This year, the Parisian ring road is already celebrating its 50th anniversary! This great urban highwaythat circles the capital has not always been a road and has a rather sad history, closely linked to the evolution of Parisian society and its urbanization. Created to protect the city, the lines of the current ring road were home to the poorest part of the population for several decades, those who could not afford to live in Paris or in the adjacent suburbs, whose prices were already too high.
Fortifications dating from 1850, 250 meters wide and nearly 35 kilometers long, delimited a military zone, which had to keep the big city safe. At the same time, the city began to change, thanks to the work of Haussmann, to whom we owe this particular architecture, and to modernize. Housing prices rose accordingly and the working classes moved to the suburbs. But the poorest workers could not afford to live there either and were forced to live in what was then called the"Zone".
The poorest workers could not live there either and were forced to live in what was then called the "Zone", where they worked as ragpickers, waste collectors, street vendors and even grinders. Considered as unhealthy and rather dangerous, the Zone is not very pleasant to live in and many criminals are present, such as the Apaches, for example. Although regulations were requested to deal with this, the public authorities opted instead for a redevelopment of the area after the First World War.
The first idea, that of making the ring road into a nature zone to make Paris breathe, did not succeed, and it was finally after the Second World War that the urban freeway gained ground in people's minds, in an attempt to ease traffic. A large construction site was then set up in the 1960s and the Zone disappeared little by little, until 1973, when Pierre Messmer, Prime Minister of Pompidou, inaugurated the ring road.
But this story left its mark on the era, and the term"zonards" remains in the vocabulary, sometimes used in songs, implying a generally contemptuous discourse towards the suburbs.
