BEYOND the Paris the world knows —resplendent Boulevards and leafy esplanades, elegant restaurants and sunny sidewalk cafes—lies a ring of small communities with names like Aubervilliers and St. Ouen, Boulogne-Billancourt and St. Denis. No soaring monuments to Western civilization grace their drab and grimy streets. Instead, the stigmata of the worst of the 20th century abound: the sprawl of brick factories, the grey, faceless slabs of low-income housing projects. All day big diesel trucks thunder up and down belching fumes, their oversize tires slapping the ancient cobblestones. This is the Red Belt of Paris, so called because most of its towns have Communist mayors. It is here that the Parisian worker lives and plies his trade.
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Out of the Red Belt came the muscle that nearly overturned De Gaulle; what the students began, only the French workers ever had any chance of finishing. On the surface, the cry for "worker power" seemed an unnecessary and ungrateful response to the Fifth Republic. In the decade of Gaullism, France's workers, particularly the skilled ones who earn an average $195 each month, have enthusiastically entered the consumer economy. Fully 70% of all workers' households have a refrigerator, a washing machine and a vacuum cleaner. Though only 46% of all French families own TV sets, at least six out of ten workers' families are able to set tle down on the canape at night to watch le football matches and the pop-singer contests. More than half of all French workers own a car, and a vacation in Spain or even Greece is no longer the province of the well-to-do Frenchman.
The worker's car and TV set are often bought on credit, a relatively new notion in France and one whose in escapable rhythm of monthly bills has proved a painful education. Wives often must work to make ends meet; workers seldom have any savings to fall back on in times of sudden disablement or job loss; life insurance is virtually unknown.
French inflation has cut heavily into the wage gains of the decade, and, among their Common Market peers, French workers lead the way both in the number of hours spent on the assembly line and in enduring the highest national cost of living. Though he made less money several years ago, Citroen Worker Pierino Fausti, a bachelor, says he used to be able to go to the local dances and meet girls whom he could then afford to seduce in the grand and proper French style. "Well, I can't any more. Now, it's no drinks, no food, no coffee, just straight to bed."