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suburbs ("Petite couronne") of Paris[5] The PCF stopped using the "Red Belt" as a motto as it engaged in the strategy of the “Front Populaire” alliance for the 1935 municipal elections.

Thanks to the success of the PCF at the 1935 elections, Georges Marrane, communist mayor of Ivry-sur-Seine, became president of the General Council of the department of Seine in 1936.

This success can be partially attributed to the housing crisis that brought a large working-class population to the suburbs, where the living conditions were particularly poor.

Communist municipalities promote social policies, including the development of inexpensive housing, the Habitations à Bon Marché (HBM), which will later become the HLM; the creation of garden cities through the local public housing office; and health centers that democratize access to health services.

[6] Since the PCF could not form alliances with other political parties, it lost 22 communes in Seine-Banlieue to the SFIO and to Charles De Gaulle's RPF in the 1947 elections.

[7] At the end of the 1950s, the PCF's setbacks on the national stage paradoxically illustrated what Pierre Bellanger calls "the resilience of municipal communism".

But the opposite happened: revived by the unpopularity of the Pinay-Rueff plan,[9] the PCF won 7 new cities, bringing its total to 31 in Seine-banlieue.

In the aftermath of the municipal and cantonal elections of 1959, the Communist Party, the leading political force in the Paris agglomeration, was preparing to run for the presidency of the General Council of the Seine, which it had held in 1936 and after the Liberation.

In addition, the PCF made new inroads in the outer suburbs, in Poissy, Les Mureaux and Mantes-la-Ville, and confirmed recent wins in cities such as Montereau, Palaiseau or Savigny-sur-Orge.

While Jacques Duclos, the communist candidate, had received 21.7% of the national vote in the 1969 presidential election, André Lajoinie only obtained 6.8% in 1988.

As historian Romain Ducoulombier notes: To improve the condition of the working-class, a distinctive choice of communist towns was to build large housing projects.

After that, the number remained stable until 2002, when it lost 2 more seats in the aftermath of the dismal results of Robert Hue in the presidential election.

[11] The 2014 municipal elections represented a major defeat for the Communist party: in Seine-Saint-Denis, it lost Bobigny, Saint-Ouen, Bagnolet and Blanc-Mesnil, four cities that it had held for decades.

[12] The 2020 municipal elections confirmed the slow disappearance of the Red Belt: the PCF lost 4 out of 10 cities it held in the département of Val-de-Marne: Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, Choisy-le-Roi, Valenton and Champigny-sur-Marne, but it won back Villejuif.

It constitutes, in the words of Annie Fourcaut, "a political myth": It is first and foremost a strategic and political myth, born in the mid-1920s, shortly after the secession of the Tours Congress, that expresses and distorts the encounter between the newly created communist party (SFIC) and a limited share of the working class in the suburbs of Paris.

Without claiming it, communist mayors take advantage of the legacy of the previous administration, while creating new social functions and extending its network of sympathizers.

They do not reject the tradition of collaboration between mayors, and participate in the rationalisation of municipal administration, most notably by promoting alumni of the ENAM.

The way communist mayors exercised their responsibilities, including in times of withdrawal or bolshevization, appears at odds with the radicality of manifestos and partisan articles published in opinion newspapers.

Through the partisan use of avant-gardes - Karl-Marx School in Villejuif built by Lurçat in 1933, Culture house of contemporary Seine-Saint-Denis - the suburbs become a testing ground for modernity.

In other cities, André Lurçat, Paul Chemetov, Serge Magnien and other modernist architects close to the PCF renovated the suburbs.

Georges Valbon, mayor of Bobigny, accepted the renovation of the town according to the standards of slab urbanism: he notably entrusted Oscar Niemeyer with the creation of the departmental labor exchange.