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What if ordinary city-dwellers ’voices were taken into account earnestly? This is the issue’s premise, which focuses on a corpus of written complaints where the city is both setting and motive. What do these low-key protests convey? To what extent do they inform us regarding the making of the city? These out-of-the-ordinary sources provide historians with invaluable novel insights into the social and material transformations of urban environments. This is what each of the papers gathered here endeavour to expose

Isabelle Backouche rapproche deux terrains d’enquête sur lesquels elle travaille actuellement. D’une part, l’annexion de la zone non aedificandi, une bande de 250 mètres déclarée inconstructible en 1841 parce qu’elle longe la fortification, et largement urbanisée au moment de son incorporation au territoire parisien en 1919. D’autre part, le vaste transfert d’appartements des familles juives parisiennes pendant l’occupation, sous l’égide de la préfecture de la Seine. Dans les deux cas, les Parisiennes et Parisiens concernés – les zoniers expulsés, les familles qui tentent d’investir un appartement précédemment occupé par des Juifs – écrivent à l’administration pour plaider leur cause. C’est à partir de ces écrits ordinaires que l’usage des frontières spatiales et sociales mises en œuvre dans les argumentaires est analysé. Cette observation donne l’occasion de comprendre comment des normes sociales sont travaillées par les acteurs, et par là, de restituer leur participation aux dynamiques spatiales à plusieurs échelles qui affectent la capitale au 20e siècle.

This article combines two of Isabelle Backouche’s current research topics. One is the annexation of the non aedificandi zone, a strip of land 250 meters wide where construction was banned in 1841 because it ran along the fortifications; it was largely urbanized upon its incorporation into the city of Paris in 1919. The other is the massive transfer of the apartments of Jewish families in Paris during the Occupation, overseen by the prefecture of the Seine. In both cases, some interested Parisians – evicted residents of the Zone and families trying to take over apartments formerly inhabited by Jews – wrote to the relevant administrations to plead their case. Analysis explores the spatial and social boundaries mobilized in the arguments of these ordinary writings, which provide an opportunity to understand how various actors work on social norms and allow us to reconstruct their participation in spatial dynamics at several scales that affected the capital city in the twentieth century.