MojoNomads

View Original

Gallic humor

Paris. The name alone evokes romance, beauty and fun, but it's a hopelessly outdated stereotype. The internet seems surprisingly uninformed about the origin of the saying "gai Paris," which denoted the fun-loving, but pre-sexual-revolution properties of the city. At the turn of the century ‒ nineteenth to twentieth ‒ Paris was the place to be. It was the center of the world, in terms of literature, visual art and Bohemian life, giving birth to many of the modern currents that shaped the last hundred-plus years. While there are traces of that world, if you look carefully, the city today is a very different place.

For starters, in case you are one of those lucky people who manage to live without ever tuning into the news, Paris has been the victim of horrific terrorist attacks. To make matters worse, the French economy has struggled and many young people are unemployed and disaffected. In 2017, Emmanuel Macron was elected as the youngest president ever in a country where tradition has replaced revolution, but the trade unions feel threatened by his vision of bringing France into the modern age and have plans to strike in protest all summer long. All of this was not necessarily surprising, but it was hard to digest, because I spent some of the formative years of my life here as a teenager. I love Paris and have always defended her citizens against accusations of being hard and rude to visitors. This trip tested my limits.

Don't get me wrong: Paris is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, because of the way it has been designed. Its boulevards are straight and wide, lined with trees and elegant buildings in the Haussmann style. The skyline is intentionally kept low, with the Eiffel Tower alone standing out among the sea of small light-colored buildings. The few hills that remain are quaint and usually have some remarkable historic context. The museums house some of the greatest art collections money can buy. The women are beautiful. The men are handsome. Everyone wears nice clothes and acts their part. But, if you scratch beneath the surface, you soon realize that it's all a façade.

Life in Paris is not what is sold in the pages of luxury magazines or on TV. It never has been. There has always been a gulf dividing rich and poor, so much so that the people overthrew their monarchy in favor of more plebeian dictators, like Napoleon. In recent decades, France has struggled with its colonial past, welcoming foreign workers from its overseas territories when the economy was good, but resenting them for wanting to stay when the good old days came to an end. Most first-generation immigrants have had a hard time integrating into French society. They were not accepted by their hosts and tended to find solace with their own people. Their children, though, were born in France as French citizens. They had a tough time finding acceptance as well.  Thanks to terrible urban planning in the 1950s, many working class immigrants and their families found themselves cast off into the suburbs of Paris, housed in concrete jungles ‒ council estates that had no cultural or extracurricular amenities, but provided complete isolation from other communities in the region.

Let's not mince words: these were pre-planned ghettos. I know because I used to live near some of them. There were places I feared to ride my bike, because older kids would beat me up and try to steal it. There were drugs and there were gangs. The police tried to avoid these areas as much as they could and they were not welcome anyhow. But, mostly, these "cités" were full of normal families who struggled to get by. The 1995 film, La Haine, by Mathieu Kassovitz, paints a realistic portrait of life in Paris from the perspective of its disaffected youth. Alas, little has changed. In fact, life is far, far worse now. The younger brothers and sisters of the kids in the film are the angry youth of today. Paris is no longer "gai." It's at a boiling point.

After speaking with French friends about the situation, I know that I'm not imagining things. With a few notable exceptions, the exchanges we had with people in shops and cafés during our week-long stay were indifferent at best and outright rude at worst. We tried to stay in the happy mood we cultivated throughout our trip, but we struggled. The striking French rail workers didn't make things any easier, although it could have been worse. One train in three was running, so we could still get around the city from our base in the outskirts in Saint Cloud, to the West, but the service was erratic and there was lots of time wasted, waiting on platforms for elusive trains.

Jona and I had visited Paris before, many years ago, and briefly again last year, so we revisited some of the more famous attractions that we liked ‒ the Champs Elysées, Montmartre and the Eiffel Tower. We also explored neighborhoods like the Thirteenth District, Canal Saint Martin and the Latin Quarter ‒ and finally made it to the Louvre. We marveled at the sheer insanity of the crowds around the Mona Lisa, which stands behind thick glass, guarded on both sides by attendants and is always mobbed by hordes of tourists, but we also enjoyed many of the impressionists and lesser-known artists in adjacent rooms. By this time, however, we were getting tired of large museums with big crowds.

Our favorite moments were spent in the company of friends or searching for the perfect baguette. There is a "best baguette" contest, so this is an actual thing. We admired the architecture and enjoyed the food, although we ended up trying to avoid too much personal interaction in shops and restaurants. This meant going to local shops and supermarkets in non-touristy areas, speaking French everywhere ‒ although they now have me pegged as an American because of my clothes ‒ and having picnics in parks and other oases in the city.

In fairness, we lucked out during our stay, thanks to our great Airbnb rental: it had a floor-to-ceiling view of the city, so we spent quite a bit of time just watching the Eiffel Tower light up at night. We also came to realize that it wasn't just Paris that was in a funk. For the first time, we had a sense that our trip was coming to an end. Once the idea popped into our heads, it was difficult to put out of our minds.

This strange odyssey of ours has taken us around the world and allowed us to explore ourselves in more depth than we ever imagined. Traveling is not all it appears to be in photos and videos. There are moments of great elation, but there are also less glamorous moments when you question yourself and your environment. The irony was not lost upon us that Paris was a strange place to feel uncomfortable and unwelcome, given its reputation, but it's okay to feel conflicted when you're in discovery mode. We won't hold it against this great city in future either, but we will be sure to broaden our travels to other parts of France, where there is less tension than in the capital and more joie de vivre.