Modernizing the Provincial City: Toulouse, 1945-1975.

• Author: Kaplan, H.J.
• Position: Review

Rosemary Wakeman, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 323 pp., $45.

Toulouse, metropole of the Languedoc or Midi-Pyrenees area in southwestern France, went through an exhilarating experience after World War II. The city grew. Not for the first time in its two thousand-year history; and not all by itself, since something similar was happening (after the long years of depression, war, defeat, and German occupation) in most other provincial centers. Still, the postwar development of Toulouse was dramatic, and distinctive enough to engage the attention of Rosemary Wakeman, an American student of French history and more specifically of urban affairs. Thanks to Harvard University Press, Ms. Wakeman has now published Modernizing the Provincial City: Toulouse, 1945-1975, a thoughtful study and quite worthy of general attention, even if it provides more detail about yesterday's bureaucratic struggles (over zoning regulations, planning conceptions, and real estate promotions) than most of us will ever want or need to know.

For reasons that escaped me when I first came to live here (as they still do), Toulouse has never held much attraction for tourists, although in medieval times it was a stop on the famous pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. But then so were a lot of now quite obscure places, like Saint Bertrand de Comminges. Even the guidebooks feel obliged to quote the disparaging remarks of travel-writers from the north like Stendhal, or foreigners like Henry James and Edith Wharton, who were put off by the lack of amenities, the accent, and perhaps by a certain rough-hewn and stubborn quality of the natives. It does not surprise me to find a lot of Scottish and Irish names in the neighborhood, like my friends the O'Byrnes, who have a chateau at Saint-Gery on the Tarn River; and to discover that Jenny Courtois' house on the rue Mage was built by a man named McCarthy in the eighteenth century; or that, while the rest of France goes bonkers over soccer, the Toulousans have a passion for rugby, a game - at least until recently - of amateurs and locals, not imported dancers from Brazil. All this, whether cause or consequence or both, may help to explain why this town has been left to its own devices and little heard of in the wider world, at least since 1249, when it succumbed to the Albigensian crusade and became part of the kingdom of France.

An attractive place, nevertheless. Toulouse is in the valley of the Garonne, nestled in a bend of the river and in close touch with a rich and varied countryside. The old town, its characteristic red brick center now circled by green and white suburbs and an occasional cluster of towers, is still a hub of the Canal du Midi, which since the seventeenth century has made it possible to ship merchandise from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic without exposing oneself to the Barbary pirates. In those days it was still the center of the pastel trade, which enriched many Toulousan families and left us with many fine mansions. A center of learning since Roman times, and the birthplace of many famous men (like the mathematician Fermat), it quite naturally became home not only to the aerospace and high-tech industries, but also to a great university, not to forget the oldest think tank in France, the Academie des Jeux Floraux, or the impressive collection of romanesque sculpture in the lovely old monastery of Les Augustins. Politically, it has always been a bastion of the Radical-Socialists and home of the daily...