In May 1958, the government the
Fourth Republic, hopelessly deadlocked by divisions over the
War in Algeria and other issues, resigned. The President of the Republic,
René Coty, invited
Charles de Gaulle to form a new government and prepare a revised Constitution. Within three months, the new
Constitution was drafted and put to a vote on September 28, 1958; it was approved by more than 80 percent of voters. and a new government was in place. The
Fifth Republic was born on October 4, 1958. During the ten years that de Gaulle occupied the presidency, France and Paris experienced rapid economic growth, which was accompanied by the building of new office buildings and housing, and the rehabilitation of historic neighborhoods in the center of the city. De Gaulle's
Minister of Culture,
André Malraux, oversaw the reconstruction of the historic neighborhoods in the center, particularly
Le Marais. In
Le Marais and the other designated historic zones, the rehabilitation consisted of leaving the façade and walls intact, while rebuilding completely the interior of the building. The Malraux law also required that the façades of buildings be scrubbed clean of centuries of accumulated soot and dirt. The most visible improvement was the cleaning of
Notre-Dame de Paris, which in a few months turned from black to white. In other neighborhoods in the center of the city, the rehabilitation took a different form: residential buildings of the
Haussmann era were transformed into offices. As the price of land doubled in the city center, middle class residents moved out to the suburbs. Dilapidated and crumbling residential buildings were torn down and replaced by office buildings. The population of the
arrondissements in the city center markedly decreased. The neighborhood of the central market of
Les Halles was also a target for renewal. The old market was too small and traffic around it too congested to serve the needs of the growing city. One of the historic pavilions was preserved and moved to a park outside the city, but the others were closed down and the site, after long debate, was eventually turned into a park and underground commercial space, the
Forum des Halles.
The first towers and Beaugrenelle project in the
15th arrondissement, started in the 1960s, created a wall of residential towers along the Seine. project in the
13th arrondissement, with
Paris's Chinatown at the far southern edge. Until the 1960s there were no tall buildings in Paris to share the skyline with the
Eiffel Tower, the tallest structure in the city; a strict height limit of thirty-five meters was in place. However, in October 1958, under the Fifth Republic, in order to permit the construction of more housing and office buildings, the rules began to change. A new urban plan for the city was adopted by the municipal council in 1959. Higher buildings were permitted, as long as they met both technical and aesthetic standards. The first new tower to be constructed was an apartment building, the Tour Croulebarbe, at 33 rue Croulebarbe in the 13th arrondissement. It was twenty-two stories, and sixty-one meters high, and was completed in 1961. Between 1960 and 1975, about 160 new buildings higher than fifteen stories were constructed in Paris, more than half of them in the 13th and 15th arrondissements. Most of them were about one hundred meters high; several clusters of high-rises the work one developer, Michel Holley, who built the towers of
Place d'Italie,
Front de Seine, and Hauts de Belleville. Two of the projects of residential towers were especially large; 29 hectares along the banks of the Seine at
Beaugrenelle, and 87 hectares between Place de l'Italie and Tolbiac. Blocks of old buildings were torn town and replaced with residential towers. Between 1959 and 1968, the old
Montparnasse railway station was demolished and rebuilt nearby, making a large parcel of land available for construction. The municipal council learned of the project only indirectly, through a message from the ministry in charge of construction projects. The first plan, proposed in 1957, was a new headquarters for
Air France, a state-owned enterprise, in a tower 150 meters high. In 1959, the proposed height was increased to 170 meters. In 1965, to protect the views in the historic part of the city, the municipal council declared that the new building should be shorter, so it would not be visible from the esplanade of
Les Invalides. In 1967, the
Prefect of Paris, representing the government of President de Gaulle, overruled the municipal council decision, and raised the height to two hundred meters, to create more rentable office space. The new building, built between 1969 and 1972, was (and still is) the tallest building within the city limits.
The creation of La Défense from the Arc de Triomphe in 1970, with the first towers The most important project of de Gaulle's government was the construction of a new business district at
La Défense, just west of the city limits. The idea was to create a new business center, since there was no more room to build in the traditional business center, around the
Opera; and also to extend the historic axis of the city, an imaginary east-west line which ran from the
porte-Maillot at the eastern edge of the city to
Place de la Bastille, to the
Louvre, and through the Place de la Concorde along the
Champs Élysées to the
Arc de Triomphe. It allowed the creation of a French version of
Manhattan, without disturbing the skyline and architecture of the historic center of the city. The idea had been discussed and various proposals put forward as early as the 1930s, but did not begin to move ahead until 1957. A site of nine hundred hectares, between two cemeteries, between Paris and
Nanterre, was chosen. The first company to move to the site was
Elf Aquitaine, the largest French company; they had little choice, since they were owned by the French government. It was also decided to add residential buildings, since there was not yet a Métro line, and so that the regional train line was not overwhelmed with commuters. Some of the more daring components of the original plan were dropped because of public opposition or cost. A planned 250-meter-high skyscraper by the architect Zehrfuss was reduced in height. The famed modernist architect
Le Corbusier was commissioned to design a huge cultural center near the Rond-point de La Défense, with a museum of 20th century art, a music conservatory, and the national school of architecture, but this component was never built. The Museum of 20th century art instead became a museum of 19th century art, and was installed in the former
Gare d'Orsay train station. The project developed slowly; most of the towers did not go up until the 1970s, and formed a backdrop to the Arc de Triomphe. By 2000 more than a million square meters of office space was created at La Défense, more than in the old central business district around the Opera.
New Chinatowns The building of the new residential towers coincided with the departure of the French from
Indochina, and the beginning of a large-scale new immigration to Paris. A large number of Vietnamese and ethnic Chinese from Saigon moved into the new residential towers, and created what became the largest Chinatown within the city limits. A smaller Indochinese community, had been created between the wars around
Place Maubert, but its growth was limited by the rapid rise in real estate prices. An even larger Indochinese migration settled in the newly created town of
Marne-la-Vallée. After the end of the
Vietnam War in the 1970s, the new town attracted a large migration of Vietnamese and Cambodians, making it the largest southeast Asian community in the Paris region.
The suburbs and the ZUPs In the suburbs of Paris, the process of de-industrialization was already under way before de Gaulle. Under the Fourth Republic, enterprises had been required to get government approval for every new industrial building over 500 square meters, and to pay heavy charges to subsidize transportation and other services. The government also paid a subsidy for the demolition of old factory buildings. The rising price of land was a major factor in the move of industry out of the city and the suburbs to other regions. Between 1960 and 1966, 352,000 square meters of industrial buildings was destroyed a year, while only 295,000 square meters was built. By 1960, the industrial space of the Paris region represented only 10 percent of the national total. The construction of public housing projects in the suburbs of Paris accelerated and took on an even larger scale. The new projects, authorized by an August 1957 law, were called ZUPs, or
Zones à urbaniser en priorité (Zones for priority urbanization). Unlike the earlier projects, these buildings included shops, schools and other services for their residents. By 1969, a dozen ZUPs had been built in the zone within thirty kilometers of Paris; they included about a hundred buildings altogether, with 300,000 housing units, occupied by about 1,400,000 residents. A single ZUP at Pantin had 1,700 units. Quantity and speed were the principal requirements in their constructions. They were welcomed and appreciated by the families who moved into them in the 1960s, since they resolved the housing crisis, but were not so much appreciated by the immigrants who moved into them decades later. The building of new housing was combined with the construction of new highways. On April 12, 1960, the
autoroute du Sud, a highway from Paris to the south of France, opened.
The Algerian War and terrorism in Paris In the 1960s, Paris regularly became one of the battlegrounds of the
Algerian War for independence from France. The two sides engaged were the
FLN, or Algerian Front for National Liberation, and the
OAS an armed terrorist group fighting to keep Algeria part of France. On January 6, the OAS set off a series of bombs at targets across the city. The FLN began a campaign of killing French policemen, targeting the Muslim policemen who had been hired to fight the wave of terrorism. Thirteen policemen were killed between August 29 and October 3. On October 5, the Paris municipality imposed a curfew on young Algerian men, advising them to be off the streets between 8:30 p.m. and 5:30 a.m. On October 17, to protest the curfew, the FLN and their ally, the
French Communist Party, organized a demonstration of four columns converging in the center of the city. The police blocked the march and arrested six to seven thousand persons. Some of the demonstrators were trapped by the police on the
Pont Saint-Michel, and a number jumped or were thrown off the bridge. The number of persons killed was never reliably established; estimates vary widely from between thirty and fifty dead to the Communist estimate of hundreds killed. (See
Paris massacre of 1961.) The FLN and Communists held another demonstration February 8. It was broken up by the police, and eight persons were killed, most of them crushed by the crowd trying to take sanctuary in the
Charonne metro station. (see
Charonne Métro Station massacre.) On August 22, 1962, the OAS targeted de Gaulle himself. As he was being driven from Paris to the military airport at
Villacoublay, an OAS assassination squad of trained soldiers with machine guns was waiting at the traffic circle at
Petit-Clamart, just outside the city. They opened fire on the General's car, shooting 150 rounds, of which fourteen struck the car. Thanks to the skilled driving of de Gaulle's chauffeur, and the poor marksmanship of the gunmen, neither the General, his wife, nor the live chickens they were carrying in the trunk of car for the family kitchen, were harmed. The leader of the attack squad was arrested a month later, tried, and shot by a firing squad on March 11, 1963. (see
Petit-Clamart attack)
The 1968 uprising (1968) In May 1968, Paris was the scene of a student uprising and general strike which briefly paralyzed the city, and had a profound impact on French society. The events began on May 3, 1968, with a sit-in-demonstration by students at the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris, demanding reforms in the university. In the afternoon The CRS riot police were summoned to clear the building. That evening, demonstrations began in the Latin quarter. The police cleared the street with tear gas and arrested six hundred demonstrators. The leaders, including a German-born Nanterre student,
Daniel Cohn-Bendit, were quickly judged and sentenced to prison. At first the French Communist Party and the labor unions opposed the demonstrations;
Georges Marchais, the lead of the Communist Party in France, called Cohn-Bendit "a German anarchist.' Student and non-student radical and anarchist groups organized a massive demonstration of twenty thousand persons on boulevard Saint-Michel, confronting the police. The demonstrators began to pull up cobblestones from the street and built barricades at rue Saint-Jacques, rue Le Goff, rue Claude-Bernard and rue gay-Lussac. Cars were overturned and added to the barricades, along with bicycles, benches, and anything else moveable, up to the first floor of the buildings along the street. By ten in the evening there were some sixty barricades in place. The CRS riot police waited until after two in the morning and then tried to clear the streets. The battle was fought with tear gas from the CRS and molotov cocktails from the demonstrators. By 5:30 am the streets were clear without fatalities, but 367 students had been injured and four students and ten policemen hospitalized in serious condition. President de Gaulle had gone to bed at ten in the evening and no one had awakened him; he learned of the events in the morning. The major labor unions and the socialist party decided to join forces with the student demonstrators. On May 13 nine hundred thousand students and workers marched against the government of President DeGaulle, led by the leader of the Socialist party,
François Mitterrand, and the leader of the Communist Party,
Waldeck Rochet, and the heads of the two largest unions, the
CGT and CDFT. A demonstration of an estimated nine hundred thousand took place on May 13, The demonstration ended with a huge sit-in around the Eiffel Tower. The workers of the major enterprises in and around Paris, including
Renault,
Rhône-Poulenc,
Snecma, went on strike, followed by the workers of the railroads, the metro, and the postal service. Demonstrators occupied the buildings of the university. President de Gaulle made a secret half-day visit to the commander of the French army in Germany, then returned to Paris. On May 25, Prime Minister
Georges Pompidou, met with the unions at rue de Grenelle and proposed a series of measures, including wage increases and a reduction in working hours, to win over the unions. On the evening of May 27, the anti-government movements, including the trade unions, students, Maoists, anarchists, Communists and Socialists, held a large meeting at the
Charléty stadium, firmly rejecting Pompidou's proposal. On May 28, François Mitterrand held a press conference to announce that there was a "vacuum of power", and call for the formation of a provisional government, followed by a new Presidential election, in which he would be a candidate. President de Gaulle responded on May 29, making a radio address to the French people, declaring "I have a mandate from the people, and I will fulfill it." He dissolved the National Assembly, and called for new elections, blamed the demonstrators for causing chaos and the communists for trying to overthrow the government. The speech was followed on May 30, 1968, by a huge counter-demonstration of over one million people on the Champs Élysées supporting de Gaulle. Life in Paris gradually returned to normal; the last demonstrators were cleared from the university and barricades came down on June 11, and work resumed at the Renault factory at Billancourt on June 18. The national elections held on June 23 and June 28, were a triumph for de Gaulle; his party, the RPR, won 293 seats in the National Assembly out of 487, the first time a single party had an absolute majority in the French Parliament. The events of May 1968 had two immediate effects on Paris; the five faculties of the
University of Paris, founded in the 12th century was broken up in November 1968 into thirteen independent campuses; and the streets around the university were no longer paved with cobblestones, which had been used so extensively in the building of barricades. President de Gaulle's triumph did not last long. In September, he proposed a major restructuring of the French regions, and a reduction of power of the
French Senate, and put his plan to vote in a national referendum, promising to resign if it did not pass. All the opposition parties, and many within de Gaulle's own party, opposed the change. The referendum was held on April 27, 1969. and the "no" vote was fifty-three percent. De Gaulle, as he had promised, immediately resigned. New elections were held in June, and the Prime Minister, Georges Pompidou, was elected President, taking 58 percent of the vote in the second round. ==Paris under Pompidou (1969–1974)==