Historic Photo: Paris in winter, near Saint-Augustin Church, 1952.
Paris was a bit bleak in the first few postwar years, but it never lost its charm or resilience.
It’s winter now, and a new year—this is the first article of calendar year 2026 on this blog—and it’s hard to get one’s head out of a wintry mindset. So I thought I’d find an iconic winter photo for this series. This picture, titled “La neige et l’église Saint-Augustin,” was taken in Paris in December 1952, during a snowstorm, by photographer Robert Doisneau. It depicts Saint-Augustin Church, on Boulevard Malesherbes, which was built in the 1860s during Baron Haussmann’s massive reconstruction of Paris in the reign of Napoleon III. I like this photo. It’s obviously very cold, but the women are still going about town in high heels and knee-length skirts. The snow on the street is dirty. The mid-century cars and buses date the scene pretty precisely. Paris was somewhat of a bleak place in the early 1950s, still recovering from the German occupation during World War II and the postwar poverty and austerity that was still endemic in Europe in the first years of peace. Paris in 1952 looked like it had seen better days, and it had, but somewhere in these streets there was also a vibrant art and literary scene and some avant-garde jazz clubs where you could have found the likes of greats like Sidney Bechet. No matter what the hardships are it’s dealing with, the culture of Paris never sleeps, and that’s easy to imagine looking at this picture.
