Le vieux Paris n'est plus

“The old Paris is no more. The form of a city changes more quickly, alas, than a mortal’s heart.” Is this still true?

Baudelaire published his classic lines in 1857, a few years after Louis-Napoleon and Baron Haussmann began their massive reconstruction of Paris. And at almost any moment in the subsequent century and a quarter the lines would have continued to ring true. After “Haussmanization” came the destruction wrought on the city during the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune. Over the subsequent decades there arrived the Eiffel Tower, the glitter of the Belle Époque, electrification, the automobile and the Metro, and large-scale immigration from outside France. The interwar period brought more immigration and considerable new construction throughout the city. After World War II, along with yet more waves of immigration, this time above all from the global south, came the planners with their steel and glass. What Haussmann had spared of working-class Paris, with its corner cafes and music halls, now fell in large part to the wrecking ball, as did the grand old central marketplace of Les Halles. In 1977, the social historian Louis Chevallier published a bitter lament for his own “old city” entitled L’assassinat de Paris.

I first spent an extended period in Paris five years later, in 1982. I was lucky enough to get a summer internship at the weekly newsmagazine Le Point and started off doing the usual things magazine interns did in those days: xeroxing, running proofs to and fro, checking facts, and delivering wire service dispatches to the appropriate editor. The Agence France Press dispatches came in on a telex machine that printed on a giant spool of paper. I would cut off each dispatch using a ruler and an exacto knife. When Israel invaded Lebanon that summer, the machine did not stop clacking away, and by the end of the day I would be exhausted from running the updates to the foreign desk.

Halfway through the summer, however, the rédaction acquired a new toy: a Nexis terminal that provided instant access to the wire services and half a dozen world newspapers besides. The reporters were befuddled by it, until one of them said: “Let the American figure it out. They’re born with these things.” So I learned to use it and started printing out the wire dispatches directly from the terminal, as well as doing research tasks for the editors—it was the first time one could easily search through years of a publication for a particular name or term. As a result, my status rose considerably, and to the annoyance of the other (French) interns, the editors started taking me along on their boozy, two-hour, expense account lunches at La Coupole.

My living situation was not so glamorous. Not having much money, I rented a room in an old-fashioned pension on the rue d’Assas. It did not seem all that much removed from the days of Balzac. Breakfast and dinner were served at a long table to all the pensionnaires. The café au lait arrived in large, steaming bowls, accompanied by tartines of half-stale bread from the night before. Dinner often introduced me to various organ meats, and on those nights, I took to skipping out to McDonald’s with my next-door neighbor, a Jordanian ophthalmology student. Another co-pensionnaire, a Brazilian, introduced me to a much better restaurant: a basement dive on the Île Saint-Louis called “Nos Ancêtres les Gaulois,“ which had an excellent all-you-can eat buffet, accompanied by as much wine as you wanted.

Back in Paris this week, it struck me with real horror that it has been forty-two years since that summer. Forty-two years before that was the horrific summer of 1940, with the Blitzkrieg, the panicked and chaotic “exodus” in which millions tried to flee northern France, and then the start of the Nazi occupation. So has Paris continued to transform at its usual breakneck speed in the past forty-two years?

My first reaction, in thinking about this issue, was to say no. To me, the city still feels very much as it did then. In central Paris there is relatively little new construction. A surprising number of the restaurants I visited then still exist (yes, I think of the city in terms of food—who wouldn’t?). The “As du Fallafel” (called the “Roi du Fallafel” back in 1982) still cooks up the best falafel sandwich outside of the Middle East, although they have added seating, jacked up their prices, and gotten featured in too many guidebooks. The old Breton crêpe restaurants in the rue Montparnasse serve the same tasty galettes and cider that they did forty-two years ago. Even “Nos Ancêtres les Gaulois” is still there, although it no longer has “vin à volonté.” In 1982, Les Halles had been replaced by a grimy and depressing urban mall. A few years ago, they tore it down in its turn and replaced it with… an even more grimy and depressing urban mall. Much of the city still smells the same, including on that uncomfortable portion of the RER B underground line which passes too close to the city sewer system.

But all in all, Baudelaire’s words still resonate. Paris continues to evolve. One obvious change is the ambitious set of construction projects which President François Mitterrand embarked on soon after 1982, when he abandoned his initial, ambitious socialist policies and decided to leave a legacy of stone-and-steel instead. The projects included the transformed Louvre around I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid, the large new Bastille Opera, the enormous Arche de la Défense to the west of Paris, the new finance ministry at Bercy, and the gigantic new Bibliothèque Nationale de France at Tolbiac. In place of the glorious old library on the rue de Richelieu, a stone’s throw from the Palais Royal and any number of good, cheap restaurants (yes, yes…), the new institution forces readers to navigate through a massive metal fortress out of Michel Foucault’s nightmares before reaching the pleasant lower-level reading rooms.

In addition, there have been the same changes experienced by most major Western cities over the past few decades. Phone booths and mailboxes have largely disappeared, and Parisians now stroll down the street talking loudly into space (into their earbuds), just like New Yorkers and Londoners. Everyone has a phone in their hand or pocket. Cash is fading out as well. The city has gotten far more expensive—and far more choked with tourists than I would have believed possible (but what am I, this week?). There is a much greater range of ethnic restaurants, although the fad for “French tacos” thankfully seems to be fading.

Despite all the tension around what the French call “immigrant-descended communities,” it is obvious that far more people of color have achieved social mobility than was the case in 1982. Paris was always cosmopolitan, but today it seems more of a genuinely multi-cultural city than ever before. My French friends have been saying « inshallah » for many years now, but their children seem to be using much more Arabic-derived slang.

One of the best changes involves the decline of the automobile and the rise of the bicycle. Back in 1982, no one I knew was foolhardy enough to bike in central Paris. As late as the 1990’s, the city had just three miles of dedicated bike lanes. Today it has 150. One of the old highways along the Seine has been converted into a lovely riverside promenade, and more such promenades line what had once been the city’s dreary, polluted canals. The Socialist administration of Mayor Anne Hidalgo is planning to cut lanes from the buzzing Périférique beltway surrounding the city, and to cover over other parts of it with gardens, following the example of Boston’s Big Dig.

This project points to what may be the biggest transformation yet: the opening up of Paris to its suburbs. One of the striking things about Paris has always been its very small, compact size compared to that of most other major Western cities. The formal city of Paris has a surface area half that of Brooklyn, and just one-fifteenth that of London. Elsewhere, places like Montreuil or Clamart or Neuilly would be metropolitan neighborhoods, not separate towns. But the Périférique and the large boulevards just inside it (named for Napoleon’s field marshals), cut the city off almost as effectively as its walls once did. The current plan for a “Grand Paris” won’t change the city’s formal boundaries, but, in addition to the downgrading of the Périférique, it calls for the construction of no fewer than sixty-eight new metro stations along some 200 kilometers of new track, to bind ville and banlieue more closely than ever before. The New Yorker in me, remembering that the construction of three new stops and three kilometers of track along Second Avenue took twenty years and $4.45 billion just wants to weep.

The political mood here is dreary this week, with polls forecasting the extreme right dominating the elections to the European Parliament on Sunday. But it is always hard for me to feel gloom in Paris (even if the weather has been unseasonably cold and wet). “The old Paris is no more,” but the new one, despite many problems, seems as inviting as ever.