire brothers,
wealthy financiers and founders of the Credit Mobilier.
The capital's future was in their hands.
We know you have no buyer.
Not only are you asking us to buy the land,
you also impose some very binding specifications.
And expensive.
Huge six-storey buildings, arcades, shopping galleries.
It is simply the perfect neighbourhood.
I propose 460 francs per square metre.
A price that guarantees a significant profit.
Along with significant risk.
The days of making a fortune investing in rail roads are over.
It's time to invest in stone.
The Emperor's friendship and future commissions are worth this price:
400 francs.
For under 400 francs a square metre,
the Pereire brothers made a major contribution to Haussmann's
urban renovation projects.
Prices soared.
The Pereires bought, sold, exchanged and invested
in the capital's key areas:
the Rue de Rivoli, the plain of Monceau, the Place de I'Opéra.
From Montparnasse to Saint-Honoré, to the lie de la Cité,
to Bastille, the face of Paris changed.
The building of the Avenue de I'Opéra
gave the Emperor direct access
from his home at the Tuileries Palace
to Charles Garnier's majestic opera house,
a symbol of the Second Empire's grandeur.
The Boulevard Haussmann became home
to the city's department stores,
the new temples of consumption.
Paris's transformation also changed the way Parisians spent their money,
especially Parisian women.
Capital of fashion and luxury,
Paris became a shopping mecca for women from all over the world.
Another way of opening up the city was to build squares,
large squares, along the main roads.
These broke the monotony
of the newly created avenues.
In the west there was the laying out of the Place de I'Etoile,
one of Haussmann's greatest achievements,
formed by the intersection
of twelve radiating avenues.
These avenues did not really serve any purpose
other than to make the square more beautiful.
With its wide avenues and pavements,
the city became the perfect place for strolling and social interaction.
At nightfall, there was a festive atmosphere on the Boulevard of Crime.
The Boulevard of Crime
was located on what is now the Place de la République.
It had plenty of theatres
and other forms of entertainment, such as tumblers,
freak shows, bear-leaders...
Absolutely everything imaginable.
These were very popular with the Parisians
who went there for entertainment.
It was nicknamed the Boulevard of Crime
because the theatres put on plays in which people killed one another,
very merrily!
In the mid-19th century, Paris had never been so safe.
Haussmann installed gas lighting and street lamps all over the city.
Haussmann brought street lighting to the entire city.
George Sand
wrote that you could perhaps criticise Haussmann's straight roads,
but you could walk around safely
with your hands in your pockets, day and night,
without any danger of being robbed or attacked
because everything was lit and visible.
People strolled freely among the trees.
As well as the street lamps, managed day and night by lighters,
fountains, clocks,
newspaper kiosks and urinals adorned the capital's streets
for the convenience and delight of people out for a stroll.
"To stroll in Paris is to live," wrote Honoré de Balzac,
who was in the habit of pacing
the city's wide boulevards until dawn.
This was a period when Parisians rediscovered green spaces
in their city.
Haussmann and Alphand, his director of parks and gardens,
planted over one million trees in the city of Paris,
including the Bois de Vincennes and the Bois de Boulogne.
Parisians could also stroll in the city's many parks.
Some were man-made, like Buttes-Chaumont.
It was a rubbish dump, the former site of a gallows,
and it was turned into an extravagant park
typical of the period.
Everything was fake, artificial, but it looked absolutely wonderful.
This 25-hectare park in the 19th arrondissement
is one of the capital's largest green spaces.
It was a breath of fresh air for Parisians at the time.
There was a real desire to organise all these parks and gardens.
In fact, bringing air, light and greenery to the city
was part of Haussmann's original mission in Paris.
There was another thing that Haussmann did,
more his project than Napoleon's,
and that was installing running water and sewers.
Six hundred kilometres of sewers
were built under the city's streets,
with absolutely enormous collectors.
In fact, they were so big that it became very fashionable
to visit the Paris sewers.
High society would put on their finest clothes
to go and visit them.
But apart from being a dazzling sight,
the sewer system meant the city was a great deal cleaner.
In the space of 17 years, thanks to Haussmann,
the city's water supply increased tenfold.
And this water was perfectly clean.
They diverted springs within a radius of over 200 kilometres around Paris,
and built a system of aqueducts to bring the water to the city,
where it was stored in reservoirs, such as the Ménilmontant reservoir.
This perfectly clean water was then distributed all over the city.
Huge reservoirs
on the city's various hills supplied the capital with water
from springs in the Paris basin.
Parisians no longer needed to carry water from the Seine to their homes.
Every building was now equipped with running water and gas.
Just as the new capital was emerging,
one of Haussmann's fiercest detractors, Victor Hugo, passed away.
Over one million Parisians gathered on June 1885
to celebrate the memory of this great author.
Victor Hugo's state funeral was the largest event
ever to be held on the city's streets.
From the Arc de Triomphe to the Pantheén,
the crowd followed "the hearse of the poor" in silence.
The coffin contained the remains of the man who embodied
the capital's soul.
With this funeral,
the Panthéon was restored to the purpose
for which the Revolutionaries had intened it,
as a resting place for the great men of the nation.
And we mustn't forget that in a country like France,
great men were not military men, not heads of state.
They were writers, scientists and scholars.
This was a France
that saw itself as the heir of the Enlightenment.
And it was Paris that suddenly found itself
back in the role of capital city,
in the sense that it symbolised the nation and its new values.
It was not a dangerous city,
a city of revolutions, any more.
At the end of the 19th century,
Paris was readying to burst onto the scene
as one of the world's great modern capitals.
For the fourth time since 1855,
Paris hosted the World's Fair.
The idea was to show the world
the extent of France's know-how and industrial might.
That year,
over 30 million visitors rushed to discover the capital.
A city of possibilities, Paris shone and fascinated.
At this point, Paris became
a beacon of the world.
A World's Fair is both a view of yourself and of the world,
but it's also a moment when the whole world is watching you.
The posters advertising these fairs
were displayed all over Europe and even in the United States.
And as a result people felt drawn to Paris.
These fairs were also an excuse for major urban planning projects.
Architects and engineers
did not hesitate to take on the boldest challenges.
Gustave Eiffel wanted to erect a gigantic iron tower
on the Champ de Mars.
The project did not meet with universal approval.
Far from it.
Many railed against this "ugly monster"
that would disfigure the capital.
This was the case of Alexandre Dumas Junior,
Guy de Maupassant and Charles Garnier.
We're here to protest...
Against the erection in our dear capital
of this monstrous and useless tower.
One only has to imagine for a moment a dizzying tower dominating Paris,
overwhelming Notre-Dame and the Louvre,
humiliating the city.
Gustave Eiffel answered his critics.
Monsieur Eiffel, if you please.
My tower will have its own beauty.
Just because I'm an engineer doesn't mean I don't appreciate true beauty.
Now THE symbol of Paris,
the Eiffel Tower was almost never built.
Who could argue against the artistic value of the pyramids
and how they've sparked the imagination of men?
And what are the pyramids, anyway, but towering mounds made by men?
Eiffel maintained that his tower would be useful to science
and was much more than a mere tourist attraction.
What visitor can remain unmoved
when he gazes at the pyramids?
My tower will be the tallest structure ever raised by mankind.
Will that not be extraordinarily beautiful in its own way'?
The Eiffel Tower, a soaring 7,000-ton steel structure,
dazzled the capital with its modernity.
This marvel of engineering
was not intended to dominate the city's skyline.
Most of the galleries, exotic pavilions and sumptuous palaces
would be demolished.
You have to try to imagine
Paris being destroyed and rebuilt every 20 years,
but that's the nature of World's Fairs.
Every fair was an occasion for visitors
to embark on a journey into an unfamiliar world.
The streets were embellished with ephemeral palaces,
invitations to discover different cultures.
Gustave Eiffel saved his tower from demolition in the nick of time
by suggesting it be used as a radio antenna.
Today
it's the most visited attraction in the world.
The Eiffel Tower, the Petit Palais,
the Grand Palais and the Palais de Chaillot
are pretty much all that remain of the World's Fairs.
All the other pavilions were destroyed
as soon as the fairs were over,
such as this sumptuous Gallery of Machines,
which cost 7 times more to build than the Eiffel Tower.
In a sense,
the goal of the World's Fair is to announce the future,
that's to say, what tomorrow's world will be like.
The world's industries and economic potential are on display,
and also its industrial capacity.
It's an ode to progress and this progress is appealling.
During these huge events,
exhibitors and visitors converged and mingled with the Parisians.
They were huge crowd-drawing machines.
Try to imagine what 50 million visitors
to the 1900 World's Fair actually meant.
It meant the provinces came to the city.
Today someone from the provinces is not considered an immigrant.
But France was a different place then.
Two thirds of these visitors from the provinces didn't speak French.
Visiting the capital was a way of imagining they could live there.
In 1900 the capital hosted another World's Fair
and the Olympic Games.
After years of discussions,
the Mayor of Paris managed to convince the authorities
to begin construction of the metropolitan railway.
The construction of the metro
from 1898 onwards would have been
the perfect opportunity to create a Greater Paris.
Yet what became known as "the municipal toy"
was an inner-Paris metro.
And it remained a centralising instrument,
even though the purpose of public transport
was to develop not only Paris but also its environs.
A spectacular building project began.
The capital's streets were torn up
to dig the many galleries and tunnels.
These trenches hindered pedestrians and the city's first automobiles.
Parisians lived with this construction site for 10 years.
But once the network had been built,
it was an efficient system that ran all over the city.
The first underground network had 6 lines and was an instant success.
Line 1 served the main exhibition sites
and transported over 17 million passengers in its first year.
The metro radically changed the way Parisians moved about.
They now descended into the underground city every day.
Elevated viaducts over Haussmann's avenues
gave Parisians a new place to stroll.
This massive building project attracted thousands of workers
to a capital in upheaval.
I saw an ad
which had appeared in a town where poor peasants
were desperate to leave,
saying workers were needed in Paris to build the metro.
It said how much they would earn,
that the ticket would be reimbursed after they'd worked a while,
and that they had to bring their own pickaxes and shovels.
And they came to Paris by the trainload.
A large part of the Paris metro system was built by Bretons.
People from the provinces who came to Paris
created neighbourhoods close to the station they'd arrived at.
Bretons settled near the Gare Montparnasse.
People from Auvergne, arriving at the Gare d'Austerlitz,
settled in Bastille.
They could also arrive at the Gare de Lyon.
Two stations served Auvergne.
And Alsatians lived near the Gare de I'Est.
People from the provinces came to Paris
to set up businesses or do seasonal work.
Native Parisians have been in the minority since the 19th century.
There are fewer people now who were born in Paris.
But already in 1886 only 36% had been born in Paris.
This trend has remained constant.
So the native Parisian
is as much of a myth and a fantasy as the ethnic Frenchman.
They don't actually exist.
The new arrivals
settled in the working-class areas of north and east Paris.
This flood of people gave rise to a period of unrest.
Parisians from the inner suburbs regularly expressed their anger.
Among them, "the Apaches" were the most fearsome.
The Apaches were gangs of youths aged between 15 and 20,
hailing from working-class districts
like Belleville, Ménilmontant, Charonne,
so mainly from outlying areas
in the north and east of the capital near the fortifications.
The old ring around Thiers' fortifications
was home to those on the fringes of society and the dispossessed.
Living among these dropouts were the Redskins of modern Paris,
who had no place in the rapidly developing capital.
The Apaches scared people. That's why they were given the name.
It conveyed how feared these gangs were.
It was always their extreme violence that was highlighted.
And it was always the most violent stories
that the press put on the front page.
Every evening, these gangs invaded the cafes and dance halls
of Bastille and Belleville.
Parisians were fascinated by these lawless thugs
who challenged bourgeois morals.
Some even went as far as to carry out bomb attacks,
such as Ravachol, a fanatical anarchist.
The most dangerous met "the Widow", the guillotine.
The rendezvous took place in front of La Grande Roquette prison,
where hordes of Parisians would gather for the executions.
In Belle Epoque Paris,
the rabble rubbed shoulders with the working classes,
artisans, traders, bohemians and young bourgeois.
These districts were places where people from central Paris
would go to slum it
or at least drink more cheaply.
Parisians met to party
at the foot of the hill of Montmartre.
On the stage of the Folies-Bergeres and the Moulin Rouge
La Goulue danced the cancan.
Pigalle became a pleasure dome.
There was a provocative atmosphere
- provocative artists, provocative lifestyles -
which was due to the extraordinary freedom
and, indeed, the rather loose morals
that were prevelant in Montmartre at the time.
In the early 20th century,
the area's brothels did a roaring trade.
The liberal atmosphere in Montmartre was conducive to creativity.
Artists from all over the world came to live on the hill.
At the time, Paris was a city with a flourishing art scene,
which welcomed these artists,
who found cheap lodgings here.
And Paris had a reputation as the capital of the world
all over Europe.
So artists came here because life was cheap
and they could express themselves.
They got together in places
where they could share their art, their artistic expression.
The hill of Montmartre
was the birthplace of the principal art movements of the 20th century.
Renoir and Utrillo were regulars
at the Lapin Agile cabaret.
Matisse, Apollinaire and Picasso met at the Bateau-Lavoir.
Modigliani painted portraits in the local cafés.
He'd exchange them for a glass of Vermouth and Cassie.
At the time these artists were beggars, bohemians.
They had a tough existence.
A few bourgeois would buy their paintings,
but not always.
The prolific output of artists like Apollinaire, Picasso and Braque
left an indelible mark on Montmartre's soul.
This was the birthplace of Fauvism and Cubism.
Capital of the arts,
the Paris of the Belle Epoque had a huge global influence.
On January 20 1910, Parisians woke up to a disaster.
The Seine had burst its banks,
flooding shops, cellars, even the metro...
Paris was under water.
In this age of industrialisation,
electricity and the drive to modernity,
nature had reasserted itself.
But Parisians' dreams and parties would be swept away
in an even more terrifying ordeal...
The outbreak of the First World War.
By September 1914,
the Germans were less than 100 km from the capital.
Constantly bombed, Paris shook but did not surrender.
All able-bodied men were called up.
The women of Paris made sure it was business as usual.
For the first time, they were seen driving trams,
delivering coal and making shells in the city's arms factories.
These factories played a major role
in what was known as "the Second Front",
the war effort behind the scenes.
Because in 1917 the first assembly lines
appeared in France, in the Citroén factory,
for the manufacturing of tanks.
To meet the huge demands of the war effort,
the Renault factory in Billanoourt and the Citroen factory in Javel
introduced assembly-line work.
Originally dedicated to "the glory of French art",
the Grand Palais became a military hospital.
Paris tended to soldiers injured in the trenches,
then trained them and sent them back to the front.
A centre of industry and a railway hub,
Paris played a major role in the war effort up until the end.
The Great War ended in 1918. The toll has horrendous:
9 million dead and 20 million wounded.
The Arc de Triomphe, where the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier lies,
became a historic national symbol.
The monument houses the Eternal Flame,
in memory of those killed in action.
The Champs-Elysées,
where the nation's armed forces and leaders have always paraded,
turned into a sacred way.
Paris wanted to forget "the war to end all wars".
The smart set drowned their sorrows in the cafes of Montparnasse
alongside American soldiers.
This district became the centre
of artistic life in the Paris of the Roaring 20s.
You can't mention the Roaring 20s
without mentioning black American culture.
Things took off with the arrival of Josephine Baker,
of jazz, of different cultures...
You could say, as a result of this intermixing,
that Paris became the first black capital in the world.
In a way, Paris is a city which... politically and intellectually,
is a city of encounters, a city of interaction.
At one point, there were Chinese leaders teaching communism
to Africans, West Indians, North Africans and Vietnamese in Paris.
It's incredible! It's paradoxical.
At the same time, the authorities' logic was simple.
It was much easier to keep an eye on them in Paris
than it was in the empire. So it was a form of pragmatism too.
But we shouldn't delude ourselves.
The Great Mosque and the Franco-Muslim hospital
were monitored.
Religion was controlled, health was controlled, men were controlled.
At the beginning of the 1930s,
foreigners made up almost 10% of the population of Paris.
A place of refuge for some,
it was above all an open-minded cultural mosaic of a city.
But immigration scared people
at a time when the fascist menace was growing.
Paris was also the capital
of the second largest colonial empire in the world.
It did not hesitate to display the riches of its colonies
at great international exhibitions.
In the heart of the city, visitors could wander
around the Dogon palaces of West Africa,
and stroll among the Cambodian temples of Angkor Wat.
The colonial exhibition is a different dialectic.
This wasn't just an ode to progress.
This was really about the civilising mission,
about the colonial empire and its vainglory,
about one's self and the other.
And here, the native was the puppet.
The native had already been present
for a long time in these productions,
through human zoos, ethnographic exhibitions
and shows at the Folies-Bergéres,
of which there were an increasing number from the 1870s.
With the colonial exhibitions, however,
there was a civilising discourse.
These displays of the colonial empire's riches
could not mask the harsh reality.
At the beginning of the 1930s,
the economic and financial crisis hit France.
The Great Depression affected all workers.
The stock market panicked.
Hitler came to power in Germany.
The political and social climate worsened all over Europe.
Following the fascist riots of 1934 in Paris,
the CGT trade union called its first general strike.
There was revolution in the air.
On July 14 1935,
socialists, communists and trade unions
marched together for the first time.
This 500,000-strong demonstration
led to the creation of the Popular Front.
On coming to power in 1936,
it introduced the 40-hour working week,
collective agreements and paid holidays.
The pictures of the first paid holidays in 1936
are extremely interesting.
These pictures of men and women on tandems leaving Paris
for the Bois de Boulogne or the Bois de Vincennes,
or going home to their families...
We mustn't forget that the population of Paris
was of relatively recent rural origin,
so they still had family ties in the countryside.
When you look at their faces,
you can see how these paid holidays briefly - the war wasn't far off-
but profoundly changed each and everyone's existence.
It was a kind of personal fulfillment
and it resulted from a collective struggle.
The Popular Front wanted to establish a better world.
But this upturn was short-lived.
The Second World War was looming.
In Paris, general mobilisation was declared.
The bloody conflict of the Great War was still fresh in people's minds.
But "the war to end all wars" was not the last.
In 1939,
World War Two looked as if it would be long and violent.
The capital prepared for war.
The authorities took preventive measures.
Notre-Dame cathedral was protected
by a fire-resistant wall of sandbags.
The stained-glass windows in the Sainte Chapelle were dismantled.
The contents of the Louvre were moved.
Thousands of Parisians decided to take flight.
They fled the city on foot
with whatever they could carry and without knowing where to go.
On June 14 1940, the Nazis entered Paris without a fight.
For a few days, Paris seemed to be full
of ordinary tourists, but in uniform.
But these ordinary tourists immediately turned
into an intrusive occupying force, and the face of Paris changed.
When the Germans marched down the Champs-Elysées,
Paris was no longer the capital of a free country,
but that of a nation humiliated by defeat
and devastated by the flight of civilians.
The symbols of the Republic were requisitioned.
The German army took possession of the city.
The swastika was flown
on all official buildings.
The face, the appearance, of the streets changed.
There was no petrol, of course, so people found
alternative means of transport.
Horses reappeared on the streets, as did bicycles,
but they obviously did not have the same function
as they'd had during the days of the Popular Front.
And it was a city where people waited,
where they queued for whatever food was available.
The queues grew in front of desperately empty grocery stores.
The Parisians' daily lot was one of suffering and hardship.
Basic items were rationed and cost a fortune on the black market.
Parisians found solutions to avoid starvation.
Potatoes were grown on the Champ de Mars.
Wheat was harvested around the Louvre.
Fatal signs appeared in Paris.
From May 1942
Paris Jews must wear a yellow star.
In September 1941,
the anti-Semitic exhibition, The Jew and France,
drew over 200,000 people to the Palais Berlitz
on the Boulevard des ltaliens.
The number of roundups increased.
Jews were systematically deported to the death camps.
Almost 50,000 Parisian Jews would be exterminated
in the concentration camps.
In the capital, indifference turned to revolt.
In 1944, faced with the lightning advance of the Allied troops,
Hitler gave the order to blow up the city's main buildings.
The German governor did not have time to comply.
Paris rose up once more for freedom.
On August 24 1944,
General Leclerc's tanks entered the city.
Two days later, at Paris City Hall,
General de Gaulle feted the Parisians,
the capital's liberators.
Paris... Paris outraged.
Paris broken. Paris martyred.
But Paris liberated.
Liberated by itself!
In Paris, the euphoria of victory was only short-lived.
Poverty settled in the working-class areas on the edge of the city.
Squalor was everywhere.
Paris was in a pretty disastrous state in 1945.
The city had been weakened
but also significantly
weakened by what had not been done for half a century.
Almost 100,000 decent homes were needed in inner Paris,
and another 100,000 were needed in the greater Paris area.
After the Second World War,
the shantytowns grew as the housing crisis worsened.
The wretched living conditions of the poor of Paris
were similar to those Victor Hugo described in his novels.
The crisis reached a climax in the harsh winter of 1954.
Abbe Pierre launched an appeal on behalf of the poor and homeless.
His message stirred people's consciences.
In the mid-20th century, the capital too had to do some soul-searching.
On January 8 1959, Charles de Gaulle
became the first president of the Fifth Republic.
This new strongman was an advocate of modernist thought.
Modernist thought
consists in saying there's a part of Paris that's not worth preserving,
and that's the inner suburbs.
This included the Faubourg Saint-Antoine,
which was almost demolished.
Then there's the Paris that is worth preserving,
and in the Paris that's worth preserving
there's a district with a very special status, the Marais.
The rehabilitation of the Marais's aristocratic mansions
restored the district's prestige.
This redevelopment plan was instigated
by Andre' Malraux, Minister of Culture.
He wanted to protect the city's architectural heritage.
The majority of historic sites to be preserved
were in the centre of Paris.
In the outlying districts,
that's to say areas annexed after 1861,
the renovation policy in the 1960s
basically involved razing some neighbourhoods,
then completely rebuilding them.
And the 13th arrondissement was obviously the main victim.
In a compact city like Paris,
it was thought it would be better to stack different functions.
So, a few metres above the natural ground,
an artificial ground was built,
and, on this artificial ground, shops, offices and housing
were piled on top of one another.
A new public space was created:
the elevated square.
In the 13th arrondissement,
the demolition of entire housing blocks
made room for huge towers.
This was a new phenomenon in Paris.
The Chinese and Vietnamese gradually turned the area
into a new Chinatown.
Chinatown began
when the Vietnamese boat people moved in.
In the 1970s and 80s,
populations the authorities didn't know what to do with ended up here.
There were properties no one wanted
and neighbourhoods in which these populations could be offered housing.
So you could say Chinatown was created as a result
of the incompetence of the City of Paris's urban planning department.
That's perfectly clear. In other words,
the area was not designed to meet a need,
and, all of a sudden, there was a need no one had thought about.
So the combination of the two resulted in Chinatown,
and meant the area became a Chinese neighbourhood.
It was not conceived as such.
Because the principle of the Chinese diaspora
is to recreate their community from a strong base
by buying up all the surrounding shops and businesses.
This urban model soon became the norm.
Concrete jungles sprang up all over the Paris suburbs.
These large architectural complexes
were seen as "centres of modern civilisation".
It was initially seen as the height of luxury,
and not only by the population who moved there.
There was running water,
space, light”
In the 1960s it was seen by many people
as a revolution in housing, in working-class housing.
A "red belt", whose population was mainly socialist and communist,
formed around the capital.
The gulf between Paris and its suburbs widened.
This social segregation continued to intensify.
A barrier was erected between the city and its outlying suburbs:
the Périphérique.
From 1966 to 1973,
a 35-kilometre-long ring-road was built around the capital.
As early as the 1930s,
planners thought about a wide boulevard that would go around Paris.
It was pictured as a kind of wide, American-style boulevard
planted with trees,
which would certainly not constitute a boundary
that was difficult to cross.
It was thought that this boulevard
would actually be a rather pleasant place to live,
and that large housing estates could even be built along it.
I honestly think that some people in charge
did not imagine the impact the Périphérique would have
on the environment or on noise levels.
They did not even consider the fact
that people would not be able to live next to this ring-road.
And all of a sudden there was an extremely brutal, abrupt split,
which still exists in the minds of Parisians today.
Parisians living in inner Paris
will always find it hard to cross the Périphérique,
to go for a walk somewhere other than in their own neighbourhood
or the centre of Paris.
This most recent wall around Paris is still controversial.
There are plans to cover it
and turn it into a pleasant walkway planted with trees.
In 1966, Paris let the car take over the city.
A 13-kilometre-long expressway
was built on the right bank of the Seine.
UNESCO would later add the banks of the Seine
to its list of World Heritage sites.
In the 1960s the capital seemed peaceful at last,
but Paris the rebel had not said its last word.
In the month of May, Nanterre University was occupied by students
demonstrating against the Vietnam War.
They were forcibly removed by the police.
The rioters gathered in the streets of the Latin Quarter
and erected barricades.
Students threw cobblestones and Molotov cocktails.
The riot squad riposted with tear gas and batons.
One of the explanations given
for the barricades in the Rue Gay-Lussac
is that work was being done in the area
and there were pickaxes and other material all over the place,
which the students were able to use to build the first barricades.
On May 10, during the Night of the Barricades,
the fighting intensified.
Cars were set alight, cobblestones dug up, windows smashed.
Two different mindsets,
two generations clashed on the streets of Paris.
With the barricades on the Rue Gay-Lussac,
the Paris students were trying to defend a district
which they felt was, and always should be, theirs.
They ended up occupying the Sorbonne.
So the Sorbonne, Odeén and the Latin Quarter
became a district they re-conquered and controlled again.
The May '68 uprising remains the most important social movement
the Fifth Republic has ever known.
The aim was not to take power but to protest
against all forms of cultural, political and social authority.
This event perpetuated the tradition
in the modern city of insurgent Paris.
From the 1970s,
contemporary monuments were greeted with scepticism by Parisians.
Designed by Piano, Rogers and Franchini,
the Pompidou Centre was regarded as "the art hangar".
The Louvre Pyramid, conceived by I.M. Pei,
is now seen as the symbol of Paris's entry into the third millennium.
Since 1989, the Grande Arche at La Défense,
a monumental structure by architect Otto Von Spreckelsen,
has been a window on the world.
We need a 21st-century Haussmann.
No one knows who it will be yet, but this is only the beginning
of the great debates that might be able to jolt Paris from its stupor.
The real challenge for a city like Paris
will be to continue to ensure
that a population which has shaped Paris's history
and made the city what it is today, can actually afford to live here.
That's to say, both a middle-class population
and a working-class population,
which has as much right to the capital as any other.
Paris has become a global city where you can meet the whole world
simply by taking the metro.
Today, Paris is a national capital and an international metropolis.
But at the dawn of the third millennium,
the city sought a new identity.
Although the capital's ancient monuments
reinforce its prestigious image,
Paris has still not tackled
its transport and housing problems.
The Greater Paris project
- a green, human and cultural city for all -
is a real opportunity for the future.
Thriving on its 5,000-year history, Paris has new dreams.
The rebel capital is trying to reinvent itself
to maintain its influence.
Subtitling: Vdm - Paris