Paris between the Wars (1918–1939)

The Thiers wall, 19th-century fortifications surrounding the city, were demolished in the 1920's and replaced by tens of thousands of low-cost, seven-story public housing units, filled by low-income blue-collar workers.

The low birth rate of Parisians was made up by a wave of new immigration from Russia, Poland, Germany, eastern and central Europe, Italy, Portugal and Spain.

They opened crêches, day-care centers for the children of working women, and in 1923 and 1924 obtained a loan of 300 million francs to build public housing for low-income Parisians.

[10] In the 1924 elections for the National Assembly, Parisians expressed their discontent with high prices and new taxes by voting for a coalition of the left called the Cartel des gauches.

[15] On May 26, even before the new government had taken office, the large labor unions declared a strike to push their demands; strikers used a new tactic, occupying the factories of the metallurgy and aviation industry in the Paris suburbs.

The first defense exercise was held in Paris on February 2, 1939, and Parisian workers began digging twenty kilometers of trenches to use as shelters in the event of bombing attacks.

The low value of the French franc against the U.S. dollar made the city attractive for foreign visitors such as Ernest Hemingway, who found prices for housing and food affordable, but it was difficult for Parisians.

He organized a series of highly publicized automobile expeditions to remote parts of Africa, Asia and Australia, and, from 1925 until 1934, had a large illuminated Citroën sign on the side of the Eiffel Tower.

The motors of the city economy were the great department stores, founded in the Belle Époque: Bon Marché, Galeries Lafayette, BHV, Printemps, La Samaritaine, and several others, grouped in the center.

As other European countries devalued their currencies to meet the crisis, French exports became too expensive, and factories cut back production and laid off workers.

Wine arrived in barrels, transported by river barge from the different regions of France, at the Halles aux Vins, on the Quai Saint-Bernard of the Left Bank, next to the Jardin des Plantes, where it was taxed and resold.

Fish, fruits and vegetables arrived by truck very early in the morning at the huge iron and glass pavilions of Les Halles, where they were arranged and sold to buyers from markets and restaurants.

In 1921, the first train station for the arrival of refrigerated railway cars was opened at Paris-Ivry, allowing the easier transportation of perishable fruits and vegetables and other food products.

One important addition to the housing of Paris was the Habitation à Bon Marché, or HBM, an apartment building built by the state for low-income Parisians.

The first musical broadcast took place in November 1921, when a banquet of electric engineers at the Hotel Lutetia was entertained by musicians performing three songs at a station in the Seine-et-Marne department.

It was the home and studio of Pablo Picasso, Hans Arp, Max Ernst, Amedeo Modigliani, Marcel Duchamp, Maurice Utrillo, Alexander Calder, Kees van Dongen, and Alberto Giacometti.

In 1935, a 20-year old singer named Edith Piaf was discovered in the Pigalle by nightclub owner Louis Leplée, whose club Le Gerny, off the Champs-Élysées, was frequented by the upper and lower classes alike.

In the early 1920s, during the era of silent films, the largest movie theater in Paris was the Gaumont-Palace, built in 1911 with six thousand seats, located on the Place de Clichy.

Other great movie palaces of the period included the Marignan on the Champs-Élysées (1933), the Eldorado [fr] on Boulevard de Strasbourg (1933), and the Victor Hugo on Rue Saint-Didier (1931).

de Coubertin also personally awarded 21 Gold medals to members of the 1922 British Mount Everest Expedition including 12 Britons, 7 Indians, 1 Australian and 1 Nepalese, who had tried but failed to reach the summit of the mountatin.

His major achievements between the wars were the building of the Mobilier National (1936) and the Museum of Public Works (1939), now the Economic and Social Council, located on place d'Iéna, with its giant rotunda and columns inspired by ancient Egypt.

The department store La Samaritaine, which originally had a colorful Art-Nouveau interior and facades, was expanded and remade with characteristic art-deco features in 1933 by Henri Sauvage.

The modernist architect Le Corbusier, who at the age of twenty-one had worked as an assistant to Auguste Perret, opened his own architectural office with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret in 1922 and built some of his first houses in Paris.

Intended to honor the Muslim soldiers from the French colonies who died for France during the war, it was designed by the architect Maurice Tranchant de Lunel, and built and decorated with the assistance of craftsmen from North Africa.

The project was funded by the National Assembly in 1920, construction began in 1922, and it was completed in 1924, and dedicated by the President of France, Gaston Doumergue, and the Sultan of Morocco, Moulay Youssef.

Pablo Picasso was perhaps the most famous artist in Paris, but he shared the spotlight with a remarkable group of others, including the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși, the Belgian René Magritte, the Italian Amedeo Modigliani, the Russian émigré Marc Chagall, the Catalan and Spanish artists Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Juan Gris, and the German surrealist and Dadaist Max Ernst.

The American art patron Gertrude Stein, resident in Paris, played an important role in encouraging and buying works of Picasso and other artists of the period.

Ernest Hemingway, hired as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, moved to Paris with his first wife Hadley in 1922 and made his first residence in a small upstairs apartment at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine.

They included the American Aaron Copland, the Brazilian Heitor Villa-Lobos, the Hungarian Béla Bartók, the Spaniard Manuel de Falla, and the Russian Sergei Prokofiev.

On March 10, the first gas masks were issued to the civil population, and signs were posted showing the location of bomb shelters, in case of future air raids.