In 1973 Olivier Guichard, minister of housing and public works in Pierre Messmer’s government, issued a directive proscribing the construction of large-scale social housing projects throughout France. No more tower blocks. And no more low-rise, high-density schemes. Guichard’s was the conventional, bien pensant wisdom of the era. It was commonplace in Britain and America. The housing experiments of the previous two decades had evidently been founded in expediency; the burgeoning post-war population had to be housed by some means or other. They had also been founded in the deterministic optimism that better homes might create better lives, even better citizens: in this they were witting heirs to the French tradition of practical utopias that stretched back to Claude Ledoux’s Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-senans.
The beneficiaries were people who had inhabited rudimentary corons (back-tobacks) with communal toilets and baths, who had subsisted without running water in the bidonvilles (literally: jerry-can towns) that surrounded Paris and many large French cities, who had migrated from the disease-pocked slums of Djibouti or Dakar, who had fled the jobless indigence of the Algerian boondocks. To them, their new homes might not be quite heaven on earth but in comparison with what they had suffered thitherto they were paradisiac, materially paradisiac. Here, though, was the largesse of a state which, in the name of its vaunted equality, forced an awkward form of equality on its citizens.
France, ever utopian, acknowledges only a compact between the individual citizen and the state. That citizen’s race and colour and creed are, so to speak, unseen: censuses do not record them. Egalitarian idealism was accordingly employed as a weapon against communitarianism. Practically, this meant that widely differing cultures and, often, languages were wilfully ignored by housing authorities. Thus, it was hoped, would de facto apartheid along tribal and nationalistic lines be avoided: from the joyous melting pot there would eventually emerge impeccably French citizens who had sloughed their ethnicity, superstitions, funny clothes, folklore and identitarian baggage.
That hope has been realised. Not, though, in the manner that the governments of the early Fifth Republic envisaged. Utopia mutated with alacrity. Within a few years the glorious streets in the sky had turned into vertical slums. The dwellers within them have no doubt achieved a praiseworthy racial harmony. They have created a new factionalism based not on the ethnicity and distant heritage of their parents or – more likely, with the passage of time – their grandparents, but on neighbourly alliances made in their cités (estates) or even in particular blocks: that’s localism in action.
Thus at Noisy-le-grand, halfway between the rather different hell called Disneyland and central Paris, the architectural tourist, not knowing whether to laugh or marvel at Manuel Nuñez’s Les Arènes de Picasso, will be offered drugs by Gang 1, which includes operatives whose ethnic origins are Vietnamese, Maghrebian, west African and indigenous French. Given that Nuñez’s colossal folly, which tempers Boulée with a splash of Gaudí, appears as nothing less than a hallucination to the sober, one courteously declines Gang 1’s offer. When Gang 1 has gone, Gang 2 appears. Again racially mixed, and with an understanding of supply and demand as frail as Gang 1’s: if everyone is selling the stuff who is going to buy it? The French education system has clearly failed them. Again, refuse, courteously. Not far away the mini-rainbow-nation known as Gang 3 is on duty at Ricardo Bofill’s slapstick-classical Les Espaces d’abraxas. (Can a building be sectioned?) One is obviously tempted by the offer of a psychotropic jolt since it might be just the way into Bofill’s singular imagination. None the less: refuse, courteously.
Courtesy is of paramount importance in these curtailed transactions since no selfrespecting teenage gangster – and the street level operatives are predominantly teenaged – is without an automatic weapon. A “kalach” is the designer accessory that kills, it’s smarter than mere knuckledusters, which are sold openly and legally. It is de rigueur in the countless cités which are thoughtfully euphemised as “sensitive”, like those of Seine-st-denis (“neuf-trois”, as it’s known, after its departmental number), Lyon and Marseille’s northern quarters where the “settling of scores”, ie gangland murder, has become a weekly occurrence – which prompts the question, to what extent is such merciless criminality related to, even provoked by, the built environment?
No matter how sculpturally dramatic their silhouettes, no matter how eyecatchingly gaudy their details, there can be no doubt that the blocks’ labyrinthine planning, both internal and external, is propitious to drug dealing. Stairwells have become such bazaars that tenants of certain buildings are forced to use external fire-escapes and rooflights to gain access to their home. There is little in the short term that an undermanned police force can do to change a situation where eightyear-old guetteurs (look-outs) “earn” 1,200 euros per month. (The Baltimore minicrims in The Wire must be envious.)
What has changed throughout Sarkozy’s presidency, and rapidly under the watch of Claude Guéant as minister of the interior, is the mindset of which Olivier Guichard was just as much a captive as the philanthropic state whose projects he rejected. The notion that people are affected – for better, for worse – by their physical surrounds has thankfully been chucked out. In its lieu comes the conviction, abhorred by liberal delusionists (of which caste France has as many as Britain), that exclusion – initially expressed through truancy and minor delinquency – is wrought by people on themselves, by their irresponsibility and failure to integrate, because their life is an incompatible synthesis of primitivism and envy, of ill-education and consumerist desire.
And if the exculpation of the architectural modernism of over half a century ago requires further proof, look around you, at the countless high-rise blocks where the maligned bourgeoisie live their exemplary life – and there is no ruffian on the stair. ‘Jonathan Meades on France’ continues on BBC4 on Wednesdays