By May 1945 there were perhaps forty million uprooted people in Europe. As the immediacy of the Second World War receded, the anxieties in Europe about home, both in the sense of a tangible abode and of belonging and security, did not. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Jacques Soustelle suggested that the recent experience of cities in flames was a key locus of the distinctive psychology of the French and European peoples. One might surmise that, in large part, this lay behind what Leif Jerram describes as a ‘“cult” of home in post-war Europe’. A key point of European commonality after the war was an insufficient housing stock, and across the continent housing was a desperate popular aspiration and priority of government. In post-war opinion polls ‘housing’ always topped the list of popular concerns.

The home, then, concerned Europeans both in the sense of material shelter and affective belonging and security. Preoccupation about procuring lodgings was compounded by the task, surely exacerbated in a time of recent continental cataclysm, of making oneself at home in the modern city. But how did Paris fit into this shared post-war European experience? And in what ways was discourse about Europe connected to the Parisian home in a stronger sense than merely being a priority shared by Europeans in general?

This examination of the Paris home reveals that in various ways a strong equivalence was drawn between Europeanisation and modernisation. It connects the home in the French capital to the discourse about a renewed Europe after the Second World War and through the period of decolonisation, and to the reconfigured understandings of Europe and Europeanness these prompted. In particular, it picks up on Etienne Balibar's observation that ‘the question of giving an endogenous, self-referring definition of “Europeans” has only come up very recently. Until the middle of the twentieth century, the principal meaning of this name referred to groups of colonizers in each of the colonized regions elsewhere in the world’. The chapter will place particular emphasis on the immigration of both European Algerians and Algerian Muslims, as they were termed, to examine the Parisian home. For the home is a particularly useful space to examine the dynamics of the turning point in understandings of Europe and Europeanness, to which Balibar alludes.