ABSTRACT
France has experienced major waves of population immigration. In the thirty-five years from 1955 to 1990 France moved from having some of the worst housing conditions, the grossest overcrowding, and an extremely low rate of building to having a massive level of production over the 1980s, totalling about 300,000 units a year. For many centuries France dominated Europe politically. French history was marked by Republican fervour, and international and sometimes imperial ambitions. The Paris Commune, a short burst of ‘citizen control’, shook the confidence of the state in locally based authority and coloured the special shape of state housing in France. The Commune of Paris lasted for two months in the spring of 1871, but it proclaimed the rights of citizens in ringing phrases, echoing the earlier declarations of the French Revolution. After the First World War, France fought for the toughest possible of war ‘reparations’ by Germany.
