OVERVIEW - CultureShock! A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette - page 18

were settled into faceless residential suburbs. Fifty years
later, these suburbs are openly seething with unrest.
Nonetheless, city life after the war began to shine.
Intellectuals once again rose to the forefront—Jean-Paul
Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus frequented
the cafés on the Left Bank, foreign writers again found Paris
as their muse and the film industry gained prominence
worldwide. Haute cuisine and haute couture rose to their
greatest heights and Paris became a tourist Mecca once
again. Not even the explosive student unrest of 1968 could
dent the reputation of Paris; today Paris is the most visited
city in the world.
Indeed, over the next several decades of the Fifth Republic
(1958- ), under presidents from both the Right and the Left,
Paris continued to build, restore and modernise. Some streets
were widened and the péripherique was built to alleviate the
clogging of the roads brought on by the proliferation of cars.
Historic buildings were restored and cleaned under a 1962
law. The poor neighbourhood of Beaubourg was replaced by
the ultramodern art museum, the Centre Pompidou. The Tour
Montparnasse that arose in the city centre reminded Paris
that it didn't want such eyesores, and thus throughout the
1970s, the enormous, modern business-residential city of La
Defense was built on the city's western edge. Its dominating
Grande Arche was later constructed as part of President
François Mitterrand's Grands Projets that envisioned urban
revival and architectural modernity for a city whose cultural
and economic position would be cemented in the European
Union and beyond.
Mitterrand cleaned up those eastern slums to which the
poor had retreated during the Haussmannian improvements.
He also constructed a new science museum, park complex
La Villette on the site of the city's former slaughterhouse, as
well as the huge Opéra Bastille. The Bibliothèque Nationale
arose in the wasteland of the 13th arrondissement , an area
that is becoming populated once again. More parks were
landscaped and an ultramodern Finance Ministry building
brightly commands the riverfront of the 12th arrondissement .
Even the Louvre, that ancient oasis of elegance, was restored