History of Paris (1946–2000)

Health was also a major problem, with 100,000 cases of tuberculosis in the city, killing hundreds of persons each year, particularly in the crowded apartment buildings and furnished lodging houses.

The unintentional result was to stop new construction, create a black market in apartments, and reduce even further the number of available housing units, affecting particularly young Parisians.

[5] In 1950, the government began a new large-scale project to construct apartment blocks for low-income Parisians, after 1950 called HLMs (habitations à loyers modérés, or residences with moderate rents), usually on the edges of the city or in the suburbs.

In October 1947, the Paris municipal elections were won by the Rassemblement du peuple français, a new center-right party led by Charles de Gaulle, with 52 seats on the council out of ninety.

The decisive defeat of the French army at Dien Bien Phu, on May 7, 1954, led the government of Mendés France to the end of the war and the division of Vietnam into two countries, and the beginning of a stream of Vietnamese immigrants to Paris.

Three other events with long-term significance took place in Paris during the years of the Fourth Republic: on December 10, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the Palais de Chaillot; on December 15, 1948, Zoé, the first French nuclear reactor, designed by Frédéric Joliot-Curie, was tested at located at Fort de Châtillon; and on August 1, 1954, a Paris ordnance banned the honking of automobile horns "except in case of danger."

In 1967, the Prefect of Paris, representing the government of President de Gaulle, overruled the municipal council decision, raised the height to two hundred meters, to create more rentable office space.

The famed modernist architect Le Corbusier was commissioned to design a huge cultural center near the Rond-point de La Défense, with a museum of 20th century art, a music conservatory, and the national school of architecture, but this component was never built.

After the end of the Vietnam War in the 1970s, the new town attracted a large migration of Vietnamese and Cambodians, making it the largest southeast Asian community in the Paris region.

Under the Fourth Republic, enterprises had been required to get government approval for every new industrial building over 500 square meters, and to pay heavy charges to subsidize transportation and other services.

As he was being driven from Paris to the military airport at Villacoublay, an OAS assassination squad of trained soldiers with machine guns was waiting at the traffic circle at Petit-Clamart, just outside the city.

Thanks to the skilled driving of de Gaulle's chauffeur, and the poor marksmanship of the gunmen, Neither the General, his wife, nor the live chickens they were carrying in the trunk of car for the family kitchen, were harmed.

On the evening of May 27, the anti-government movements, including the trade unions, students, Maoists, anarchists, Communists and Socialists, held a large meeting at the Charléty stadium, firmly rejecting Pompidou's proposal.

On May 28, François Mitterrand held a press conference to announce that there was a "vacuum of power", and call for the formation of a provisional government, followed by a new Presidential election, in which he would be a candidate.

His major legacy was the Pompidou Centre at Beaubourg, opened in 1977 after his death, an ultramodern showcase of the contemporary arts, whose pipes, escalators ducts and other internal workings were exposed outside of the building.

His Grands Travaux included finishing the extension of the City of Sciences and Industry at La Villette, begun by Giscard (Mitterrand dedicated the Géode, the symbol of the park on June 6, 1985), the Musée d'Orsay, begun by Giscard (1986); the Institut du Monde Arabe, by architect Jean Nouvel, finished in 1987; the Grand Louvre, including the glass pyramid designed by I. M. Pei (inaugurated 14 October 1988); the Grande Arche of La Défense (inaugurated July 1989); the Opéra Bastille, by architect Carlos Ott, opened on July 13, 1989, the day before the bicentennial of the French Revolution; and the new French National Library, now called the Bibliothèque François Mitterrand, which Mitterrand personally dedicated on March 30, 1995, in his last official appearance before his death.

President Chirac's own grand project, the Musée du quai Branly, a new museum of the arts of non-European cultures, was planned and land acquired.

[30] In the last years of the century, Paris was the scene of an epic tragedy: the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in an automobile accident in the Pont de l'Alma road tunnel on August 31, 1997.

[33] The war had ruined the engines of the Paris economy; the factories, train stations and railroad yards around the city had been bombed by the Allies, there was little coal for heat, electricity was sporadic at best.

Nonetheless, the reconstruction went ahead rapidly, aided by 2.6 billion dollars in grants and loans from the United States given under the Marshall Plan between 1948 and 1953, administered locally from the Hotel Talleyrand on the Place de la Concorde, which allowed France to finance two-thirds of its exterior debt and to buy new machinery for its factories.

The third luxury goods giant of the period was the cosmetics company L'Oréal, founded in 1909 by Eugène Schueller, a young chemist who had developed a hair dye formula called Auréale.

[47] The 1950s saw the emergence of a number of Paris-based actors, including Gérard Philipe, Simone Signoret, Yves Montand, and Brigitte Bardot, whose films reached a global audience.

The late 1950s saw the birth in the city of the Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave" of cinema; led by a group of young directors who rejected the methods of Hollywood and who shared their ideas in a journal called the Cahiers du Cinéma.

A new generation of actors came to the screen in the 1960s and 1970s, including Jean-Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon, Philippe Noiret, Lino Ventura, Catherine Deneuve and Romy Schneider, joined at the end of the period by Gérard Depardieu, Isabelle Adjani, Juliette Binoche and Audrey Tautou.

The musical styles were be-bop and jazz, led by Sidney Bechet and trumpet player Boris Vian; Mezz Mezzrow, André Rewellotty, and guitarist Henri Salvador.

Future French stars who debuted in the cabarets after the war included Bourvil in 1946, Yves Montand in 1947, Juliette Gréco in 1948, Georges Brassens at the Trois Baudets in 1952, and Jacques Brel at the same club in 1953.

[49] The literary life of Paris after World War II was also centered in Saint-Germain-des-Prés on the left bank, where there was a large concentration of book stores and publishing houses.

Pirandello and Molière; the actor-director Jean-Louis Barrault and his wife, Madeleine Renaud, who created the Compagnie Renaud-Barrault in 1947 and the Théâtre d'Orsay in 1974, produced French classics as well as innovative new works.

Marcel Marceau achieved worldwide fame by reinventing the art of pantomime beginning at clubs in the Latin Quarter in 1947, then in major theaters; he founded a school of mime in Paris in 1958.

In 1964, French cultural minister André Malraux invited Marc Chagall, who had fled Paris to escape the Nazis in 1941, to paint the ceiling of the Opéra Garnier.