Photographs by David Bacon

Paris at one time was the most photographed city in the world. The boy with the bread loaves. The man jumping the puddle. The kiss in front of city hall. And then, after the war, confronting the collaborators.

People love Paris because its Popular Front stood against fascism, and then resisted the Nazis. The love for the photographs is bound up in the way we think of its heroic history, and the way Parisians remember it. Walking up the hill towards the Belleville Park, the street ended and I came on a small frieze that remembers the site where the communards fought the last battle – where the Paris Commune ended in their deaths. Nearby, a bunch of dried flowers on a wall remembers a young man who died in the Resistance, fighting Nazis.

Then I passed two computer-printed sheets in a window. They spoke in today’s spare language: “I LOVE FUCK NEW YORK” and “BOMB TEXAS.” And ensconced in the artists’ graffiti in a Belleville alley, Rue Denoyez, is the call by Paris Anti-Fasciste to demonstrate – “Pas de Nazis dans Paris!” – “No Nazis in Paris!”

Paris in the years before and after WW2 was more than the Popular Front, a home of the European French. It was the metropole of a global empire, and therefore a headquarters where the empire’s unwilling subjects planned anti-colonial strategies. Their movements to break those colonial bonds often started here. The future leaders of revolutions in Vietnam, China, Ghana, Senegal and many countries walked the city’s streets. They attended its universities and met in its bookstores and secret apartments.

Yet the photographic archive of that time celebrates little of this history. Its great photographers still showed Paris as a very European and an overwhelmingly white city.

Throwing off colonialism ended that vision. The colonies became independent, yet the bonds remained. Formerly colonized people arrived in the metropolis, and are still coming. France’s political left recognizes that movement and documents it at the new Museum of the History of Immigration. Until the 1960s its building, the Palais de la Porte Dorée, first housed the Museum of the Colonies. Then, using the later colonial euphemism, it called itself the Museum of Overseas France. The giant bas reliefs beside its grand entrance, and the murals in its vaulted portico, all celebrate idealized stereotypes of happy colonial people, working in the industries that made France rich.

Inside, the museum turns that history on its head. Its photographic archive includes images made of and by people in the waves of migration that have made Paris what it is today. On its walls, for instance, hang the photographs of photojournalist Amadou Gaye of the newspaper Sans frontier (Without borders), who documented the March for Equality and Against Racism of 1983.

On the streets outside the museum the visual language of Paris’ alleys and boulevards is different from the pre- and post-WW2 years. In many ways Paris was always an international and internationalist city, even if not in the eyes of most photographers then. But the immense diversity of its people make it impossible today to see it as anything else.

These are just a few pictures, glimpses of its streets during this summer’s heat dome. This is the Paris where Turks, Moroccans and Malians hawk fruit and vegetables in the Belleville produce market that extends for blocks. It’s the Paris of Carlos, singing the Colombian vallenato, La Tierra del Olvido, in the cavernous metro. It is the Paris of the evicted African drum player keeping time to the speech of the organizer from Droit au Logement (Right to Housing) outside City Hall. It’s the Paris of those who sleep next to walls filled with graffiti, and at the same time, of the painter finding the right green for the water lilies in the Botanical Garden. Paris today belongs as much to the vast crowds who watch a museum guard help a man in a wheelchair take iPhone photos in front of the Mona Lisa. And of course it still belongs to the lovers who lean into each other on a bicycle or sleep against each other on a park bench, escaping the fierce heat of climate change.

Go see for yourself.

For images of the graffiti on Belleville’s Rue Denoyez, click here.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/56646659@N05/albums/72177720335190858

For images of the murals and bas reliefs from the Museum of the Colonies, click here.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/56646659@N05/albums/72177720335177291