IN JULY 1998 Philippe Denis, president of the association SOS-Paris which was founded in the late 1970s to defend the capital's architectural heritage, stated: ‘La construction de l'Opéra-Bastille a provoqué dans le quartier un véritable séisme’ / ‘The building of the Opéra-Bastille caused a real earthquake in the quartier.’ It unquestionably brought about the most dramatic changes in the area since the days of Haussmann, hastening and intensifying the process of yuppification that has characterized eastern Paris over the past thirty or so years.

The changes in the area over the past twenty or so years are a microcosm of those that Paris, in common with virtually every large Western city, has experienced, but because of the Faubourg's radical traditions and the catalytic effect of the Opéra they have probably been more dramatic than in any other part of Paris. The great film critic Serge Daney, interviewed on video in a Bastille café in July 1991, spoke of the area as his ‘vraie patrie’/ ‘real homeland’, for he was born there into a modest milieu, received his early film education in the local cinemas and between 1974 and 1981 worked there for Cahiers du cinéma, thus embodying the end of the old quartier and the onset of the new. The population of the administrative area known as Sainte-Marguerite, bounded by the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine and the rue de Charonne, was 23 per cent working-class in 1954; by 1990 this figure was down to 9 per cent, and the quality of the housing stock had risen significantly. Pinçon and Pinçon-Charlot adduce three locally specific reasons for this change, already touched upon in previous chapters: the replacement of light industry such as wood- and metalworking by artists’ workshops, the area's long-standing festive traditions which made it a popular destination for an evening's entertainment and ‘la volonté politique affichée de rééquilibrer Paris à l'est’ / ‘the declared political wish to shift the balance of Paris eastwards’, the latter of course exemplified by the Opéra.

Nature – even if of a highly cultivated kind – has played its part along with culture in the quartier's redevelopment.