Examining an ordinary town-planning decision made during an extraordinary period, this article highlights the interaction between the local urban redevelopment policy and the state policy of racial persecution in 1941. However, it argues that this interaction was far more complex than the implementation of an anti-Semitic ideology by two separate administrations to which it is usually reduced. Instead of trying to assess the ‘reality’ of the ‘representation’ of the housing area (îlot) as a ‘Jewish quarter’ the article takes as fact the notion that representations are realities, and vice versa, and attempts to understand if, and by what mechanisms, an ethno-religious characterisation of the îlot played a role in the redevelopment operations under consideration here.
In 1921 a memo from the Seine prefecture had been presented to the city council, identifying seventeen insanitary îlots in Paris as having above-average mortality rates from tuberculosis. These îlots were to be razed to the ground and rebuilt. The sixteenth îlot on the list was located in the southern section of the fourth arrondissement. This ‘îlot 16’ was apparently known as an area where the majority of its inhabitants were foreign Jews. In October 1941, when the persecution of the Jews was at its height, the Seine prefecture began a massive redevelopment of this urban space. The issue of areas of bad housing had been nagging at officials since the beginning of the century: but how are the actions of the Seine prefecture to be explained from 1941 onwards? Why, during the Second World War, were city officials so determined to prioritise, indeed to focus exclusively on, îlot 16? Why was it that a Paris construction project of a scale not seen since Baron Haussmann's time was planned at this point, when the actors themselves described the economic and political situation as unfavourable?