The Mosaic Pattern: Cohabitation between Ethnic Groups in Belleville, Paris

Abstract

The image of Paris as a ‘cosmopolitan’ city is as old as Paris itself is. However, only in the 1920s and 1930s did Paris earn its reputation of being a writers’ city, an ‘international republic of artists’, to quote Alejo Carpentier. It became a centre of attraction for the intelligentsia worldwide.¹ After a period of decline, Paris has once again become a centre of convergence for the world’s elite, a ‘global city’ where international executives and financiers run the global economy and redistribute the world’s resources. The City of Light owes its cosmopolitan nature not only to its cultural and artistic aura, or to its role in economic exchanges and technological innovation. It also, and maybe even especially, owes it to the fact that from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, immigrants from foreign countries and from the provinces began to flow in massively, fostering an unprecedented economic and demographic boom.