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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 October 2016
It is a historiographical commonplace to portray France during the so-called Trente Glorieuses of economic expansion after the Liberation, especially during the last of those three decades ending in the 1973 oil crisis, as engaged heart and soul in a project of full-throttle modernisation. The Fifth Republic under Charles De Gaulle and Georges Pompidou rolled up its sleeves and set to work tackling the country's multifarious examples of historical backwardness. France ceased to be a nation of peasants, small-minded small business owners and bolshie workers, and instead dreamed of becoming one of confident technocrats, technicians and world-beating industrialists. Only after the end of the Trente Glorieuses, it is often assumed, did that dream of technologically based progress give way to greater scepticism, pessimism and environmental concern, for modernisation swept all before it until its assumptions were rudely challenged by the end of growth in October 1973 - or at least until they were by the political crisis of May 1968. While more critical perspectives on post-war modernisation are evident in recent historiography, notably on issues around planning in general and housing and the grands ensembles in particular, transport policy and the set of social experiences which it sought to shape have been relatively more marginal to our understanding. This review article seeks to explore how issues around transport, and their broader implications about the very nature of modern growth-oriented capitalist society, are leading the debate onto new terrain. The underlying purpose of several of the books under review is to cast doubt on the accepted narrative of the Trente Glorieuses. They do so, however, in two defiantly opposite directions: some defending the distinctly pro-car orientation of the post-war elites and others offering a more radical critique of this perspective.
1 Influential to the spread of this interpretation was Fourastié, Jean, Les Trente Glorieuses ou la Révolution invisible de 1946 à 1975 (Paris: Hachette, 1979)Google Scholar.
2 Important works in English include Busbea, Larry, Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960–1970, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Newsome, Brian, French Urban Planning, 1940–1968: The Construction and Deconstruction of an Authoritarian System (New York: Peter Lang, 2009)Google Scholar; Haffner, Jeanne, The View from Above: The Science of Social Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013)Google Scholar. For overviews of work in French, see Mengin, Christine, ‘La solution des grands ensembles’, Vingtième Siècle, 64 (1999), 105–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bertho, Raphaël, ‘Les grands ensembles: cinquante ans d'une politique-fiction française’, Etudes photographiques, 31 (2014)Google Scholar, http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/3383.
3 The full text of this speech from 18 November 1971 is given in Le Grand dessein parisien de Georges Pompidou, 230–4.
4 For example, Flonneau, Mathieu, Paris et l'automobile, un siècle de passions (Paris: Hachette, 2005)Google Scholar.
5 Flonneau, Mathieu, ‘A City for Woody Allen? The New Banks of the Seine in Paris, a Product of Rootless Sociology and City Planning’, Transfers, 4, 2 (2014), 131–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Ibid. 133.
7 See Urry, John, Mobilities (Cambridge: Polity, 2007)Google Scholar.
8 Passalacqua, Arnaud, L'autobus et Paris. Histoire des mobilités (Paris: Economica, 2011)Google Scholar.
9 Chevalier, Louis, L'Assassinat de Paris (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1977)Google Scholar, translated as The Assassination of Paris (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993). Chevalier, a former khâgne classmate of the president, serves as convenient historiographical villain-in-chief for Le Grand dessein.
10 For example, Le Banlieusard, 2 (Sept. 1971).
11 Haffner, View from Above.
12 See Gros, Brigitte, 4 heures de transport par jour (Paris: Denoël, 1970)Google Scholar.
13 Gordon, Daniel, ‘L’économie morale des banlieusards: aux origines de la crise des transports en France des années 1970’, Vingtième Siècle, 128 (Oct.–Dec. 2015), 119–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Bigey, Michel and Schmider, André, Les transports urbains (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1971), 38 Google Scholar.
15 The report stemmed from a plan to balance France's books, entrusted by De Gaulle to Antoine Pinay and Jacques Rueff, a critic of Keynes who had been present at the Lipmann conference in 1938 – a key moment in the intellectual origins of neoliberalism.
16 Charbonneau, Bernard, L'Hommauto (Paris: Denoël, 1967)Google Scholar.
17 See, however, Frédéric Héran's quantitative critique in Les transports de la démocratie of claims made by Illich and his French translators about the average speed of cars once the time taken to earn the money to buy them is taken into account.
18 Surprisingly, Duverger also sneaks a contribution into Flonneau et al.’s Les transport de la démocratie, with an analysis of Charbonneau, Illich, Gorz and Dumont's 1968-era critiques of car culture, while Massimo Moraglio analyses the same question through 1960s films from Playtime to The Italian Job.
19 See also Hensman, Ravi, ‘Oracles of Suburbia: French Cinema and Portrayals of Paris Banlieues, 1958–1968’, Modern and Contemporary France, 21, 4 (2013), 435–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
20 Touraine, Alain, Anti-Nuclear Protest: The Opposition to Nuclear Energy in France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.
