Despite their youth French new towns have been the subject of numerous accounts and analyses that place them in a historical perspective. Some researchers describe them as the supreme stage of State town planning while others make a technocratic reading of them. These accounts develop a mythology of new towns. As a counterpoint to these two views from above local historians of new towns report nostalgically the epic everyday life of their pioneer inhabitants. Anyhow these histories of new towns were written for a great part by non-historians. This gap in contemporaneous historiography testifies both to problems raised by present-day urban history and to aesthetic prejudices within the corporation.