ABSTRACT
A number of private housing associations and worker-led co-operatives did develop in this period – known as societes anonymes – but their contribution to housing development was small and often in the form of single-family houses for individual workers – a few thousand homes at most. This alternative utopian vision, backward looking as it was in the French cities of the mid-to late-nineteenth century, inspired a French garden city movement based on the construction of owner-occupied workers’ pavilions. The ideas incorporated in the Cite Napoleon and other similar experiments were inspired by a handful of visionaries and industrialists who made a unique contribution to French housing history. Individual savers at every level of French society paid into state-guaranteed savings banks, which lent to state-sponsored bodies to carry out work on behalf of the government including, social housing. The French social housing law set out to encourage building for owner-occupation by relieving both housing societies and purchasers of some tax burdens.
