How to Live in Cergy-Pontoise
Barbara Burns talks to Ed Welch, whose book Making Space in Post-War France: The Dreams, Realities and Aftermath of State Planning has recently won the Gapper Prize, awarded annually by the Society for French Studies to the outstanding book of its year in the field — and has just appeared in our budget-priced paperback line, priced £14.99.
BB. Congratulations on winning the Gapper Prize! Your book is a wonderfully rich and nuanced study of urban change and modernization in post-war France, homing in on developments since the 1960s when Charles de Gaulle was president. Why was this such a significant period in French history, and how did the government’s vision for the country’s future as a modern European state relate to the legacy of its imperial past?
EW. Thank you! I was already delighted to make the prize shortlist, so to learn the book had won was great news.
France wasn’t alone amongst western European countries in undergoing major economic, societal and cultural transformations during the post-war period, of course. But those transformations were typically also inflected by each country’s specific historical context. Having been one of the world’s major imperial powers since the sixteenth century, France – like the United Kingdom – was seeing its status challenged by the shifting geopolitics of the Cold War and the demand for self-determination on the part of populations around the world living under colonial regimes.
France’s empire included colonies in North and West Africa as well as South East Asia, and it became increasingly bogged down in struggles for independence after World War Two. The most significant both politically and historically was in Algeria, which had been colonised by France in the 1830s and had a distinct status amongst France’s colonial possessions in being an integral part of French sovereign territory: its three départements, or administrative regions, had the same status as those constituting the territory of metropolitan France.
The Algerian liberation movement, the Front de libération nationale (FLN), launched a series of coordinated attacks against French interests in November 1954 that marked the start of the Algerian War. What became a protracted conflict, which saw French conscripts mobilised little over a decade after the end of World War Two, triggered a crisis in France in 1958 that led to the return to power of legendary wartime leader Charles de Gaulle following a period of (self-imposed) political exile. He deployed his substantial political capital, as well as a new constitution that shifted the balance of power from parliament to the presidency, to bring a formal end to France’s imperial era. The conflict in Algeria ended in 1962 with a negotiated settlement and Algerian independence from France.
Simultaneously, De Gaulle was initiating a series of reforms and projects (political, administrative, technical and territorial) to modernise France itself and position it as a beacon of western liberal civilization. To facilitate that task, the country could draw on a cadre of engineers and civil servants who were now returning from the former colonies, where they had acquired vast experience in running modernisation projects and testing the theory that civilizational advance could be achieved through spatial planning and infrastructural development. They set to work applying that theory to the mother country, carrying out what the Marxist philosopher and spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre termed a form of internal colonisation.
The book shows how spatial planning (what the French call aménagement du territoire) became a key vehicle for De Gaulle’s politics of French modernity by the way in which it transformed French space, landscape and environment in ways intended to usher in new ways of life. It argues that projecting France into the future through planning was a way to obscure or negate the territorial contraction resulting from decolonisation. It explores how the planners imagined the future they were planning, and what happened when their visions and dreams were translated into built realities on the ground, most notably in the form of new towns around Paris such as Cergy-Pontoise, whose designs reflected the latest thinking about modern architecture and urban planning.
Like many such projects, one of the most interesting things about the outcomes of Gaullist state planning is how, as they endure in time, they begin to resemble dreams of the future from the past, even as they continue to shape the experience of everyday life in the present. One of the ways I explore this is through various forms of cultural production through to the present day, including literary texts, films and photographic projects. I am interested in how different cultural forms evoke and depict life in modernised France – or, to put it another way, modernised life in France – and how people respond and adapt to their new surroundings, consciously or otherwise.
BB. This volume is the fruit of a truly interdisciplinary project, drawing on legislative, administrative and planning materials as well as cinematic, literary, photographic, and journalistic responses to the built environment. Can you tell us something about how these different media complement each other?
EW. I’ve always understood different sorts of texts, discourses, visual material and other modes of representation as creating a sort of continuum of symbolic forms through which human beings articulate, understand and give shape to the world. Things like legislative, administrative and planning materials are especially significant in this regard because they have a performative quality. That is to say, it is through them that power and agency are channelled to enact change. When legislative texts are published that define land and land use, the definitions in those lines of text can produce real and material changes in physical space and lived experience.
In one of the later chapters of the book I look at how the term ‘zone’ is codified and defined in order to produce certain sorts of space in the territory, whether for planning or military purposes. Those definitions are important because of the spatial entities they create on the ground. But simultaneously in French, since the nineteenth century, ‘zone’ has acquired another, more poetic meaning to refer to space which is marginal or outside the purview of state authority. What’s interesting is how those two meanings are in play at the same time, and end up blending into each other: increasingly in the 1980s and 1990s, right-wing politicians would talk about ‘lawless zones’ to describe some of the peripheral areas where civil unrest would periodically break out, while also developing policies which mobilised the word to designate a distinct sort of space or location subject to special fiscal, legal bureaucratic measure. I enjoyed unpicking the ambiguities, tensions and contradictions inherent in what might at first appear to be drily technocratic or administrative language.
Meanwhile, I wanted to examine how the realities and effects of French modernisation were being articulated in different forms of cultural production as the decades progressed. Sometimes there would be direct engagement with aménagement du territoire as a societal phenomenon: the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard was someone who recognised early on the extent to which Gaullist state planning would transform French society. His 1967 film 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle is memorable for the way in which it films the redevelopment of Paris, for example. Likewise, the writer Annie Ernaux has explored the oddly fragmentary nature of lived experience in the new town of Cergy-Pontoise in a number of her texts, and especially Journal du dehors (1992).
At the same time, I was struck by how, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, France’s modernised environments were present quietly as a setting or backdrop in films that otherwise didn’t appear to be engaged directly with exploring the nature of French modernity. An example to which I devote some time is Agnès Varda’s brilliant film Sans toit ni loi (1985), or Vagabond to give it its English title. It tells the story of an itinerant young woman circulating through the landscapes of southern France. A number of details caught my eye, including glimpses of the new holiday resorts built along the south coast of France in the 1960s as part of a drive to develop the tourist industry, or the barely noticeable presence of cars running along a motorway in the film’s crucial closing minutes. Drawing out such details enabled me to offer what I hope is an engaging new reading of the film as a reflection on French modernisation through the prism of the central character.
BB. You started your research journey with a PhD on the Nobel-Prize-winning French novelist François Mauriac. How did you move from a relatively traditional literary focus to develop an interest in urban planning?
EW. It was through my work on Mauriac that I became interested in the politics of post-war French modernisation, and the extent to which modernisation was entangled with decolonisation and French imperial decline. The PhD and subsequent book explored Mauriac’s shifting fortunes as a writer and intellectual. Having established his reputation with novels such as Thérèse Desqueyroux in the 1920s and 30s, he was famously the subject of a polemical attack by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1939. Sartre was intent on marking out his territory at the vanguard of French literature and rather deftly (if perhaps unfairly) positioned Mauriac as a representative of the established literary order he was looking to overturn. But the symbolic assassination of Mauriac as a novelist coincided with his increasing willingness to intervene as a public intellectual during the post-war period.
Tracking Mauriac’s post-war career was an illuminating way to map transformations in the fields of French literary and cultural production, but also in relation to an evolving media and political landscape that brought the two key narratives of post-war France – decolonisation and modernisation – together. Central to this was Mauriac’s surprising involvement with the weekly news magazine L’Express, which had been launched by Françoise Giroud and Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber in the early 1950s to support and promote the modernizing agenda of centre-left politician Pierre Mendès-France (the magazine is still in circulation today). Mauriac joined the paper as a columnist in 1954, staying with it until 1961. The presence of a writer seen to embody the conservative values of provincial France amidst a group of young modernisers caused something of a sensation in a way that suited both parties as they sought to (re)position themselves in the public debate.
Mauriac had become an increasingly outspoken critic of colonial injustice and violence in France’s North African colonies, most notably with a searing (and early) denunciation of the use of torture by the French army during the Algerian War that was skilfully amplified within the pages of the news weekly. As I mentioned earlier, the conflict provoked a political crisis in 1958 which saw the dramatic return to power of Charles de Gaulle. A condition of his return was a new constitutional settlement that founded the Fifth Republic and oriented the balance of power away from the legislature towards the presidency. Convinced of De Gaulle’s ability to end the Algerian War and lead France towards prosperity and stability, Mauriac became one of his most vocal supporters, while his colleagues at L’Express – like many on the left – were deeply suspicious of what they saw as De Gaulle’s authoritarian and anti-democratic impulses.
Their difference of opinion was the determining factor in Mauriac’s departure from L’Express in 1961, and the move of his weekly column to the staider setting of Le Figaro littéraire. But as the 1960s progressed and De Gaulle’s modernisation agenda gained pace, Mauriac became increasingly disconcerted by the transformations set in train by a president to whom he was otherwise devoted. He became preoccupied by the sonic booms of the jet fighter planes flying over his house in South West France, and the disfiguring earthworks he saw in the French countryside as new motorways were being built. That sense of an encounter between a disoriented French citizen and the radical transformations of French modernity was one of the things I wanted to explore further in Making Space in Post-war France.
BB. A key signifier of modernity at this time was the new town project, and you devote a chapter to the town of Cergy-Pontoise that was created outside Paris in the 1960s and 70s. How does this case study exemplify the tension between dreams and realities to which you refer in the subtitle of your book?
EW. Cergy-Pontoise is a fascinating place, and I’d recommend a visit to anyone who wants to get a feel both for the scale of post-war modernisation and the strange ways in which the Gaullist vision of modernity survives into the present. Cergy-Pontoise covers a surface area as large as central Paris, but is much less densely built up: it was intended to create a distinctively new blend of rural and urban living for its (largely middle-class) residents. Key to doing so was the topography of the site. Cergy is located on and above a meander of the river Oise, which is a tributary of the Seine. The plateau above the river affords a view of the Paris skyline on a clear day. I tell the story in the book of how the planning team led by Paul Delouvrier (the man at the centre of the photo on the cover of Making Space in Post-war France, whose development plan for the Paris region, produced at the behest of De Gaulle, had been published in 1965) chose the site for one of the five new towns around Paris because of its spectacular location. Cergy’s newness was encoded in its design, whether that be architectural (it included some landmark modernist buildings) or from the point of view of then-current trends in urban planning, such as the separation of vehicle and pedestrian traffic.
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Construction on the site began in the early 1970s, but the final planned phase wasn’t completed until the early 1990s. That in itself signals the temporal lag and inertia that take hold as plans are turned into realities. And what it also means is that urban developments that articulate the latest thinking at the time become overtaken by subsequent approaches and ideas, as well as unforeseen political and economic challenges, so that they become relics of, or maybe memorials to, visions from earlier epochs. But even while they are places expressing dreams from earlier times, they remain the setting for lives lived in a future which they were supposed to anticipate, but which took a radically different turn: one of the things explored in later chapters of the book is how Gaullist planning was blown off course by political and economic headwinds in the 1970s and 1980s, headwinds that continue to determine the nature and development of French space into the present day.
BB. What were the most rewarding aspects of this research project?
EW. Perhaps the most rewarding thing about the project was that it ended up taking shape over a substantial period of time (a bit like the things it discusses I suppose). That wasn’t the original intention: it was going to be my next major project after my work on François Mauriac, but I had the chance to collaborate with Joe McGonagle at the University of Manchester on a project exploring how the complex relationship between France and Algeria is mediated in visual culture, which led to a book we published in 2013.
The germ of the idea for Making Space in Post-war France came in the late 1990s, when a French friend of mine gave me a copy of a book called Les Passagers du Roissy-Express by François Maspero and Anaïk Frantz. It was published in 1990 and recounts a slow journey along the RER B rail line from Charles de Gaulle airport north of Paris to its southern suburbs. Both the RER network and the new airport at Roissy were part of the development plan for the Paris region initiated by Paul Delouvrier. Travelling through those places myself using the transport networks produced by Delouvrier’s plan got me thinking about the politics of spatial production and how decisions taken by a relatively small number of people at a particular point in time can continue to have ramifications and implications for decades to come. As a key theme of the book is the afterlives of post-war dreams and how they live on in the present, the extended time of the project meant I was able to take stock of some of the most interesting recent developments in the politics of French space and territory.
The most notable of these are the insurgent actions by environmental and climate activists intended to disrupt the logics that equate economic growth and prosperity with spatial transformation. Particularly eye-catching was the long-running battle between the French state and a group of activists who had occupied a rural site at Notre-Dame-des-Landes in western France designated for development as an airport during the 1960s. The land had been pre-emptively earmarked at the time as a ZAD (zone d’aménagement différé, or deferred development zone), but the project had never advanced for a variety of political and economic reasons. When it gained momentum again in the early 2010s, the activists joined forces with local farmers to occupy the land and resist the development plans, renaming it a zad (zone à défendre), deliberately shifting to the lower case to signal they intended the space to be something other than intended by the French state. Their move was a nice example of the tensions lurking in the word ‘zone’ I mentioned earlier. Most striking of all was that the government conceded defeat in 2018 and abandoned plans for the site. But while at one level this marked a victory for the kind of environmental activism that might produce a different form of relationship to space, environment and the planet in an era of climate crisis, in reality it seemed more like a tactical retreat by the state as it worked out how best to negotiate an emerging threat to its territorial integrity.
BB. One of the observations made by the Gapper Prize jury was that your book makes ‘a powerful argument for the history of state planning to be a major part of French studies’. Why do you think this is important, and can you see the university curriculum, as well as academic scholarship, embracing this interest?
EW. Hopefully one of the things readers will take from the book is the extent to which the outcomes of post-war state planning have shaped life in France over the decades, and therefore the ways in which people think, write about, film or photograph the country. The often-unrecognised relationship between spatial production and lived experience, and how the two are mediated by and through cultural forms, is probably one of the key points of the book for me. I was also keen to remind us of the fact that the activity we call ‘state planning’, and which implies the exercise of power by the state as a remote and monolithic entity, is also a human adventure. The outcomes of state planning in France (and elsewhere) are by no means always positive. Indeed, the history of post-war French society shows us they have often been deeply problematic. But I wanted to suggest that the enterprise of state planning shouldn’t simply be the subject of critique along those lines, but deserves to have its complexity recognised. How the planners understand and reflect on their actions requires critical scrutiny, but there is room too for understanding how their motivations were fuelled by passions, desires, hopes and other forms of human emotion. My hope is that the book in some way enables students and scholars to hold both of those aspects and outcomes of French state planning in dialogue.
BB. Finally, what do you do to relax and switch off from academic work?
EW. I spend as much time as I can in the Scottish hills. I’ve a particular soft spot for the Cairngorms in north east Scotland, where I’ve spent a lot of time tramping, and the startling landscapes of Assynt in north west Scotland. Both are rather different from the modernised environments I otherwise spend time thinking about!
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