Inside the Paris Zone: Entering the French Leftspace

Abstract

This article presents a spatial and cultural analysis of the Zone as a space inhabited by the “dangerous classes” in 19th- and 20th-Century France. The Zone was a marginal and illegally occupied area that first sprawled out at the foot of the Paris fortifications, serving as a refuge for the poorest of those hounded from the city by the major modernization works carried out during the Second Empire (1852–1870). This territory belonging to the Lumpenproletariat, caught between neglect and transgression, maintained a physical presence at the gates of Paris, on and off, until the turn of the 1970s. However, after it was erased from the territory of the French capital, the Zone did not disappear. In colloquial French, the term continues to refer to the no longer physical but now symbolic space occupied by the déclassés (declassed). This symbolic figuration of the Zone lies at the heart of this article, which sets it up as an empirical paradigm of what we propose to refer to as the “leftspace”: a spatial configuration characterized both by the neglect of déclassés abandoned to their fate and by the transgression of the law.