Still a wonderful town
Sam White
Paris There was a time when to speak ill of Paris was to brand oneself as a barbarian. Times have changed. Today from the Glenda Slaggs and the Lunchtime O'Boozes to the highest reaches of the British intelligentsia the cry goes up that Paris is both a clip joint and a cultural desert, an architectual eyesore and a gastronomic poor relation to Soho. 'Paris,' a prominent British intellectual told me the other day, 'is in danger of pricing itself out of civilisation.' Shades of: 'Storm in Channel—Continent Isolated.'
From all these views I beg to differ. For me Paris is easily the most agreeable capital in the world to live in. I would define it simply as a city where a civilised man can still lead a civilised life against a civilised background and consider it not as a feat of escapism but as something amounting to total immersion. It still remains a city manageable in size, easy to get about in and easy to get out of, with each area retaining an individual character. And it still remains lived in for the greater part by the people who actually work in it. This of course makes an enormous difference to life as compared to cities like London and New York which each day gorge and disgorge millions of commuters leaving only a desolation of office blocks behind them. Nothing like this needless to say happens in Paris and this is particularly noticeable at weekends when London becomes a graveyard and Paris a playground.
All this of course I realise is old hat but it still continues to make an inestimable difference to the quality of life between Paris and London. There is one other European city which might rival Paris both in beauty and in its closely-knit character and that is Rome; but Rome is essentially a provincial city which has lost its provincial charm. With its noise and its traffic problems, it is now scarcely habitable. It has a further handicap: it is not big enough to absorb its expatriate population, especially the Americans. These latter are of an exceptionally mediocre and pretentious quality with the result that one tends to meet more bores in bars in Rome in the course of an evening out than one would meet anywhere else in a month. Away with Rome then as with Berlin and Vienna, both of which have lost their status as great capitals.
Having said all this I now realise that I stand exposed to the full counterblast of the Paris detractors. They will talk of the architectural horrors perpetrated in Paris in recent years, such as the Montparnasse skyscraper and the complex of skyscrapers to the west of Paris looming over the Arc de Triomphe, to say nothing of the desolation created when the central markets of Les Halles were uprooted and moved out of the city centre. That these protests should be particularly vociferous across the Channel is probably an indication of our own uneasy conscience over the much vaster vandalism perpetrated in London. The vandalism in Paris has been limited in extent and has at any rate spared the centre of the city and its historic and architectural sites.
Here the Seine continues to flow past the same landmarks and under the same bridges. It still remains impossible for building promoters to lay their hands on such delectable pieces of real estate as the unused Gare d'Orsay. In short, anyone who was visiting Paris for the first time in say fifty years and planted himself in the middle of the Concorde bridge would see to right and left in front and behind him the same unspoilt magnificent views. As for the Montparnasse tower, admittedly it does not please me and would please me even less if I had a flat, say, overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens, but at least it does not dominate the city like for example the even more hideous Post Office Tower in Soho. As for the other object for protest and outcry, the skyscraper complex at La Defense, here not only does it not disturb me but I approve of it wholeheartedly. It is situated well away from the centre of the city and is in itself an interesting and rather beautiful architectural creation.
On the question of Les Halles and the uprooting of its famous pavilions suddenly discovered to be notable works of art, here I have even less sympathy for foreign critics than over the affaire of La Defense. Once it was decided to end Les Halles' role as Paris's central food market, then it seems to me there was no point in keeping the pavilions on the site. There is a large element of hypocrisy in the whole debate over Les Halles: for decades the very existence of this market in the heart of Paris was considered evidence of French backwardness, but once the decision was taken to remove it and put the space to new and largely noncommercial use there was this huge outcry. It would seem that in the eyes of foreign critics Paris can't win: if it modernises itself it is guilty of vandalism and if it doesn't, of backwardness. For those nostalgiques for the days of Hemingway and 'A Moveable Feast' it should be pointed out that the cost of maintaining Paris as a city for foreign expatriates to live in was precisely to keep France as a backward and basically agricultural country.
Despite the enormous changes of the last twenty years the essential human quality of Paris still remains. It still remains, as I pointed out earlier, a lived-in city, a city of Parisians while London is ceasing to be a city of Londoners and New York has long ceased to be a city of New Yorkers. It still remains too an 'open' city where a citizen's rights include those of being able to get a meal or a drink at any hour of the day or night and as the whim takes him. All this too is a city with a still solidly implanted tradition of good food and service. All this adds up for me to my idea of what a city should be: where a civilised man can partake of civilised pleasures in a civilised manner and in a civilised setting.
I must admit—and it remains a constant regret with me—that I am the least qualified of men to get the most out of Paris. My French remains incorrigibly bad, my taste in food and wine does not rise much above the standards of La Coupole and my feeling for the French cultural scene is exceedingly feeble. Yet I like it here and carry my self-inflicted frustrations lightly. None of the awful misadventures which befall colleagues when they visit Paris seem to befall me despite my give-away accent or at least not with anything like the same regularity. So much so that I cannot recall the last time I was cheated by a taxi-driver. I hear dark talcs of Paris's cultural decline but I notice that at the moment sixty-eight theatres are playing to full houses and that two new Jean Anouilh plays are running. I note too something like twenty times more books are sold in Paris than in London and that a learned political essay by President Giscard has sold well over a million copies. I note too that so many art shows are listed that it would take one a fortnight working an eight-hour day to take them all in. All this makes me puzzled at the current Francophobia that reigns in London. Could it be bafflement and bewilderment at the fact that the French have made a better fist of running their country since the war than we have? Could it be resentment at our relative decline in relation to the French?
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