Zone: Paris’ former grey area beltway

Editor’s note: when we announced our “Grey Spaces” issue, now available at a fine book or magazine shop near you, Spacing contributor and historian of France Paul Cohen sent us this fascinating account of a remarkable grey area that developed around 19th century Paris at the same time as the interior of the city was being aggressively gentrified.

At the same time as Baron Haussmann was famously redrawing the map of Paris in the 1850s and 1860s with the grand boulevards that remain iconic of the city to this day, a huge grey area was forming around the city’s outskirts.  In the 1840s, when France was governed by the constitutional monarchy known to historians as the July Monarchy, the government erected a system of fortifications surrounding Paris 33 kilometers in circumference — itself in turn surrounded by a wide ditch and a 250-meter glacis, or firing zone, within which no construction was permitted and even trees were torn down.  In 1919, as France mourned its war dead and began to rebuild after World War I, the government dismantled the fortifications as an archaic monument to a bygone military age.  But the enclosure had already ceased to enjoy any military function long before its demise.  A growing population of squatters, mostly poor Parisians who had been chased out of the capital by booming real estate prices — Haussmanization’s victims, as it were — erected a series of illegal shantytowns within the glacis and trench.  Mobilizing the linguistic resources of nineteenth-century Paris’s rich slang, they rebaptized the grey area they had made their home the Fortifs’ or, more commonly, la Zone — turning the army’s official term for the area, the Zone militaire fortifiée, derisively on its head.

Zonards, as its inhabitants came to be known, rapidly invented a complex, lively society, animated by ragpickers (chifonniers), small-scale artisans manufacturing commodities like baskets, and gangs of petty criminals known in slang as Apaches.  They created a variegated cartography replete with permanent dwellings, a street grid, underground cafés, and garden plots.  It was, in short, a city-within-a-city — or, rather, a spontaneous city on Paris’s margins, hidden in its shadow, a phantom metropolis huddled beneath the City of Light’s very walls.

And like the grand Haussman capital inside the Fortifs’, the Zone drew intense attention almost as soon as it came into being, fascinating bourgeois and lettered contemporaries as much as it terrified them.  They saw in it an exotic locale, its inhabitants an alien ‘other’, and flà¢neurs eagerly explored this city of shanties and its social bestiary.  One author described a zonard shantytown in 1854 as “farther than Japan, more unknown than the interior of Africa,” a place which “no more resembles the other Paris than Canton resembles Copenhagen. … the capital of misery lost in the middle of the country of luxury.”  The Zone inspired its own chroniclers, like André Warnod, who as the fortifications were torn down published a nostalgic account entitled Les Fortifs, promenades sur les anciennes fortifications et la zone.  The photographer Eugà¨ne Atget trained his camera on this marginal Gotham with sustained, systematic interest.  And the symbolist poem Guillaume Apollinaire immortalized this world in his poem “Zone,” a decidedly more fragmented, disjointed and violent world than the one philosopher Walter Benjamin discerned in the commercial civility of center-Paris’s passages and boulevards.

The Zone‘s days were, of course, numbered from the very start.  By the 1930s, the city redeveloped part of the strip with low-income housing (much of it still in existence) and athletics facilities.  The advent of the automobile in an increasingly prosperous post-1945 France rang its death knell.  Between 1956 and 1973, the Zone was ploughed under to make way for a six-lane ring-road girdling the city known as the périphérique, which today cuts Paris off from its suburbs and welcomes one million cars a day with equal brio.

Attentive twenty-first century flà¢neurs can still find echoes of the old Zone, if they look hard enough, in the lively, semi-licit Sunday-morning Montreuil flea market strung out along the périph’, the temporary communities of Roms who occasionally gather their mobile homes beneath its overpasses, and the tough banlieue youth who race stolen sports cars along the périph’ late on Friday nights in what are known as rodéos.  And just as Apollinaire saw lyric beauty in the Zone, French rapper MC Solaar has traced out what could be characterized as a poetics of the périphérique in a song entitled — aptly enough, for what was after all home to the fearsome Apaches — “Le Nouveau Western”.

Photograph of Zonards by Eugà¨ne Atget