ABSTRACT
In the late summer of 1944, Charles De Gaulle famously announced that Paris had been broken but was finally freed. As true as this statement may have been in the immediate context of war, it proved only half true in the years that followed. For Paris was indeed “broken,” but not just by war. The city also faced massive problems of insufficient and outdated infrastructure, vast housing needs, and what I call a “symbolic urban crisis,” as the place of France and Europe were challenged in the geopolitical context brought on by the Cold War. At the same time, the capital could hardly claim to have been “freed” in any real sense, since it remained under the tutelage of the central state and would not benefit from any robust form of self-government until 1976–1977. Confronted with the need to rebuild the capital of a country that sat at the crossroads of Cold War geopolitics, discussions on Paris’s reconstruction and its local government thus became debates on multilevel state-building. What ultimately emerged in this key period was a process of democratizing urban governance in the capital city on the multiple scales of the metropolitan region, Europe, empire and geopolitics.
