While photographing writer Blaise Cendrars, Robert Doisneau was encouraged by the well-known poet and novelist “to pursue and broaden the scope of a self-assigned project on the Paris suburbs. He lent the cachet of his name and talents in writing the text. Doisneau took full advantage, repaying Cendrars’ patronage with what is his best book. When Doisneau began to photograph the suburbs of Paris, they were still the tough but spirited working-class communities of Julien Duvivier and Marcel Carné. But Doisneau caught them just as they were about to change and expand beyond recognition, making this book a valuable document that looks unsentimentally yet afectionately at a popular idea of the French working class” (Parr & Badger I:201). “The soft gray tones of the gravures here tend to give even the bleakest images a romantic cast” (Roth, 132). Published simultaneously with the Paris edition. Text in French.