Les charmes insupportables de Paris

My latest visit to the world capital of illusion

Holiday window at the Galeries Lafayette

“I hate Paris,” began an article that I read last week. “It’s something about the mix of imperial pomp and saccharine cutesiness in the streetscape… Mostly my hatred of Paris is a reaction to a very dull and conventional city’s vastly inflated reputation.” 

Considering my family and I had made plans to fly there a few days later, this contrarianism inspired me to conjure up a stereotypically haughty Gallic sneer. But the sentiment continued to cloud my head throughout our entire visit.¹

I’ve been to Paris more than anywhere else that isn’t a drive away. It was where I took my first ever flight, on a class trip in high school, and for many years it remained the only non-North American country I’d ever seen. My sister moved there a decade back, which has given us an excuse to keep returning. We celebrated our first Paris Thanksgiving in 2014 as part novelty, part joke, part opportunity to take advantage of accrued vacation time. But by the time we did it again, fleeing the Trump-ascendant States in 2016, it already felt like a tradition. This year marked our fifth Turkey Day in Europe, and our third in Paris (with a couple of London sojourns mixed in).

I will concede, enjoying Paris feels like a path of least resistance. It’s famous, it’s pretty, it has a high-end cultural reputation. Its romantic pull on the American imagination is well-documented - wine, sex, and art may not be everyone’s idea of a good time, but they project a certain kind of broad-brush classiness that many U.S. citizens feel compelled to evaluate themselves against, to the smug detriment of one side or the other. So I had to ask myself as I strolled the boulevards and sampled the cheese: Is my affection for this city genuinely held? Or am I another victim to centuries of transatlantic hype? 

I can concede that there’s a Disneyland aspect to Paris. Every facade seems calculated to dazzle the slackjawed visitor. Whenever you stumble on a sculptural doorframe or turn a corner to reveal the previously hidden Eiffel Tower perfectly framed in the distance, you have to ask yourself if it’s all a put-on, if these are just plaster veneers without anything behind them. The wonderland of small businesses and grand gestures feels too good to be true - and the fact that every vendor can peg you for an American and speak flawless English only further entrenches the fantasy.

But then you see an old woman enter through one of those doors with her shopping bags, or a car almost runs you over while you’re goggling at the view, or you have an unaccountably rude exchange with a cashier. You realize that, unlike a theme park, there’s actual everyday life taking place behind the windows and down those alleys. It’s a life tipped toward privilege, to be sure - just like the city I call home - but it’s real, and the fragile coexistence of finely wrought artifice and plodding mundanity can suddenly feel quite moving.

Space Invader across from the Odeon Metro stop

At one point while we were walking down the street, Dash told me he prefers London. It’s more bustling and diverse, he said - Paris feels too gray and forbidding. Maybe at his age - and lacking a rudimentary sense of the language to make things more engaging - I would have felt the same way. I like London too, but it feels too much like home. London and New York are both mercantile cities, enshrined to capitalism. London loves its history, but it also matured as the seat of a vast commercial empire, sucking in riches and resources from its far-flung colonies - much like New York leveraged its financial dominance to hoard the promise of the 20th century. In its modern form, both cities revel in brightly colored vulgarity as they shamelessly court every class of tourist with all manner of advertisements and attractions. These are cities that never sleep, because to sleep is to miss out on a buck. 

Make no mistake, Paris is also an imperial market city, but it employs a magician’s misdirection to help you pretend otherwise. Look at all the monuments, the ornaments, the museums - all seemingly built for the sake of liberté, égalité, and fraternité. The municipality refuses to compromise its integrity by growing above a certain height. This is a cultural city, it insists, an aesthetic city, a place shaped by higher forces than mere money.

And maybe it is, if we count politics and religion as being somehow superior to cash. In reality, all three are different iterations of the same underlying force, i.e, a will to power. For all that makes them interesting, cities don’t rise without exerting pressure on various elements outside. As much as they may rub our noses in certain dirty realities, they shield us from others. It’s all a matter of costuming, and so your preference may come down to what sort of dress-up you prefer. As a fashion capital, it makes sense that Paris takes its sense of style so seriously. 

Maybe because of my background in theater, I find these theatrics compelling - the story that Paris tells appeals to me. Like any great work of art, a city takes whatever it can from the powerful forces that underwrite it to create a commentary on what it means to come together as humans. This commentary can be bitter and depressing, or it can be bright and optimistic. Often, it’s all of the above - the magic is in the mixture. 

Bust of poet Gabriele Vicaire in the Jardin du Luxembourg

The article that I referenced at the top is an excerpt from a book called The Living City, by Irish sociologist Des Fitzgerald. The author’s snark actually paves the way for an interesting take on city living, which he also elaborated in a recent interview. The real way to create change, equity, and sustainability, he argues, is not to render cities greener or more “natural.” In a sense, they’re already natural. How is concrete, made from sand and stone and water, any less natural than a leaf? If nature itself is full of processes, then what is so bad about the “processed” nature of an urban environment? Isn’t that what attracts us to the density of urban living in the first place? Isn’t that what art is, in the end - the processing of raw materials into something new, useful, interesting, beautiful, strange, compelling, or enlightening?

If so, I suppose Paris can be accused of trying too hard - but then again, so can I. Ultimately, I will always love a city where bookstores are as common as bakeries, and both are more common than banks. I will always love a city where pixelated tile emblems of video game glyphs live in harmony with 19th-century street signs. I will always love a city that bans skyscrapers but keeps its alleys narrow and gnarled, so you always feel surrounded wherever you stand. So yeah, call me a sucker, call me middlebrow, call me a self-important little dilettante, but I suspect I’ll always like Paris.

1. Yes, this trip is why I didn’t write anything last week. I ran out of time to finish my Wednesday post, and when I tried to compile a bunch of my tourist photos for Friday’s Gallimaufry I discovered that Substack’s mobile capabilities for creators are really, really bad. For the three of you who might have wondered between courses, “Hey, what happened to Jeff’s deathless prose this week?” I apologize.