There is a little bit of Belleville in many people’s image of traditional Paris – even for those who have never been there or even heard of this district in the eastern part of the French capital. The songs of Edith Piaf and Maurice Chevalier, the close-knit community life of a working-class French neighbourhood, the black and white photographs of many of the most respected French photographers of the past, the alleys and stairways that form the setting for Albert Lamorisse’s well-known film ‘The Red Balloon’(Le Ballon Rouge) – all of these contribute to the image of a traditional Parisian quartier of labourers and artisans. And there is much truth in these elements. Legend says that Piaf was born on the pavement of the rue de Belleville; Chevalier originated from the next-door district of Ménilmontant; the photographers Atget and Ronis made many prints of Belleville scenes; and in ‘The Red Balloon’ the eponymous object is first found tied to railings on the steps of rue Vilin, linking lower with upper Belleville. In many censuses over a long period of time Belleville was, of all the 80 quartiers of Paris, the one in which the greatest proportion of the residents had been born within the capital city: it was the most Parisian of Paris districts.
I first got to know Belleville in the 1980s. In the 1990s I supervised an outstanding PhD thesis by Juliet Carpenter on this (and one other) district. And more recently I have examined doctoral theses on the neighbourhood for two different Paris universities. I have lost count of the number of times I have strolled through the district. I last visited two years ago, and I have just been back again.
When I first visited Belleville it was in the throes of upheaval. The nineteenth century tenement and cottage properties had been poorly maintained and the district had some of the poorest housing conditions in the city. Major plans were being put into place for large-scale urban renewal, involving the demolition of vast swathes of sub-standard housing and its replacement by various forms of tower blocks. Some were already in place by the time of my first visit, but the dominant impression I have from the mid 1980s is of a level of dereliction and slum clearance that I have scarcely ever witnessed elsewhere.
I find considerable interest in the pattern of redevelopment in Belleville over a 40 year period. In my own home city of Sheffield streets and slum houses were cleared away to create the Hyde Park and Park Hill estates on completely new patterns of ground occupancy. In Newcastle the little terrace houses running down to the Tyne that I remember as a child were bulldozed to create the Byker Wall, reorientating the street pattern completely. Many residential areas of the East End of London were similarly reorientated during reconstruction after wartime bombing: the same was true in Le Havre in France (although less so in the equally-badly-destroyed Rotterdam in the Netherlands). But the Belleville street pattern today is in many respects identical to that shown in my late 1960s Paris street directory. By and large, reconstruction has occurred within the street blocks that were first created in the mid nineteenth century.
But redevelopment is not just about street patterns and buildings. It is also about the people who occupy the properties. Have the original residents all been displaced, with newcomers of a different social class replacing them? Certainly in the 1980s the worst housing in Belleville was occupied by the poorest Parisians: has reconstruction changed that? And from the 1960s onwards Belleville became an immigrant area – is that still true?
One of the most dramatic changes in the neighbourhood was the creation of a park on the steepest slopes where previously lay the steps of rue Vilin made famous in Le Ballon Rouge. The park was being created by the time I first visited Belleville and it was formally opened in 1987 and has been extended since then. But, and here is a first indicator of sympathetic improvement, rue Vilin’s steps and cobbles have been replaced by a staircase running up the park on exactly the same line. At the top, instead of emerging onto rue Piat between two dismal houses, there is now a fine viewpoint over the terraced grass and the trees and beyond to much of the rest of Paris. The Eiffel Tower, the Montparnasse Tower, and most of the major tourist sights of the city are visible – but there are no tourists enjoying the view. This is not a neighbourhood that is on the tourist map.
The Parc de Belleville: the steps follow the line of rue Vilin (see text)
My purpose in visiting Belleville today has been to compare some photographs I took with a colleague here in the mind 1980s with the same scenes today. And I am with the same colleague. The changes have been profound in many areas – but elements of the old Belleville are still recognisable. The new housing is not entirely out of scale with what it replaced, and some of it is social housing so it is still available for the less well-off in society. We show some pictures to two teachers outside the infants school that has replaced a row of small shops and they are fascinated by the images of what was there before – but the street pattern is still recognisable and a small public square has been created opposite their school. But we also observe that a 40-year process of urban renewal is not yet complete, and that even today some buildings are boarded up waiting for action, and a map consulted during a later visit to the planning archive shows that the greatest concentration of renewal projects in the whole of Paris still occurs in Belleville.
The same scene in 1984 and 2018 - Impasse des Gênes
1984 (left) and 2018 (right). The building on the left in 2018 is an infants school
Renovation still taking place
But what of the people living here? The Ashkenazi synagogue in rue Pali-Kao is still there – although the detachment of machine-gun-toting military police guarding it is off-putting. We are actually here on Yom Kippur (the Jewish New Year festival) and Jewish sites in Paris have been subject to attack in recent years. And as in the 1980s, there is still a visible Jewish presence in the streets but combined with the North African community that arrived in the post-war period. There seem to be fewer Asian shops and restaurants on rue de Belleville than I recall, but they are still certainly present. Juliet Carpenter characterised Belleville as in part an immigrant space, and that is still true. And when I was here in 2016, during a hot day in August, the hundreds of people sun-bathing or resting in the park were a cross-section of the multicultural populations of Paris – but including more well-dressed, apparently middle-class, white Parisians than I would have expected thirty years ago. The park may not be on tourist maps but it certainly features strongly in the lives of local people.
Apart from the park, and the replacement housing and public facilities, the other new elements in the Belleville landscape since the 1980s are artists’ studios. Potters, sculptors, artists in various materials, and others in what are often termed the ‘creative industries’ are important elements in urban change everywhere today. But I also know from Juliet Carpenter’s thesis about the role that such people have played in leading resistance to the city’s more grandiose plans for total reconstruction in the neighbourhood. The city scaled back a number of its plans and the result is a more human-scale environment.
The market along the central traffic intersection of the boulevard de Belleville is in full swing, and the same sorts of stalls are present as years ago, with fruit and vegetables predominant alongside clothing, other foodstuffs, and hardware of various household kinds. But next to Belleville metro we come across petty street trading with individual sellers offering odd shoes, a few wrapped pizzas in a box, old radios and clocks and other miscellaneous items. Languages other than French are predominant, and the poverty of both the sellers and those interested in purchasing indicates that the poor have not been driven out of Belleville completely by redevelopment.
Petty street trading on boulevard de Belleville
After our exploration of new Belleville we enter a small café looking out on the market. It is dark inside and above the bar a sign proclaims ‘Cocktail of the week: Bellini’ as it probably has for several years. We are served by a friendly man, probably of French West Indian origin. At the next table are a middle-aged white couple who leave soon after we arrive. Near the bar a couple of men are reading newspapers. Opposite us is a fluid group of older men, clearly daily visitors, of a variety of different ethnic origins: arrivals and departures are frequent. They banter with the waiter, and with a young woman in a striking blue dress who comes in to deliver a box of patisseries to a man at the counter who takes it through to a back room. This is clearly a café des habitués,but the waiter has made us welcome despite our outsider status.
And then a strange thing happens. One of the old men starts distractedly humming to himself the tune and then the words of Piaf’s ‘Je ne regrette rien’ but substituting the normal rhyme for that line with something I can’t quite catch but which involves eating a banana ( … mange une banane). Such an adaptation of one of the most famous French songs, forever associated with Piaf and Belleville, seems appropriate for the evolution of the district: a history that has been transformed but not erased.
