In 1926, James Joyce was working on his novel Finnegans Wake while living in a spacious apartment in the 7th arrondissement of Paris with his partner, Nora Barnacle, and their two adult children, Giorgio and Lucia.
Joyce’s neighbours in the elegant stone building at 2 Square de Robiac included a Syrian family whose three children had an English nanny called Jessie, Russian émigrés, an Egyptian industrialist, and the US writers William and Elizabeth Placida Mahl.
The details are part of a new exhibition that paints a portrait of the French capital a century ago when it was a hub for artists, intellectuals and young unattached men and women during the decade that became known as les années folles (the crazy years or roaring 20s).
Curators at the Musée Carnavalet have drawn on work by researchers from France’s National Scientific Research Centre (CNRS) using artificial intelligence to create a database of the 8m individual handwritten entries from the censuses of 1926, 1931 and 1936.
The result is an almost comprehensive list of those recorded as living in the 80 districts of Paris’s 20 arrondissements at a time when the population of the city reached 2.9 million people. Only the details of those in prisons, hospitals or religious institutions have not been released.
“It’s absolutely fascinating. For the first time we can name almost every person who was registered as living in Paris during this period,” said Valérie Guillaume, the director of the Musée Carnavalet.
“From the information, we see Paris was a city of single, young adults and that there were many different nationalities. There were very few children in the city at that time.”
As France recovered from the first world war, Paris attracted a cosmopolitan crowd of writers, artists, and musicians who mingled with people fleeing revolution, genocide and persecution, workers from France’s colonies as well as young people from the countryside seeking jobs.
While Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and Amedeo Modigliani were busy reshaping the art world, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and F Scott Fitzgerald were living it up in the French capital and George Orwell was down and out.
Before 1926, population counts had been carried out in Paris, but the census that year was the first to give precise details of city inhabitants including date and place of birth, dependents and profession.
Until now, the public has been able to consult the censuses in the Paris archives, but this has required a manual search.
“The artificial intelligence was trained to recognise letters and numbers in the handwritten entries in the census to create a database that can be searched and consulted. Entries that were ambiguous were checked by a human,” Guillaume said.
“It’s never been done before because it’s an enormous job; too big to manage without digital help.”
The Musée Carnavalet, which is dedicated to the history of Paris, said the censuses threw up a “mosaic of diverse life stories in a whirlwind of memories and emotions”.
Aside from the famous, including the US actor and entertainer Josephine Baker, the singers Édith Piaf (born Gassion) and Charles Aznavour (born Shahnour Vaghinag Aznavourian), and the celebrated model Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin), the exhibition focuses on ordinary Parisians.
The data also reveals interesting comparisons between the 1920s, when the average lifespan of a Paris resident was 50-60 years, and now, when inhabitants live to aabout 80.
As well as documents and photographs from the era, many of which have never been previously seen publicly, visitors to the exhibition will be able to consult the census database.
“People will be able to look for details of relatives who were living in Paris at the time or the names of people living in their building a century ago,” Guillaume said of the exhibition, which opens in October.
The People of Paris 1926-1936 exhibition will also include newsreels and broadcasts from the era as well as recordings of Parisians recalling life in the city in the 1920s and 1930s made as part of a City Hall project in the 1990s.
Joyce lived in Paris for 19 years, frequently moving address until the Nazi occupation of France in 1940, when the family moved to Zurich, where he died the following year. Finnegans Wake was finally published in 1939. As a matter of record, the 1926 census entry for the Joyce family is not entirely correct: the children are wrongly recorded as having been born in Ireland instead of Trieste, Italy, and Giorgio is recorded as Georges.
“This whole project is fascinating and a living thing. For the first time we can put a name to those registered as living in Paris during that decade,” Guillaume said. “On one hand it is a very large mass of information and on the other it’s personal because we are looking at individual people and their stories.”
