Paris rich need not fear the guillotine's swish

"The Bolsheviks, not in Paris!" one of the outgoing mayor Jean Tiberi's stalwarts was heard to cry out late on Sunday evening.

"We're under house arrest," shouted another inside the neo-Renaissance Hotel de Ville. On the square outside, supporters of the new mayor, the socialist Bertrand Delanoe were gathering for their victory celebration. Many in the crowd were gay, like their hero, Mr Delanoe. Some climbed ornamental lamp-posts while the stage was being set up. "We want the keys! We want the keys!" they shouted.

Back at his campaign headquarters in the rue des JugesConsuls, Monsieur Delanoe chainsmoked cigarillos. "Paris is liberated!" the campaign staff chanted as they launched into an improvised triumphal march.

"No!" shouted Mr Delanoe, who wants to be the non-partisan mayor of all Parisians. "Especially not that!"

Mr Delanoe may be the first left-winger to govern Paris since the 1871 commune, but socialism died with the USSR. He was taking City Hall, not the Bastille.

The verb "taking" is not even appropriate; the left did not so much win Paris as the right lost it by carrying out the most catastrophic, fratricidal campaign ever. Mr Delanoe is far from a rabble-rouser; indeed, Le Monde revealed after his election, his old friend from the 18th arrondissement Daniel Vaillant - now the Interior Minister - bused in socialist supporters from the Seine-andMarne and Somme regions to fill the Mutualite auditorium for Mr Delanoe's campaign rallies. That at least was redolent of oldtime socialism.

Looking at the map of election results on Monday morning, you might be forgiven for thinking that the Berlin Wall had been reconstructed in the French capital. The dividing line between the right-wing west and left-wing east begins at the train tracks leading to the Gare Saint Lazare in the north, runs down along the border between the eighth and ninth arrondissements, takes in the second, third and fourth for the left, then crosses the Seine with the predominantly Asian 13th and solid middle class 14th also with the left. The western rightwing region of the beaux quartiers is geographically contiguous, with a finger composed of the 1st, 6th and 5th districts protruding into the far bigger "red" zone making up the eastern three-fifths of Paris.

In the last election six years ago, the left won only six of 20 arrondissements; today it holds 12. The political earthquake in Paris has made for some colourful scenes. Because of the alliance between socialists and Greens, the mayor of the tiny second arrondissment - home of the Paris Bourse and the Banque de France - is Jacques Boutault, a young, hirsute green politician without a tie. In the 12th arrondissement, taken from the centre-right UDF, the winning socialists hired a Mexican band that played La Cucaracha, La Marseillaise and L'Internationale at their victory celebration.

The grands bourgeois holed up in the gilded ghettos of the 16th and 7th must have cringed to hear their new mayor explaining on French television on Monday night what he would do with the city.

Mr Delanoe may not be a revolutionary, but there are echoes of ideology in his plans to set up "neighbourhood councils" and "houses of economic development and employment" with city funding.

"Thematic associative fora" are to hand out city-owned apartments and place children in overcrowded daycare centres - doubtless much fairer than the Gaullists' habit of housing their friends and relatives in luxurious, low-rent buildings.

But that scene in Dr Zhivago came to mind. Yuri enters the front door to find a harridan commissar telling him that seven families now live in his house, that his wife, child and father-in-law have been allowed to keep one room. "You are right," Yuri tells her. "This is a much better arrangement."

The Parisians who voted for Mr Delanoe are - we are told with irritating frequency - "bobos" or "bourgeois bohemians", not "prolos". The bobos have university degrees, work hard and care about the environment. Like Mr Delanoe, who stood in the arty, racially-mixed and inexpensive 18th arrondissement, they have a patina of left-wing sympathy. But what they'd really like is to live where Mr Delanoe lives, in the prohibitively expensive, rightwing neighbourhood of St-Germain-desPres.