Les Halles

Here is an article I wrote 5 years ago about the redevelopment of a famous neighborhood in Paris:


The Battle over Les Halles, the Belly of Paris

Anyone who has been to a major urban food market—a kind of place that no longer exists in the United States—does not forget the experience. Although for most tourists such markets are major attractions, for the local inhabitants they are obviously more vital places. I never had the chance to visit Les Halles, the great central market of Paris, before it was demolished in 1971, but from visits to other grand outdoor markets—especially in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Senegal—and from reading and hearing of rich descriptions of this place, I can well imagine it in its smelly, hyperactive glory. And strangely, amidst the crowds that now flood the transformed site, as radically different as it is, I have sometimes felt the fleeting thrill of popular activity and heightened expectation that seems to have defined Les Halles over the centuries. But the goings-on in the area are not popular with everybody, and once again the land is to be revamped. Even as I write this the plans are being made.
The conflict over the redevelopment of the district, now as then, gets to the heart of the profound questions regarding the function and evolution of cities themselves: What are the different uses and functions of a city and how do these develop? Who does the city serve, and whose interests are prioritized within it? To what extent must growth be accommodated, or guided, or controlled? How do certain obvious expressions of this growth, such as gentrification, affect class and racial dynamics in the city? Is a high quality of life in the city congruent with increased efficiency? Are the two even compatible? What makes the original controversy as it emerged in the early 1960’s especially interesting is the fact that it concerned an area of the city whose purpose was to provide it with one of the most basic human needs: food. It is perhaps difficult to imagine--in this age of corporate supermarkets, agribusiness, and a highly globalized economy--a large-scale, urban, open market, available to bulk buyers and individual consumers alike, offering regionally-grown produce and meat to a whole city right in its center. The daily functioning of this market illustrated a mode of local, tangible, and diversified commerce that was beginning to be superceded by more modern, impersonal infrastructure. This turning point accounts for much of the conflict. But there was also another source of contention arising from the truly popular character of the district and the profound differences in vision for a place that was not just the belly, but also the heart, of Paris. In the 1960’s the district of Les Halles was, and had long been, a place where residents from all walks of life crossed paths on a daily basis. The market itself had magnitude- and not just because of its size (36 acres). First created in 1137, its own development was tied strongly to the evolution of the city itself. When it was threatened with destruction, the voices that emerged in its defense were numerous, passionate, and elegant.

Les Halles in the popular consciousness


During its long existence Les Halles has been the inspiration and setting for numerous stories, novels, poems, and films- and from the point of view of its workers, clients, and intoxicated wanderers, it was the inspiration and setting for countless spontaneous events of city life. Emile Zola’s novel, Le Ventre de Paris (The Belly of Paris, 1873) is set in and around Les Halles, and the novel’s title well describes the primal function this huge market had for the capital city, and for the farmers, gardeners, fisherman, and ranchers of the region. Zola, the celebrated leader of the French Naturalist Movement, sought to apply a scientific rigor to the description of human and social traits in order to determine the material bases for human passions (Larousse 1673). He describes Les Halles as “some strange city where separate quarters, faubourgs, villages, promenades, roads, squares, and thoroughfares might have been capriciously assembled under a tent by a playful giant.” Above this scene, the iron market halls, built in 1851, are “an immense flowering growth, a monstrous expanse of metal with stalks rising like rockets, with branches twisted and interlocked.” And yet these massive structures covered the world beneath “as lightly as the foliage of a century-old forest.” Among the crowd are “neatly dressed women shopkeepers, farmers in smocks, dirty porters in coats greasy from the food carried on their shoulders, poor devils in rags...” And then of course there is the merchandise: an “ocean of vegetables...the tide rose in the squares at the end of the street, until the vegetables submerged the paving stones...this river of verdure overflowed the embankment of the sidewalks like a torrent of rain.” There are cabbages in “mountains,” “barricades” of pumpkins- “It was a whole humming countryside (Zola 30-39).” Zola also once wrote of the iron market halls that “since the beginning of the century only one original monument has been built...which has arisen naturally in the light of our time. It is Les Halles (Evenson 303).”


Threats and Situationists

From Les Halles rose a rancid, fermented exhalation of rotting bananas and sick flowers, a moldy sewer-smell that invaded the seedy room, a mustiness that mingled with the window-rattling of motors starting off, the sounds of heavy lorries that shook the house to its foundations, the hooters that blew one atop the other in a skyscraper of sound, a dysentery of thunder, the shouts of the workmen unloading, jawing at each other as they maneuvered their barrows; it mingled as well with the shifting shadows and lights that wandered over the ceiling...[Les Halles] is inhabited by polite little people, eccentric, pleasure-loving, rakish, gluttonous, respecting nothing, refined to their fingertips, though not very well-dressed, behaving every day as if it were a holiday and considering unemployment a blessing. - Blase Cendrars, 1956 (Merrifield 32)

In the 1950’s official rhetoric toward the removal of the markets was already mounting. In response, influential—and artful—political groups like the lettrists, and later the situationists, defended the area as one of great “psychogeographic” importance to the city. In reading the theory of these groups one is reminded of Zola’s Naturalism, albeit one with a radical edge. As geographer David Pinder has surmised, their defense of Les Halles was related to their aim of “investigating the city and the interactions between subjectivity, behavior, and urban spaces so as to transform them along revolutionary lines.” Also, “they wanted to uncover histories and geographies in the city, including those obscured through the discourses of planning and redevelopment and those subject to the forces of forgetting characteristic of the commodity system, with its demands for the ever-new (Pinder 371).” For their goal of uncovering histories, it would be difficult to find a richer ground than Paris. These groups remembered that the huge boulevards blasted through the city by Prefect Georges Haussmann after the revolution of 1848 had the express aim of facilitating the movements of cannons and troops against future uprisings. Entire blocks of the neighborhoods of “the dangerous classes” were demolished outright. They remembered also that it was the market women of Les Halles who brought Louis XVI to face people’s justice in 1789. In their reading of revolutionary history, the most daring initiatives always began in the popular quarters- and they didn’t come more popular than Les Halles. By 1967 Guy Debord, the most well-known theorist of the situationists, would be criticizing the new urbanism—exemplified by redevelopment or “urban renewal”—as a means “of tackling the ongoing need to safeguard class power by ensuring the atomization of workers dangerously massed together by the conditions of urban production.” In his view the goal of such planning—then consuming building after building in Paris—was to perfect the separation between and within human beings by transforming urban spaces, such as factories, cultural centers and housing complexes, into places where individuals would be “isolated together (Pinder 365).” For this, “the role of planning in dispersing populations from urban centers,” a process that had already begun with Haussmann, was central.


The 1960’s

In the late 60’s Les Halles was still “a colorful midnight-to-dawn meeting place where fashionable revelers eat onion soup with porters and truck drivers (Grose).” But beyond considerations of nostalgia or revolutionary potential, the densely-populated district and its thriving market still energized the vital heart of Paris- it was a place where “one could always find work (Chevalier 20),” along with anything and everything edible. But criticism of the area—as unhygienic, inconvenient, and unsafe—was mounting, and the city council was actively pursuing its removal. The threat to such a place, situated not by accident in the center of Paris and involving the lives and livelihoods of a great part of its inhabitants, could not help but be taken seriously by the whole city. The debate, both official and unofficial, that took place over the planned relocation of the market to the suburbs and the redevelopment of the area spanned many years and provoked deep, historic passions. For many people, Les Halles was Paris, and as city historian Louis Chevalier put it: “with Les Halles gone, Paris is gone.” Chevalier’s 1977 book, L’Assassinat de Paris (The Assassination of Paris), published after the demolition of the market halls and during the construction of the underground rail interchange and shopping mall (Le Forum des Halles) that would replace it, is a bitter but eloquent recounting of the huge transformations of urban space—including Les Halles, the building of the Montparnasse skyscraper, the 2500-acre redevelopment and financial center called La Defense, and residential high-rises at the city’s periphery—that were taking place at the time. Chevalier documents “the project of using the departure of Les Halles to transform and transfigure the heart of Paris (Chevalier 211).”
The transformation Paris was undergoing at this time was indeed profound. In the two decades between 1954 and 1974, twenty-four per cent of the surface area of its built environment was demolished and reconstructed, and around 550,000 people were expelled from the city itself to the outskirts and suburbs. Significantly, as Debord was well aware, “the new wave of expulsions were centered along class and ethnic lines; they led to the working class population of the city during this period declining by forty-four percent and the cadres supérieurs [managerial class] increasing by fifty-one percent (Pinder 366).” The stage was set for this during the seven “boom” years leading up to this period (1948-54), when rents in the city increased sixfold and the cost of living doubled (Chevalier 29). Chevalier describes how during this time Parisian landowners, long inactive in improving or expanding their holdings, were induced to do so by a new class of developers—the term was then new—interested in fueling speculation and making profits in real estate.
Les Halles was smack in the middle of this upheaval, and its majority low-income residents found themselves in very precarious circumstances. The logistics of moving the market and revamping the district were taken up by the Paris city council in 1963. On the immediate, social level, the plans concerned the 25,000 inhabitants (determined in a survey in 1962) of the densely populated neighborhood who were faced with relocation. It was not just the market halls that were to be demolished. At 300 people per acre, this was one of the densest areas of Paris, in spite of the market area itself where there were no permanent dwellings. Forty per cent of the dwellings consisted of one room, and overall occupancy averaged 2.3 persons per room. Sixty-eight per cent of the dwellings had running water, thirty per cent had a bath, and thirty-six per cent a toilet. It was also noted that the neighborhood was somewhat transient- twenty-six per cent of the population had not been there eight years earlier. More than ten per cent of the population were foreigners, half of whom were North African (Evenson 1973 311-312). The concerns of these low-income residents were expressed in posters found throughout the district. One of them, hand-lettered and posted within a block of buildings slated for demolition in 1971, is recounted by Norma Evenson:

The center of Paris will be beautiful. Luxury will be king. The buildings of the St. Martin block will be of high standing. But we will not be here. The commercial facilities will be spacious and rational. The parking immense. But we won’t work here anymore. The streets will be spacious and the pedestrian ways numerous. But we won’t walk here anymore. We won’t live here anymore. Only the rich will be here. They have chosen to live in our quarter. the elected officials responding to their wishes have decided. The renovation is not for us (Evenson 307).

The Critics

For the people who made these posters Les Halles was home. But for its detractors (and surely the architects and construction firms were among them), the district was cramped, inaccessible, dirty, rat-infested. The traffic was infamous. The liaisons between the produce truckers and the prostitutes who worked in the area were disparaged. Petty crimes were loudly deplored. One reporter called it “little but a way station for market produce, pimps, and slumming nighthawks (Edelmann).” A French writer in 1964 put it this way:

“The public powers have realized that we can no longer maintain in the city the central markets, nor the wine market, nor the Parisian-style markets that are held for the most part on public streets, that block the sidewalks, overflow onto the roads, tie up traffic several mornings per week.... The markets situated in the center of the capital constitute not only economic nonsense, but also a permanent threat to hygiene and health, and even the public morality (Boutet de Monvel 5).”

The writer, as was typical with such complaints, fails to cite any evidence of the dangers to health and hygiene, nor does he remark that besides the troublesome markets themselves there were people using them. As far as the “economic nonsense,” Chevalier cites a “sacrosanct text” (unidentified) that claimed “the laws of supply and demand cannot work in perfectly normal conditions in Les Halles because the merchandise cannot be presented at the opening of the market and also, since the goods are not arranged and displayed by category, the buyers cannot make a quick survey of the available quantities.” Certainly the supermarkets of a consumer society are the scarcely hidden ideal. As Chevalier recalls, “The economic argument, no doubt because it was the most mysterious and the most obscure, as is everything connected to economic science, was most often invoked (Chevalier 212).”
But perhaps there was some “sense” after all. Chevalier earlier cites a study on the changes in French purchasing during the years 1957-1977. In it, the author notes that the French “rank in the forefront of Europe in [the purchase of] most food categories.” But that for other products-- household appliances, conveniences, clothes, processed or “fancy” food items--they were “between sixth and ninth place.” The study concluded: “France ranks high overall, but low in the purchase of consumer goods. Given our relatively high income of 1970 we still cling to a model of consumption dating from 1930 (Chevalier 92).” Other writers, notably Kristin Ross, have written about how during this time French society was being intentionally reordered in accordance with “a streamlined, consumer-driven domesticity, largely patterned after the American model,” for which the acceptance of new commodities by a fascinated but apprehensive French public was crucial (Fantasia). Was the removal of a food market and its replacement by a mall filled with “consumer goods” a way to institute more “modern” models of consumption for the benefit of unseen investors?
Another main argument against Les Halles was the traffic jams, which were described as “stupefying,” though, according to Chevalier, “the people involved in them, the truck drivers, coped amazingly well and were the last to complain.” The traffic problems of the entire municipal area were blamed on Les Halles. But few targeted the more obvious culprit: dependence on automobiles. At this time mass-produced cars were one of those new commodities noted above; they were being aggressively promoted and their numbers on French streets were increasing dramatically. Georges Pompidou, during his term as prime minister (1962-1968), proclaimed: “Paris must adapt itself to the automobile and renounce an out-of-date way of life. (Meyer and Berretta).” The suburbs would offer the chance for a new, modern facility (with loading docks, parking, fire lanes, etc. ),and the convenience of highways, said those who supported the market’s removal. There is no evidence that the idea of building a second market in the suburbs without completely destroying Les Halles was ever seriously considered.
Chevalier dismisses all of the officially stated problems of Les Halles as pretexts fabricated by technocrats and businessmen looking for investment opportunities and others preoccupied with order and cleanliness. He describes the real estate business as a kind of everyday scandal where promoters (speculators)—with the help of connections and bribes—are able to ignore or change zoning laws prohibiting construction and sell property at large profits to their own real-estate companies, who then proceed to build and sell for much larger gains (Chevalier 137). As for order and cleanliness, other writers have pointed out how the language of hygiene—proposals to “clean up” a neighborhood, for example—can be used to exclude social groups, especially immigrant populations, from specific locations (Pinder 372). Kristin Ross, in her analysis of contemporary cinema, advertisements, magazines and other media, draws connections between a “social cult of hygiene and cleanliness” and the marketing of new kitchen appliances (Williams). But whatever the pretexts and whatever the hidden agendas, the plans to remove the market—and relocate its neighbors—marched on.

Last Defenses

The situationist Abdelhafid Khatib, recalling the aftermath of 1848, argued that the projected removal of Les Halles would “entail a new blow to popular Paris, which has for a century now been constantly exiled, as we know, to the suburbs (Pinder 373).” But popular Paris was not so quickly silenced. When the city council, in 1967, exhibited at city hall six different proposals for the site, the reaction of the public was hostile to all of them and the council ended by rejecting all of them as possibilities (Evenson 184). In 1968, when the dominant proposal was to raze everything and build an “International Commercial Center” (ICC) to attract the headquarters of the largest corporations in Western Europe (inspired by the building of the World Trade Center in New York), a “grave error” was found in the calculation of the price per square meter of rehabilitating—rather than destroying—the existing buildings in the district: the planners had put one zero too many! This discovery was made by a citizens organization, COPRAS (Comité pour la Participation et l’Animation dans la Société), which had been asked to do a public opinion survey, and forced a complete re-orientation of plans (Projetleshalles.com). This was a major victory, as the ICC plan included the demolition of up to 600 acres of central Paris.
Another survey solicited by the city council--this one architectural--recognized the historic character of the site in terms perhaps even the situationists could commend. Dutifully observing that Les Halles did “not present at first sight monumental ensembles of exceptional architectural quality,” it nevertheless recognized that “its interest resides in characteristics less apparent and more subtle: an ancient urban fabric which determines the characteristic land allotment.” It reported “street patterns which conform to the historic ways of the capital; sequences of façades filled with fantasy and harmony, forming a refined and elegant urban decor (Evenson 305).” Indeed, with all the purported interest in preserving the character of “the historic center” of Paris, one important question was not posed: why was it the center if not for Les Halles?

Despite such fleeting considerations, the departure of the market began in 1969. It should be said that alongside the loud opposition to its relocation there were also many Parisians who agreed, based on their own or official evidence, that it was inevitable. But the destruction of the massive iron pavilions, Zola’s “stalks rising like rockets” that covered the market, was another story. The pavilions, designed by Victor Baltard, were called by some specialists “the finest iron buildings in the world (Kener).” Ironically, while the city council discussed the possibility of creating, among other things, a new cultural center at the old market site, the spaces under the huge iron structures had already become one, due to nothing more than public interest and initiative. The halls were leased for theaters, cinemas, art exhibits, circuses, rock concerts, and an amusement park. There was “an extraordinary flowering of artistic endeavor...carried on mostly by groups of young people with more imagination and zeal than money (Hess).” After the market had left but before the destruction of the pavilions (which would leave a gaping hole, “Le Trou” as it came to be known, that dominated the area for years) there was also an influx of tony boutiques, antique dealers, and discotheques. Small food merchants and restaurant owners, who had left with the closing of the market, returned to the quarter and catered to a different clientele, attracted to the new life in the area.
André Fermigier, a journalist for Le Nouvel Observateur and a staunch defender of what he called “Baltard’s basilica,” wrote a stinging article one month before the destruction of the pavilions accusing the city government of engaging in “one of the shadiest affairs of the century,” and questioning the legality of the whole process. He called their impending demolition “a foolish act and a crime, an act of vandalism inspired by the most ill-advised economic considerations.” He recounted how an American banker’s offer to buy the structures--in order to move them out of the country—was rejected for fear of later embarrassment at having sold them off. As he imagined the government’s logic, if the city was going to get rid of them they should also destroy the evidence of what was sure to be later thought of as a profound mistake. Fermigier certainly found common ground with many Parisians who had seen their city transformed against their will. The redevelopment project confronting Les Halles, he said, provoked so much worry and antipathy because “it crystallizes...all of the resentment that Parisians have for the new Paris, for this awful and unlivable Paris that is being imposed on them, this Paris of office buildings and towers, of speculators, of entrepreneur real estate bankers, where all that we love is destroyed or disfigured for no other reasons than those of business and finance.” After mentioning some other recent, unpopular construction projects (including those cited above), he declares that “Paris resembles more and more a capital of an underdeveloped country, dressed up with capitalist symbols and poor counterfeits of an architecture that has its sense in New York but that here is an architecture of lies (Fermigier 1971).”
But through a combination of profit motives and executive authority (the matter was not up for a vote) the destiny of the district had already been foretold. Heedless of the eleventh hour appeals of poets, painters, and celebrities, the Paris city council, sticking to a well-known, devious tradition, carried out the unpopular decision to demolish the pavilions in August 1971, the month when most Parisians are out of the city on vacation. Still, the actions of those residents who shadowed the government from the beginning of the conflict did bring some results. When the new train station/commercial center opened in 1979, it was roundly criticized--“incoherent and threadbare,” “the architecture is third-rate,” “the overall effect nil”-- but at the same time, as Fermigier put it (possibly thinking of the plan for the behemoth ICC), “it represents a lesser evil in comparison to what was originally planned, and the fact that the authorities fell back on this lesser evil is due solely to pressure of public opinion (Fermigier 1981).” Perhaps for the public that misses their messy markets, this is small consolation.

Déjà Vu

When Jacques Chirac became the mayor of Paris in 1977, he tried to assure the public that the new structures on the old site of Les Halles would be appreciated by everyone. Proclaiming “L’architecte des Halles, c’est moi,” he wanted people to know that he was taking into consideration the popular nature of the site. “I want it to smell like fries,” he said (Meyer). From the opening of the underground shopping mall called the Forum des Halles in 1979, it was clear that this never really was the intention. (Ironically, it has—only too successfully for some—come to pass. See below.) The first stores granted leases inside the mall were mostly high-end, the popular variety store FNAC was even refused a lease. Several years later, they were begged to come anchor the failing mall, and they did come under the condition that their retail affiliates were also granted space (Meyer). Meanwhile, the commercial space on the surface, in what was left of the old neighborhood, gradually changed from stores selling food and other staples to residents to ones selling clothing, gadgets, and souvenirs aimed at the ever-flowing river of tourists in the city. The scarcity and sharp increase in price of local food and services led to the departure of many low-income residents, whose places were quickly taken by “nouveaux bourgeois” paying much higher rents.
Today, le Forum des Halles and its train station see 800,000 commuters pass daily and 41 million shoppers per year. The district has certainly been radically changed. But at close inspection, the predictions stated on the poster found by Norma Evenson in 1971 have proven only partially correct. True, the untouched and re-built housing stock is expensive. And the low-wage retail jobs that have come with the Forum probably do not compare to the working class income source that departed with the market halls. But almost from the beginning, the place began to attract young people from the suburbs—increasingly African and Arab--who came to just hang out, either in the mall itself, on the surface pedestrian streets, or amidst the shaded nooks of the gardens. The new crowd at Les Halles reflects the new ethnic and geographic composition of working class Paris. For some—notably among the residents and merchants surveyed by the mainstream press—these new visitors lend the site an increasingly “rough” exterior. The grumbling, complaints, and calls for redevelopment have begun again, and the area is once again slated for massive redevelopment.
It is truly remarkable to what extent some of the current criticisms of Les Halles remind one of the criticisms of the market site in the 1960’s. Words like “dirty” and “unsafe” are often seen in the press. Exaggerated claims of the area as “thronged by junkies, winos and beggars (Broughton)” may be today’s warning of the “threats...to public morality” heard in 1964. One journalist, while complaining of the “tatty, airless gardens, haunted by drug dealers” nevertheless turns sentimental in describing the old Les Halles as “the gritty, never-resting heart” of Paris, revealing, one might suppose, his taste for old grit instead of new—or perhaps for “French” grit instead of that from immigrant populations (Lichfield). This view is reinforced by his inaccurate and loaded claim that the Les Halles area today is “shunned by Parisians and tourists and colonized by young men in hooded anoraks.” It would be interesting to ask this journalist exactly what he thinks “Parisians” look like and who he thinks are under those forbidding hoods.
The current mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, has called the Forum “a soul-less, architecturally bombastic concrete jungle.” But whatever the range of opinions on aesthetics, the latest attempt to redevelop Les Halles is confronting a well-founded cynicism about grand, expensive construction projects- especially when they are publicly funded. In a “state architectural spree” over the past two decades, French taxpayers have been hit up for six billion dollars-- with no vote or even a debate in Parliament--to fund huge construction projects such as the refurbishing of the Louvre, and the building of the national library, the Grand Arch of La Defense, and the new opera house at the Bastille (Lewday). The scenario where a new mayor wants to put up a “symbolic building” to promote his re-election is also nothing new to Parisians (Chenay). Of course this holds true for the designers as well; as one of the 7,000 current residents of the district put it, “this whole project seems to be a race between architects to leave something extraordinary behind- with their name written all over it. What good is that to the locals (Gehmlich)?”
The new fate of Les Halles seems to lie in one of four government-chosen projects. Unlike before, the basic function of the site is not strongly challenged, though its appearance and layout could change dramatically. Public input has been solicited (you can express your preference for one of the four plans on the internet) but the city has emphasized—as it did in the 60’s—that it will have the final say. From the grassroots, the Union des Champeaux--one of the original organizations to challenge the redevelopment in the 60’s--has proposed a new food market, this time up to all modern standards, to once again “provide the capital with perishable staples at the lowest prices possible (projetleshalles.com).” Although this proposal is unlikely to be seriously considered, reading it through certainly brings good questions to mind. When and where was the idea lost that a city centered around the needs and occupations of its inhabitants, and not around investment opportunities? And, can this idea be found again?
For myself, having first visited Paris in 1980 and having witnessed some of its most recent transformations, my interest in the city comes not as a permanent resident but as one emotionally and politically attached to the charm, historical depth, and down-to-earth functionality I felt in many of its neighborhoods. For me, Paris has not been “assassinated.” As realistic as I am about the strong economic interests that try to shape the city, I will continue to put great stock in the ability of its inhabitants to do some shaping of their own.

Works Cited


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