ancient cities

52 Banlieue
Ba n l i e u e
The banlieue refers to the area surrounding a
French city, commonly used in reference to Paris.
The word faubourg also means “lying outside the
city,” but now it commonly refers to areas in central
Paris that were incorporated early into the
city. There is an implicit tendency to compare the
banlieues with the American suburbs, but there
are important differences. In the United States the
word suburb carries a positive connotation associated
with private property, middle-class ease, lowdensity
population, and an overall high quality of
life. In contrast, the immediate connotation of the
French banlieue and its inhabitants, the banlieuesards,
is one of overcrowded public housing,
people of color, new immigrants, and crime. It is
something closer to the stereotype of the ghetto in
the United States; what is common to the French
banlieue and the American ghetto are the aspects
of categorical inequality, exclusion from the labor
market, and social boundaries resulting in residential
segregation. Today, the word banlieue carries
a negative connotation; yet this hardly approximates
the complex history and social reality of
these spaces.
History of the Banlieue
The importance of the banlieue can be fully understood
only in a historical perspective and in relation
to the city to which it is a periphery. Like
many medieval cities, Paris was a walled city for
defensive purposes. As the city grew, new walls
were constructed, totaling six. In the years preceding
the French Revolution a new wall was built,
but this time it was built mainly for taxation purposes.
The wall demarcated Paris proper. Its doors
included custom posts, and everyone entering or
leaving with commercial goods had to pay a tax or
right of passage called the octroi. This physical
barrier to free trade and mobility—mur d’octroi—
created a real boundary between those living inside
(intra-muros) and those living outside (extramuros),
which had economic consequences for
trade and production. Consequently the cost of living
was lower outside Paris than inside, resulting in
an early division between a large fraction of the
labor force settling in the banlieue and consumers,
visitors, financiers, and administrators living inside
the city walls.
In the ancient regime, the Parisian banlieue contained
vast open areas where the nobility of Paris
and Versailles went to spend time surrounded by
nature. This taste was acquired by many arrivistes
of the French bourgeoisie and the petite bourgeoisie,
who would go to the green banlieue during the
weekends as a sign of distinction, as told in short
stories by Guy de Maupassant and depicted by
Jean Renoir in his celebrated film Une Partie de
Campagne (1936). But as more people built houses
in these idyllic lands, the banlieues were quickly
transformed from forests into suburban and then
urban areas. The remaining forests of Vincennes
and the Bois de Boulogne are protected and have
been annexed by the city.
After the French Revolution of 1789, the
Constitutional Assembly decreed the limits of Paris
to be a circle with a circumference determined by
a radius of three leagues (lieues) around the center,
which was set at Notre Dame Cathedral. In 1841,
the politician Adolphe Thiers ordered the construction
of a new set of walls and custom tower
to be surrounded by a zone where it was forbidden
to build. In 1860 the city was expanded by Baron
Georges-Eugène Haussmann, and taxes continued
to be levied. In this expansion Paris officially
engulfed l’ancienne banlieue, which included the
communes of Batignolle, Belleville, Bercy, Passy, la
Villette, and other neighboring areas. The Paris
octroi was instituted in these communes. This
forced many industries to move out of the new city
borders for fiscal reasons; many workers followed.
The most developed and industrialized external
communes also charged octroi to raise funds for
local infrastructure and spending, whereas poorer
banlieues did not in order to give tax incentives to
attract industry and population. The octroi of
Paris and its surrounding metropolitan area was
not abolished until 1943, during the German occupation,
when it was substituted with a sales tax.
As the density of Paris increased, the city looked
to the banlieue to locate its new cemeteries and
public parks. In 1887 a large building was constructed—a
dépôt de mendicité—to house Parisian
mental patients, homeless, vagabonds, and aged
people and to imprison women in the exterior
commune of Nanterre. In 1897 this building was
turned into a hospital. Today this building offers