PARIS

THE CITY OF ROMANCE

October 2008. Avner and Daniel arrive in Paris in the midst of what looks like the “final crisis” of capitalism, but nobody in Paris seems to be particularly perturbed. Daniel is frequently on the phone with his wife, who works for a leading U.S.-based investment bank, to check if her company has gone under (at the time, some of the most renowned U.S. companies were bailed out by the U.S. government with a multibillion-dollar loans; a big shock to “capitalist” Americans, but something that would have been almost de rigueur in France). The two old friends stay in a small hotel room paid for by Avner’s research grant. They hypothesize that Paris is the “city of romance” and their mission is to roam the streets at random and stumble on some evidence. Avner carries a map, but they prefer to rely on the symmetrical boulevards for orientation. They walk and talk, with breaks in cafés for refreshments (espresso for Avner, wine for Daniel). Finally, a bit of success: they spot a young Mandarin-speaking couple French kissing in public, something they would never dare do in China. Avner and Daniel also spot a waiter in a café kissing a female tourist with a huge backpack. Other than that, however, they are disappointed. They visit the Musée de la Vie Romantique, but it’s an unimposing nineteenth-century house with a few bourgeois artifacts from the time it was occupied by George Sand. They abandon a plan to visit the Parc Monceau, said to have the highest number of kissing couples in Paris. And when they interview their Parisian “subjects” (a professor friend at the prestigious Collège de France, a Canadian writer “in exile” since the 1950s, and two of Daniel’s family members), they are further thrown offtrack: the response to their tentative hypothesis about the Paris ethos ranges from skeptical to hostile. Perhaps the ideal of romance in Paris, like the Hollywood films of two romantic lovers who live happily ever after, is too good to be true? More worryingly, perhaps it’s too true to be good? Even if it’s true, in other words, the consequences of the ethos of romance can be morally problematic, if not downright evil.

Paris, more than any other city, is a city of romantic dreams. Like most dreams, it bears little direct contact with reality. In the case of Paris, it is mainly tourists and short-term visitors who partake of the dream. The locals—meaning residents, many of whom are born outside of Paris—tend to look askance at such dreams. They are more than happy to vacate the city in August and let tourists take over the center of town. But Parisians often partake of another, somewhat more refined, romantic ethos: an approach to everyday life that devalues the material and glorifies heroic individualism, values tradition over consumerism and moral principles over empirically grounded ways of thinking, and idealizes an anticonformist attitude and a lack of concern for formal social status. This kind of romanticism can be traced to the norms of conversation in the aristocratic salons of prerevolutionary France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the “democratization” of such norms after the French Revolution of 1789, as well as to ideas of romance put forward earlier by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and card-carrying members of the Romantic movement in the nineteenth century. In this chapter, we will trace the historical development of the romantic ethos as it is typically understood by foreigners, followed by an account of the local understanding of romance. We conclude with some questions about the tension between the pursuit of romance and the pursuit of morality.

A HOLLYWOOD STORY

Daniel’s father had a soft spot for Paris. He would frequently visit for lengthy periods and several of his writer friends had moved to Paris. He would sit in cafés and write short stories and pieces of journalism that were published in Canada. Toward the end of his life, Daniel’s father turned book collector—as he put it, he “learned to judge a book by its cover”—and he unearthed several treasures in Paris’s secondhand bookstores. Daniel’s father met his second wife (Odile, born and bred in Paris) sitting in a Paris café one day. In the mid-1980s, Daniel was accepted as a graduate student at Oxford and took the opportunity to visit his father in Paris. Perhaps Daniel would also fall in love in Paris? It wasn’t to be. But he did set his doctoral thesis (an account of the liberal-communitarian debate written in dialogue form) in a Paris literary café named La Coupole. When Daniel eventually visited La Coupole, he was a bit disappointed. Instead of writers and artists, most customers seemed to be elderly bourgeois couples and English-speaking tourists. Had Daniel seen the short film Montparnasse-Levallois by Jean-Luc Godard in Paris Vu Par (1965)—with a joke sign in the window of “La Coupole” reading, “Reserved for Artists and Intellectuals, Membership Card Obligatory”—he would not have set his thesis in that café. Obviously, La Coupole—and much of Paris—was living off its reputation, and only tourists fell prey to the illusions.¹

Paris did not start off as a city associated with romance. Its origins can be traced to the second century BCE, when a tribe known as the Parisii established themselves on an island in the River Seine, later to become the Île de la Cité. The Roman conquerors named the city Lutetia and it eventually became known as Paris in the fourth century. Under Roman rule, the city spread from its original island to both banks of the river, but it remained a minor trading post. After the Romans withdrew, the city fell into the hands of the Franks before being abandoned to a combination of slow decay and Viking raiders.

In the twelfth century, the Capetian kings of France decided to make Paris their principal place of residence and the city finally began to emerge from obscurity. The presence of the court and its officials helped fuel the Parisian economy and made the city the center of the political life of the French kingdom. In the early 1200s, King Philip II ordered the building of a massive castle known as Le Louvre (the castle is buried beneath the modern museum) and walls meant to protect the city from the belligerence of English rulers of Normandy² (little today survives of these walls). A royal palace occupied the western end of the Île de la Cité (now subsumed within the modern Palais de Justice), and royal authority was balanced at the eastern end of the island by Notre Dame Cathedral, built between 1163 and 1345. The school attached to the cathedral developed an increasing reputation for learning, attracting scholars from across Europe. By the thirteenth century, the students and masters of the cathedral school gradually established their independence, and the new university came to dominate the Left Bank of the Seine. The Sorbonne, the most famous college on the Left Bank, established in 1254, took the name of its founder, a royal chaplain, Robert de Sorbon.³

By the fourteenth century, the population of Paris had risen to two hundred thousand, making it the largest city in the Western world. Parisians could take pride in the Gothic splendor of the city’s art and architecture, and the University of Paris was the most prestigious in Europe. Paris’s medieval glory began to slip away in the mid-fourteenth century, as first the Black Death and then English armies arrived at the city gates.

How do we sum up the ethos of medieval Paris? One is tempted to trace the development of an ethos of romance to the celebrated twelfth-century love affair between the philosopher Peter Abelard and his student Héloïse, which ended when her uncle and kinsmen, as Abelard recounts, “had vengeance on me with a most cruel and most shameful punishment, such as astounded the whole world; for they cut off those parts of my body with which I had done that which was the cause of their sorrow.”⁴ But the city as a whole did not have a unifying ethos. Here’s how Victor Hugo, the most influential member of the nineteenth-century French Romantic movement, described medieval Paris as it was supposed to look like “from a bird’s view”: “In the fifteenth century, Paris was still divided into three completely distinct and separate cities, each having its own physiognomy, specialty, ethoses [moeurs], customs, privileges, and history: the Cité, the University, and the City [ville]…. The churches were in the Cité, the palace in the City, and the colleges in the University…. The Cité had Notre Dame, the City had the Louvre and City Hall [l’hôtel de ville], and the University had the Sorbonne.”⁵ What did unify the city, according to Hugo, was its architectural beauty: “Let us return to Paris in the fifteenth century. It wasn’t only a beautiful city; it was a homogenous city, an architectural and historical product of the Middle Ages, a chronicle in stone.”⁶ Hugo goes on to describe the sights of medieval Paris in language that is too flowery—too romantic—to translate. Perhaps the key reason Paris seems so romantic is that the city is so beautiful?

From the ground up, however, medieval Paris would not have seemed so beautiful. In the twelfth century, the animal discharges of horses, dogs, and pigs in Rue St. Antoine (one of the few major medieval streets in Paris left today), mixed with rain water, transformed the mud streets into an unsanitary and malodorous mess. In the fourteenth century, the “Good Housekeeping Manual of Paris” (Le Ménagier de Paris) said the first duty of the attentive housewife is to wash the feet of her husband when he enters the home. The construction works at the height of Paris’s Gothic splendor filled the air of Paris with a stench so powerful that royal marriages and treaty signings often took place in the “clean air” environment of Vincennes. Human waste and dirty water was emptied out of windows, preceded by the yell, “Gare l’eau” (“Beware of the water”), which sometimes came too late for the unlucky pedestrians. And medieval Parisians lived in fear of being attacked by rabid wild dog and wolf packs that patrolled the banks of the Seine, a river so polluted with carcasses from slaughterhouses that the fetid and blood-soaked water turned the stomachs of those who dared to venture onto its banks.⁷

By the mid-nineteenth century, Paris had scarcely improved its appearance and sanitation standards. The vicomte de Launay described the city in 1838: “How ugly Paris seems after a year’s absence. How one chokes in these dark, narrow and dank corridors that we like to call the streets of Paris! One would think that one was in a subterranean city, that’s how heavy is the atmosphere, how profound is the darkness!”⁸ Due to poor hygiene, the mortality rate was higher in Paris than in the rest of France.⁹ Paris in those days was far from a stroller’s paradise: pedestrians were frequently hit by horse-drawn coaches on the narrow lanes and the driver was held responsible only if the pedestrian was hit by the front wheels.¹⁰ If Beirut in the 1950s was supposed to be the Paris of the Middle East, the appearance of Paris of the 1850s may be closer to the Beirut of today: “an old city that had fallen into ruin through a natural process of decay, and partly a relatively new one that had suffered insurrection, occupation, vandalism on an unprecedented scale, and prolonged neglect.”¹¹ Victor Hugo’s proposed solution was to beautify the city by restoration and respect for history, similar to Jane Jacob’s efforts in New York City more than a century later. He penned an article titled “War against Demolishers!” that called for a moratorium against the mutilation and destruction of monuments from the Middle Ages:

We have to stop the hammer which is mutilating the face of our country. One law suffices: let us do it. Whatever property rights happen to be, the destruction of a historic and monumental building should not be permitted to ignoble speculators whose honor is blinded by their interest; miserable people, and so idiotic that they don’t understand they are barbarians! There are two things about a building: its use and its beauty. Its use belongs to its owner, its beauty to the whole world, it’s yours, it’s mine, it’s everyone’s. Therefore, to destroy it is to surpass its right.¹²

Fortunately for posterity, Hugo’s powerful polemic shamed the city into saving and restoring the Notre Dame Cathedral. Overall, however, Hugo may have been on the wrong side of history. Most of medieval Paris was put to the wrecking ball by Baron Haussmann, and the outcome of the “barbarian” destruction is the Paris we know today, which many consider to be the world’s most beautiful city.

When Napoleon III seized absolute power through a military coup in 1851, Paris was on its way to dominating Europe in different spheres of social and political life. France acquired new territories in Africa and Asia and the capital city had the best cafés, theaters, and—with the Louvre—the best museum in the world. The French language was spoken by the educated elites of Europe, and Paris was also the capital of medicine and literature. The beautiful Spanish-born Empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III, held balls to which every woman had to wear a new dress; the empress’s dressmaker dominated world fashion. But something had to be done about the city itself. In 1853, Napoleon III submitted a plan to his new prefect, Georges-Eugène Baron Haussmann, that was designed to improve the appearance, sanitation, and accessibility of the capital. Helped by an economic boom, the prefect put together his own ideas and exercised near-dictatorial powers in remaking Paris into what he called “the imperial Rome of our time.”¹³

Haussmann cleaned up the mud and manure by building a complete sewer system and a clean-water supply network. But Paris was a latecomer in health and sanitation compared to cities such as London, and these improvements would have come eventually. Haussmann’s most original contribution was to beautify the city. He laid out the Bois de Boulogne and made extensive improvements to smaller public parks (though he also destroyed many private gardens and developed formerly green parts of the suburbs). His army of demolition men, stonemasons, and carpenters demolished 27,500 houses between 1853 and 1870 (including many historic hotels and churches), and 102,500 new ones were built, transforming an estimated 60 percent of Paris’s buildings. Land that stood in the way of renovations was expropriated, but the total number of lodgings increased by 108,000 during this period, thus ensuring that Paris would not become a city of offices that empties out at night.¹⁴ The filthy alleys around the Halles and the Île de la Cité were replaced with straight new boulevards that are still central today—for example, de Sébastopol, Saint-Germain, the Rue de Rennes, and the Avenue de l’Opéra. (Haussmann was subsequently honored with a boulevard named after him.) Sidewalks were built on the large boulevards, thus setting the stage for today’s carefree stroller.¹⁵

About twenty years ago, Daniel made a trip to Paris to see his old friend from Montreal, Mike Sayig. They decided to meet at the Arc de Triomphe at an appointed time. But Daniel was running late and when he arrived at the multilane road encircling the Arc, he noticed that there were no traffic lights for pedestrians. Daniel decided to make a dash for it, weaving in and out of oncoming traffic and literally leaping for his life to the other side. His friend later pointed out that there are underground pathways for pedestrians.

Haussmann viewed himself as an artist:

I have the cult of Beauty, the Good, of big things,

Of beautiful nature that inspires grand art,

That sings to the ear or charms the look;

I have the love of springtime in bloom: women and roses!¹⁶

If Haussmann’s poetry leaves something to be desired, his talent as a demolition artist cannot fail to impress. Twelve grand avenues radiated from the Arc de Triomphe, projecting an ideal of symmetry that is pleasing to the eye. He replaced slums as well as elegant buildings that had larger top floors reserved for the nobility with buildings of six stories of uniform height, with flat walls and similarly proportioned windows. To avoid a monotonous uniformity, Haussmann allowed for an infinite variation of details regarding the decoration of windows, balconies, doors, and cornices. Buildings, roads, carrefours, and gardens had diverse elements but were all designed in relation to one another, and the heights of buildings varied in accordance with the width of the roads. Trees were planted on the large boulevards to break up their excessive width.¹⁷ All in all, the urban design of the demolition artist approximates the aesthetic ideal known to the Chinese world as “harmony without uniformity.”¹⁸

As one might expect, Haussmann’s creative destruction was subject to severe criticism. The cost of Haussmann’s expropriations and building projects proved astronomical, and he was eventually forced to resign from his post in 1870. (Until the beginning of the twentieth century, Paris remained the most indebted city in the world, and Parisians were paying off the debt until World War I.) Marxist critics such as Walter Benjamin argued that the streets were broadened to bring in troops in cases of riots and to prevent the erection of barricades across them (without long-term success, it should be noted: the barricades of the 1871 Paris Commune were erected at almost the same places as those of the insurrection of June 1848).¹⁹ Benjamin also argued that the “increases in rent pushed the proletariat into the suburbs.”²⁰ (We return to this theme in the final section of this chapter.) The poor were concentrated in the eastern part of Paris and in arrondissements (boroughs) bypassed by the city renovations, a rich-poor geographical divide that persists to this day. Many Parisians complained about feeling uprooted by the radical transformation of their city.²¹ As the poet Baudelaire put it in 1857, “Old Paris is no longer; it changes (the city, alas, is changing much faster than the heart of man).”²² Such complaints were further magnified by the erection of the Eiffel Tower in 1889. The writer Guy de Maupassant was so horrified by the tower that he regularly dined at its restaurant because it was the one spot in Paris where he didn’t have to look at “this giant and disgraceful skeleton”; he eventually “left Paris, and then France because the Eiffel Tower finally just irritated me too much.”²³

But the Eiffel Tower, as we know, came to symbolize Paris, and such complaints now seem eccentric. In the same vein, Haussmann’s long, straight, wide boulevards with their cafés and shops gave Paris its current form and established the foundation of what is today its most popular representation. Most Parisians today view the Haussmann legacy positively, to such an extent that suburban towns have named neighborhoods after Haussmann. Both locals and tourists take pleasure in strolling the wide boulevards and observing others from the vantage point of an outdoor café.²⁴ Now, it is the unharmonious urban renovations from the années maudites²⁵ (cursed years) of the 1960s and 1970s—the monstrous Tour Maine-Montparnasse (skyscrapers in the city center were banned shortly after it was built) and the high-tech Centre Pompidou—that are the objects of criticism. If Paris is viewed as beautiful, much of the credit should go to Haussmann.

Like most of humanity, Daniel and his family looked forward to the second millennium. They chose to go to Paris, where they could celebrate the event in a romantic atmosphere. On the evening of December 31, 1999, Daniel, his wife, Bing, and their five-year-old son, Julien, crammed themselves onto the Pont-Neuf along with some of Daniel’s relatives living in France. The evening was supposed to be magical, but the crowd was so dense that they could not move. Julien became tired and Daniel had to carry him on his shoulders. Daniel became tired and he passed Julien to his cousin Yves, who carried Julien on his shoulders for the remainder of the evening. They were looking forward to the fireworks launched from the Eiffel Tower when the clock struck twelve, but their view was blocked by the National Assembly building. Daniel and his family eventually made it back to their hotel, where they watched the spectacular Eiffel Tower fireworks display on CNN. Daniel wished he had been there, until he remembered that he actually was there.

But why should beauty be associated with romance? Yes, it’s true that a city should be perceived as being beautiful for the association to stick—a branding campaign for, say, “romantic Cleveland” is not likely to be successful—but other cities such as Rome, San Francisco, and Krakow are beautiful, and yet they are not typically considered to be “romantic.” Perhaps it’s the French language? But Italian is just as beautiful to the ear, and yet Rome—the ideal that inspired Haussmann’s urban planning—is not widely associated with romance. Maybe it’s the beautiful and fashionable Parisian women?²⁶ But women as much as men seem to fall prey to the stereotype of romantic Paris, so that can’t be the explanation. The primary explanation, let us submit, is that American artists, from mid-nineteenth-century writers to today’s Hollywood filmmakers, have imposed their romantic visions on the city. Few Parisians have been impressed—hence the resistance to the original formulation of our ethos of romance—but it has worked on most tourists.

Daniel’s father was friendly with the owner of Shakespeare and Company, the secondhand English-language bookstore facing Notre Dame Cathedral. The bookstore was famous for hosting exiled writers (expatriate writers, to use less romantic language), and Daniel’s father sometimes stayed in the shop’s spare bedroom (for free). Once, Daniel’s father persuaded the owner to let Daniel stay there when he was a lowly graduate student with no published works to his name. The next day, browsing through some books in “his” room, Daniel was approached by a beautiful young French-language student from South Africa. She asked whether Daniel was a writer. He lied and said yes. She invited him for a drink at a nearby café. A man selling roses spotted the two and came to their table. The young South African offered to buy Daniel a rose, but she backed off when the seller quoted an outrageous price. Daniel said it’s OK, we don’t need such things (in retrospect, he should have bought her one instead). Daniel had to leave the café to rejoin his father for a party, and the next day she was gone.

The American fascination with Paris owes much to the young Henry James, who wrote about the city in a series of letters published in the New York Tribune in 1875–76.²⁷ Initially, he fell in love with the city and met several of his literary idols, such as Émile Zola and Guy de Maupassant. Although James eventually became disenchanted, dismissing the Impressionists and writers such as Gustave Flaubert, the initial impression stuck among his readers. In 1904, Oliver Wendell Holmes summed up the image of Paris in the American mind: “Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris.”²⁸ In the decades that followed, great Americans writers such as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Henry Miller went there not to die but to work and strive for fame.²⁹ In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway wrote about the “Lost Generation” of American writers and artists who went to Paris in the 1920s. Hemingway’s account of the Bohemian life in Paris—sitting and drinking in cafés with great artists—influenced countless young Americans. In 1950, he penned one of the most oft-quoted lines about Paris: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”³⁰

Cinematic representations of romance in Paris in American film further popularized the ethos. In the 1920s and 1930s, dozens of Hollywood films were set in Paris, and the city became synonymous (in American minds) with the glow of pleasure.³¹ The romantic classic Casablanca (1942), with its flashbacks of an intense love affair between the two protagonists in Paris (actually shot with stock footage views of the city), sealed the ethos of romance in the American public’s mind. If it’s not possible to have a love affair with stars like Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, perhaps a visit to Paris is the next best thing?

In 1950, Life magazine published a photo by Robert Doisneau of a couple kissing on a Paris street oblivious to passersby. The photo later became famous, adorning the dorm rooms of countless American college students. In 1993, Doisneau was sued by a couple claiming that he had taken their photograph without their knowledge and asking for a share of the photograph’s sales. Doisneau was forced to reveal that the photo was actually staged with professional actors, and he won the case.³² But sales of the photo apparently continue as before.

Avner and Daniel separate briefly so that they can buy gifts for family members. They decide to meet at the Café Flore, where Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre hosted famous philosophical discussions. The café is not the bohemian setting they expect. The customers seem to be either tourists or members of the haute bourgeoisie, and the menu is ridiculously expensive. The two friends decide to pack their bags and find another observation post.

Mass tourism in Paris really took off after World War II. In 1994, twenty million tourists went to Paris; ten million visited Notre Dame Cathedral, six million toured the “bohemian” district of Montmartre, and five million went up in the Eiffel Tower.³³ As the number of tourists increases, however, the relative importance of Paris on the global stage decreases. The days of Paris as the “capital of world civilization” (the slogan of the 1900 World’s Fair), engine of global finance,³⁴ and center of artistic and intellectual activity are long gone. The movers and shakers of the financial and political worlds now look more to Beijing and Hong Kong. Artists dream of making it in New York, not Paris. Nights in Paris have been depicted as the most boring in Europe, and party-seekers, DJs, and musicians have been fleeing Paris for Berlin.³⁵ The city, as Edmund White puts it, “has become a cultural backwater.”³⁶ Still, the dream of falling in love in Paris continues to enthrall, and will continue to do so until Hollywood producers decide it won’t sell any more movie tickets.

A NONPASTEURIZED CITY

The smell of nonpasteurized cheese (lait cru)—banned in many countries because of its health risk—cannot be resisted. Each time Avner and Daniel pass by a cheese shop, they have to enter. Ah, here’s one! They want to buy some cheese. Telling them that he will be back in a bit, the shopkeeper leaves them alone in the shop with all the treasures. He returns after ten minutes, and they are surprised: he trusted the two strangers not to take a pound of cheese and walk away. Of course he did. When you are surrounded by these pieces of cheese, you become truly human, you forget greed, you let yourself be carried by thoughts and smells and senses, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s noncorrupted soul who daydreams and finds comfort in the virtues of the natural world.

There are two sorts of romanticism. We have already discussed the Hollywood version: going to Paris and falling in love. That’s the version rejected by the Parisians who talked with us.³⁷ But there’s another kind—what we call non-pasteurized romance—that may be closer to their ethos. In this version, romanticism is defined against the crass materialism of modern capitalist society. The target is the bourgeois who cares about money, social stability, personal health, and the artificial conventions of “civilized” life, with little concern for the well-being of others: even Parisians who may be “objectively” bourgeois in terms of class status often reject the label (critics call them “bobos,” bourgeois bohemians). Conversely, social recognition is given to rebels, marginalized poets, innovative artists, heroic individuals, all those who strive for something better, or less boring, than bourgeois stability.³⁸

In the seventeenth century, Parisian streets were named after their usages—hospitals, schools, hotels—and the same street could change names several times in accordance with the different uses.³⁹ Today, streets still change names, but they are named after architects, novelists, marshals, poets, philosophers, great teachers, an odd and anarchic mix of people (but few, if any, business leaders). On Rue Chénier, Avner and Daniel find a plaque that says: “Here lived in 1759 the poet André Chénier.” On Rue Chapel no. 9 in Montmartre, they read: “Here lived in 1970 Iannis Xenarkis, 1922–2001, Resistance fighter, political refugee, composer.” You cannot get more romantic and antibourgeois than that. The man stuck to his values regardless of consequences and chose to live in exile in order not to give up his freedom, eventually transforming his pain into music. He may be Greek, but Parisians honor his life.

Julhès Fromagerie-Cave: 54 rue du faubourg Saint-Denis, 75010 Paris. Photograph © Emilie Frenkiel.

In Paris, the term Romanticism is most closely associated with an artistic and literary movement in the 1830s led by Victor Hugo, which challenged the order and restraint of classicism and called for more freedom of expression and experimentation with new literary forms such as novels that explore the lives of marginalized people.⁴⁰ But the term romantique was first applied to external nature—to landscapes, and to gardens of the more informal and less controlled kind known as le jardin anglais (the antithesis is the carefully sculpted and symmetrical garden landscape of Versailles). The best-known instance is in Rousseau’s fifth walk of the Rêveries of the Solitary Walker, written in the year before his death in 1778: “The banks of the Bienne Lake are more wild and romantic than those of Lake Geneva, because the rocks and forests are closer to the water.”⁴¹ Rousseau’s idealization of the individual self freed from social conventions and his attacks on the oppression and inequalities of modern civilization were to become key themes of nineteenth-century Romanticism. The urban equivalent of the solitary walker is the flâneur, the stroller who becomes, in Charles Baudelaire’s phrase, “a botanist of the sidewalk.” In the posthumously published Le Spleen de Paris (1869), written in the revolutionary genre of prose poetry, Baudelaire is fascinated by the human detritus left behind in the rush to modernize Paris. In “The Eyes of the Poor,” he tells the story of an impoverished family dressed in rags, looking into a new café: the eyes of a little boy say “How beautiful! How beautiful! But it’s a house where only people who are not like us can enter.” Baudelaire articulates his thoughts: “Not only was I moved by that family of eyes, but I also felt a bit ashamed by our glasses and carafes, larger than our thirst.” The point is not to criticize excess of emotion: Baudelaire celebrates drunkenness “of wine, poetry, or virtue.”⁴² The problem is that some people are too materially deprived to partake of nonpasteurized romance.

Avner and Daniel walk by the Cornelius Restaurant on Rue de Trévise, close to their hotel. They look inside: simple, brownish chairs and tables. It’s noisy and colorful, full of happy and talkative people. They enter and are warmly welcomed. The waiter asks the two strollers to take a seat. Would you like to sit here or inside? He points to a table by the window. Avner and Daniel are hungry, so either place is fine with them. The waiter recommends a few dishes even before they have a chance to see the menu. Indeed, the food is superb. Simple, using the freshest ingredients, and playing on the tongue with a variety of tastes: harmony without uniformity. Wonderful food, atmosphere, full of patrons day and night, but the restaurant will close down and move to another place. Why? they ask the waiter (by now they know he is the owner, one of three). He introduces Avner and Daniel to the chef, another owner; he sighs and says, well, this place has been here for a couple of years; we need to do something fresh. Avner and Daniel insist: but it is doing so well, why do you want to move? Ah, he says, precisely, that’s why! We need a new challenge! The two friends return the next day for lunch and pursue the conversation. This time, the waiter-owner confides that there’s another reason they are closing shop: they are worried about the bad economic times ahead and are opening a smaller restaurant in a more affluent district where it’s easier for them to pursue their craft without worrying about money. Avner and Daniel are somewhat disappointed by this response, but they reason it’s still different from what they’d find in New York or Hong Kong, where owners would stick with a restaurant until it actually started declining.

In Paris, it’s distasteful to talk about bourgeois themes like money or social status. The key to the good life is to express one’s creative talents—it’s not just artists who are artists. And if creative expression won’t come naturally, the government will step in to help. Whatever the differences between the political left and right, both sides share the principle of state intervention to support culture. In 1959, the conservative president Charles de Gaulle gave the distinguished writer André Malraux a mandate to create a ministry of culture. Malraux proclaimed France’s mission “to propose to humanity the means and the method of an intellectual and spiritual action.” In 1981, the socialist president François Mitterrand appointed a prodigal minister of culture, Jack Lang, who embarked on a vast program of subsidies to avant-garde artists in France. Today, France spends 1.5 percent of its GDP to support a wide array of cultural and recreational activities (versus only 0.7 percent for Germany, 0.5 percent for the United Kingdom, and 0.3 percent for the United States). The culture ministry, with its 11,200 employees, lavishes money on museums, opera houses, and theater festivals. The ministry also appointed a chargé de mission for fashion, song, and varieties (dubbed the “minister for rock ‘n’ roll”) in the 1980s to help France compete against the Anglo-Saxons. Cultural subsidies are ubiquitous. Proceeds from an 11 percent tax on cinema tickets are plowed back into subsidies for national film production, and the government taxes every home with a TV set in order to support high-quality public programs (since June 2009, there are no longer commercials on public channels from 8:00 pm to 6:00 am). The government provides tax breaks for freelance workers in the performing arts. Painters and sculptors can get subsidized studio space. Best of all, government employees get subsidized lunch vouchers to support the restaurant industry. And the government forces companies of more than fifty employees to pay 2 percent of total wages to the in-house comité d’entreprise (workers’ council), which uses the money either to build a company cafeteria or to distribute tickets-restaurant (restaurant vouchers) to employees. Sixty-three thousand French restaurants accept these lunch vouchers (there is a sticker in their window saying they do).⁴³ Do such policies limit consumer choice? Of course they do! But the point is to support a nonpasteurized way of life, not the bourgeois freedom to spend one’s income as one sees fit.

6:30 AM. Daniel is still sleeping. Avner wonders: perhaps he’s not a morning person? Avner goes outside in search of the nearest café. The air is crispy cold, but the sun is out; it will soon warm up. He finds a warm and cozy café with a huge window looking out on Rue Chadet. The TV is on but nobody is watching it. Five men stand by the bar and chat with the owner. Avner orders an espresso and is about to pay for it, but the owner won’t take the money. Avner is puzzled, so he observes the other customers. He notices that they say “Bonjour” when they enter and pay only when they leave. He understands: having a morning coffee at a café is not only about drinking the strong black liquid. It is also about exchanging a few words, relaxing, strengthening community ties at the local café, maybe a word of gossip or an argument about politics. Avner recalls Starbucks in Manhattan. The moment he enters, an employee announces with his loud voice, “Good Morning!” and then, “What can I do for you?” In Manhattan, coffee is about good service. The customer is always right. In Paris, it is about community and tradition; the customer might be wrong, say by paying when he orders, and he will be corrected so that he understands the rule of the game and becomes part of the community next time he enters the café. Later in the day, Avner and Daniel stop by another café. Avner orders a cheese plate with an espresso, but the waiter is paternalistic: he says coffee should come after the cheese, not together. Avner understands. What might seem rude to the American tourist is an effort to nourish a nonpasteurized way of life.

Part of the struggle against globalization, with its tendency to reduce things to the lowest economic denominator, is the effort to maintain traditional values and practices. In France, it’s often about the symbolic value of traditional food, as in the famous case of the French farmers led by José Bové who destroyed the McDonald’s in Millau in July 1999. Several weeks before the incident, the World Trade Organization had allowed the U.S. government to impose a surtax on European “luxury products” in response to Europe’s refusal to import American beef. One of the items the American government taxed was (nonpasteurized) Roquefort cheese, a cheese that can be produced only in the caves of the town of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon because it is aged using a particular strain of bacterium that reproduces there. The cheese must also meet quality assurance conditions such as being made from the milk of sheep raised within a radius of about one hundred miles of the town. The World Trade Organization decision infuriated the farmers around Millau whose sheep supply the milk for Roquefort, and they attacked the McDonald’s in response.⁴⁴

In many cities, such protests by a small group of rural farmers would be dismissed as the last gasp of disgruntled reactionaries. In Paris, however, they were treated as national heroes, and José Bové was crowned as the leader of the anti-globalization movement. If it’s about protecting France’s great gastronomical traditions, Parisians will rally to the cause, whatever the economic cost. Part of the explanation is an attachment to land, to the (imagined or real) ways of life in rural France. It’s hard to think of another large city where the residents have such a soft spot for rural traditions (more typical might be the Shanghainese contempt for “backward” peasants). Parisians literally import their culinary traditions to the city. Parisians buy more food per capita at farmers’ markets and specialist food retailers than residents in the rest of France do.⁴⁵ Bakeries, cheese shops, and butchers are everywhere in Paris, far more common than chain supermarkets (the opposite may be true in rural France). And Paris-based politicians are supposed to show their knowledge of rural traditions in ways that would seem strange in other big cities. It is worth quoting a humorous passage by two Canadian observers of French culture:

[The] Salon de l’agriculture (agricultural exhibition) [is] held every March in Paris. At first, we were surprised that France’s agricultural show was even held in Paris, not somewhere “in the provinces.” But of course Paris is located in the middle of France’s richest farmlands, which were themselves the source of Paris’s early might. With the Salon, Paris once again flexes its muscles for the rest of the country to see. Each year, the president, the prime minister, and half the cabinet members do the rounds at the Salon de l’agriculture, shake hands with the farmers, squat down and milk a few cows, and pet prize piglets. Their moves are carefully documented by the press. However, it’s more of a test than a choreographed photo op. All French politicians are expected to know about farm animals and produce. [Former] President Jacques Chirac gets rave reviews each year for deftly handling lambs and enthusiastically slapping cows’ rears. But reputations can be tainted by poor reputation at the Salon. Former Prime Minister Edouard Balladur made a fool of himself with his poor handling techniques when a lamb relieved itself on his suit jacket, and the incident has remained on his record.⁴⁶

Perhaps it’s too late to resist the onslaught of genetically modified foods, fast food, and the Americanization of mass culture. But we can count on Parisians to put up a good fight.

Avner and Daniel meet Anne Cheng, the eminent scholar of classical Chinese political thought. Anne was born and bred in Paris and kindly agrees to talk about her city. She invites the two for a lovely lunch at a café near the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Daniel has learned that Anne was recently appointed professor at the prestigious Collège de France, but she seems almost embarrassed to mention it. We talk about the art of conversation in Paris. Anne explains that conversation is like a game: you enjoy it, you show your eloquence, you take risks, and you try to please without taking the whole thing too seriously. The aim is not to demonstrate or persuade but rather to experience the pleasure of conversation for its own sake. We speak in English. Anne is perfectly fluent, with an Oxbridge accent (she spent several years at Cambridge), and makes her points clearly and with a measure of modesty and caution—more typical of English academics⁴⁷ and quite unlike the way she says Parisians debate. And yet, when we ask her what she misses most when she is away from Paris, she says it’s the intellectual life, the conversations, the amusement.

The way Parisians debate is rooted in the traditions of aristocratic salons of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The French nobility of the ancien régime developed an art of sociability in which new forms of conversation were central. Left powerless and idle by their increasing isolation from politics and administration, they turned their energies instead to the development of a refined code of manners and an ideal of gallant, spirited exchange that became a model for social and intellectual life. As Benedetta Craveri explains, “only members of the nobility of the ancien régime—slaves to a magnificent idleness and with no concern other than to celebrate themselves—could make of social life and art an end in itself…. This happy utopia was a blessed island, an innocent Arcadia in which the trials of everyday life might be forgotten and illusory moral and aesthetic perfection cultivated.”⁴⁸ Versailles was the political and administrative center, but Paris gained the social and intellectual upper hand in the eighteenth century. “At Versailles you intrigue, in Paris you amuse yourself,” as Montesquieu put it.⁴⁹ The salons were hosted by charismatic and (often) beautiful women and the main aim was the maximization of pleasure via refined conversation. The hostesses were supposed to set the rules of the game, described by one hostess as the need to allow “a joyous spirit to preside, which … would nevertheless inspire in the hearts of the whole Company a disposition to be amused by everything and bored by nothing; and I want great and small things to be spoken of, as long as they are spoken of elegantly; and that one only speaks of that which must be spoken about, without there being the slightest constraint.”⁵⁰ Some hostesses also became celebrated for their wit and intelligence. Here’s a description of Madame du Deffand by one of her male admirers, the marquis du Chatel: “If there was a question of improvising and executing some plays, it would be to you whom we should turn to. I have often experienced that pleasure by your fireside; there you are admirable. What variety, what contrasting sentiments in both character and way of thinking! What ingenuity, what power and accuracy! Even when you are rambling. There is nothing missing, but everything to send one mad with pleasure, impatience, and admiration. You are invaluable to a philosopher spectator.”⁵¹

As we know, the “innocent Arcadia” was abolished as the 1789 Revolution set out on its path of blood and terror. But the nobility still salvaged its style, and perhaps its honor, in the worst circumstances: “In prison men and women would dress with care, pay each other visits, hold a salon; it would be at the end of a corridor, between four candles; but there they would joke, compose madrigals, sing songs, take pride in being as gallant, as gay, as gracious as before; should you be morose and uncouth because an accident has placed you in a bad inn? Before the judges and on the tumbrel, they would retain their dignity and their smiles; women particularly went to the scaffold with the ease and serenity with which they attended a soirée.”⁵²

What wasn’t killed, however, was the art of conversation.⁵³ After the revolution, it became democratized and no longer the privilege only of an aristocratic elite. In the nineteenth century, Madame de Staël (who had been exposed to the art of conversation as a young girl) hosted salons, and her account of conversation could be taken straight from the salons of the ancien régime:

The feeling of satisfaction that characterizes an animated conversation does not so much consist of its subject matter. Neither the ideas nor the knowledge that may emerge from it are of primary interest. Rather, it is a certain manner in which people have an effect on others; of reciprocally and rapidly giving one another pleasure; of speaking just as quickly as one thinks; of spontaneously enjoying oneself; of being applauded without working; of displaying one’s wit through all the nuances of accent, gesture, and look, in order to produce at will a sort of electricity that causes sparks to fly, and that relieves some people of the burden of their excess vivacity and awakens others from a state of painful apathy.⁵⁴

Paris was still the center for such conversation. Writing in 1814, here’s how Madame de Staël described the city:

It seems to me that Paris is recognized as the one city in the world where wit and a taste for conversation are most widespread; and what is known as the mal du pays, that indefinable mourning for one’s country which has nothing to do even with those friends who are left behind, is particularly applicable to the pleasure of discourse…. [T]he spoken word is not only, as it is elsewhere, a means of communicating ideas, sentiments, and concerns, but it is an instrument that it is enjoyable to play and that, like music with some peoples and strong liquor with others, raises the spirits.⁵⁵

Unfortunately, Madame de Staël was sent into exile by Napoleon for ten years and, in her state of mal du pays, she wrote that Paris “was the place in the world where one could best do without happiness.”⁵⁶ If Madame de Staël were around today, she would probably appreciate Paris even more. Everyone today is educated to value and practice eloquence, and it shows up at every level of society:

Even the beggars in the Paris subway do their best to be eloquent…. When they enter the subway car, they excuse themselves for disturbing other passengers. They then carefully explain how they arrived in their present conditions, laying the basis for the request that follows. We even heard beggars deliver these speeches in rhyming couplets. It can take two, three, or even four metro stops to get through them, and much of their original audience is gone by the time they wrap up, but they rarely cut corners. They always sum up their request the same way, by explaining they need money to “eat, drink, and stay clean.” Then they thank the passengers for listening to them and wish them a good day as they collect any handouts before exiting the car. North Americans couldn’t expect that kind of eloquence from a politician.⁵⁷

Beijing, early 2009. Daniel and his wife, Bing, are watching a CNN news program hosted by Fareed Zakaria. One of the guests is Fawaz Gerges, an old friend from their Oxford days who went on to become a highly influential expert on Middle East politics. Another guest is Bernard-Henri Levy, perhaps the most renowned French public intellectual today. Fawaz, a professor at the London School of Economics, distinguishes between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and argues for the need to refine policies that address different sorts of threats. BHL (as he is known in France), with an open-necked shirt and flowing hair, makes grand statements in heavily accented English about Islam and existential threats to Western civilization, and he is supported by another guest, the writer Christopher Hitchens, who strongly supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Fawaz is visibly upset by the conversation; he turns to BHL, holds his arm, and tries to knock some sense into him, but they run out of time. Bing and Daniel feel sorry for their friend, but they are very amused.

Paris-style political conversation is not about finding agreement or searching for the truth; it’s about asserting your truth. You state a principle in a heroic manner and only then do you search for reasons or consider the implications (the term a priori is commonly used in everyday Parisian conversation). Ideas become ideals, and the task is to adjust reality to those ideals rather than the other way around.

Daniel meets some of his French cousins for lunch in Paris. He tells a joke about two French intellectuals objecting to a plan for political reform on the grounds that it works in practice but not in theory. Nobody laughs. Avner and Daniel meet up and pursue their “research.” They sit in a café on Rue des Petits Carreaux. There is a Parti Socialiste office opposite the café with a huge poster of Barack Obama, depicted in red and green. The two friends find it odd that Obama is considered a socialist. They move to another café in Denfert Rochereau and meet Daniel’s stepmother, Odile, and stepbrother, Ugo. Odile and Daniel kiss each other several times on the cheeks (Daniel can’t figure out when to stop). Odile, born and bred in Paris, says she likes the sense of community in her neighborhood, the way shopkeepers often give food to the homeless people. Ugo, who has worked in the Middle East, begins to talk about politics. Odile leaves, and Daniel is sad to say goodbye.⁵⁸ Ugo switches to English; he is fluent and highly articulate. He has also learned Arabic without any formal training. Ugo casts doubt on the official story behind the terrorist attacks on September 11th, claiming that the way the Twin Towers came down suggests it was caused by controlled detonations. And it looked like a missile rather than a plane crashed into the Pentagon. Plus, how could people have made phone calls from a plane just before it crashed into the ground? Then he talks about his experience with war in Lebanon. Of course it was tragic, but he also experienced a kind of “effervescence.” Avner and Daniel ask about Ugo’s future plans, and he says he is learning Farsi and thinking of joining the French forces in Afghanistan. Daniel worries about his stepbrother’s future, and they kiss goodbye. Avner and Daniel continue their work. They walk to Le Select, a café in Montparnasse, to meet Simson Najovits, an old friend of Daniel’s father who moved to Paris in the early 1950s. Simson is late, and the two friends pursue their “research.” Daniel notices a writer, with pen and paper, who was in this same spot twenty years ago. They exchange greetings. Avner observers that writers in Paris cafés often seem to be using pen and paper; perhaps it’s bad form to use personal computers? He roams the café, reflecting on the list of people who used to come here. Picasso, the one and only. A communist who devoted himself to art. Max Jacob: painter, writer, poet. He was Catholic, but had been born Jewish. Hence he was taken away from his beloved Paris and sent by the Nazis to a concentration camp, where he was murdered in 1944. André Derain, founder of Fauvism, who was supposed to become an engineer. His friend Henri Matisse managed to persuade his parents that he could devote himself to art. Fight for your love; do not betray it with money and comfort. Who else was here? Ernest Hemingway, who volunteered to be an ambulance driver in World War I, was seriously wounded and subsequently moved to Paris, where he wrote about the ways of heroes and antiheroes.

Paris is one of the centers of the movement for Tibetan independence. Many Tibetan exiles live there, and the Dalai Lama is often taken to represent the romantic ideal of the simple, wise soul, uncorrupted by capitalist civilization, who lives in harmony with nature. As one might expect, Parisian support for the Dalai Lama causes tensions with the Chinese government, and the French government occasionally tries to mend fences with China. Here’s a transcript of the public debate that took place in the French Senate on February 5, 2009:

 

M. Jean-Pierre Raffarin: It is paradoxical that the country that was the first to have the foresight to understand the extent of China’s global rise is today in a difficult diplomatic situation with it. The role of China on the global scene is evident today: it was comforted by the presence of its representatives at the last G20 summit in Washington, following the initiative of the president of the Republic. We need to take seriously the recent decisions of China that led to the report on the Europe-China summit under the French presidency and to the recent tour of France … by the Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao. We’ve made a decision to have a global strategic partnership with China and we support the opening of China to the world. In a period of crisis, the “closing” of a people in on itself is worrying. All our heads of state, from Charles de Gaulle to Jacques Chirac, and those in between, Georges Pompidou, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, and François Mitterrand, along with President Sarkozy, all showed they were attached to Franco-Chinese friendship. France does not want to reevaluate the question of national sovereignty in China, just as it does not want others to question its own national sovereignty.

M. René-Pierre Signé: Hooray for Tibet! [Vive le Tibet!]⁵⁹

Franco-China ties were further strained in June 2009, when the Dalai Lama arrived in Paris to be named an honorary citizen of the city. The Dalai Lama himself does not support independence. He calls for more autonomy in Tibetan regions under Chinese sovereignty, with China having control of defense and foreign policy, but such distinctions are often lost on his supporters in Paris, many of whom are former Maoists turned fierce anti-Communists.

Simson arrives. The former editor in chief of Radio France International, he now writes books about ancient Egypt in his “retirement.” Daniel recalls meeting him in that same café with his father in the mid-1980s, and they would argue about whether the United States should support the Contras to overthrow the Sandinista rulers in Nicaragua (Simson supported the anti-Communist contras, Daniel the Sandinistas). They greet each other, and Daniel cannot refrain from pointing out that Daniel Ortega (the leader of the Sandinistas) is back in power in Nicaragua. Simson argues that Ortega has gone capitalist. They move on to other topics. Simson, a militant atheist, asserts that most Jews in Jerusalem are secular. Avner, a Jerusalemite who has been teaching political theory at the Hebrew University for nearly twenty years, disagrees,⁶⁰ but fails to persuade Simson. They ask if Simson regrets leaving Canada, but he says no, there’s no difference between Canada and the United States. Daniel protests, to no avail. Simson also asserts that the Chinese Communist Party will soon collapse. Unfortunately, Simson gets up to leave just as Daniel is about to remark that Simson made the same assertion twenty years ago.

In political practice, the tendency to think in terms of moral absolutes takes the form of uncompromising political protests. The earliest protests were carried out by militants at the University of Paris in the Middle Ages: in 1200, students went on strike after the royal representatives used harsh measures after a tavern brawl, and scholars launched a two-year strike, from 1225 to 1227, following the repression of a carnival.⁶¹ The most violent insurrection, of course, was the French Revolution. Whatever the bloody excesses of the revolution, André Malraux expressed an influential verdict: “The Revolution! All that is not it is worse than it.”⁶² The 1871 Paris Commune was put down by violent repression—seventeen thousand people were executed and up to thirty-five thousand died⁶³—thus diminishing the enthusiasm for violent protests. In May 1968, a half million students and workers inspired by slogans such as “L’imagination au pouvoir” (“Empower Imagination!”; it sounds better in French) marched in the streets of Paris, but the revolutionary energy slowly petered out.⁶⁴ More recently, the protests have often taken the form of street theater, with union leaders actually complaining if the riot squads fail to show up (because it looks as though the government isn’t taking them seriously, which is bad for internal union politics).⁶⁵ Since protesters tend to avoid such vulgar concerns as money, they usually pitch their demands at the level of high principle, which helps to explain why “Parisians are invariably sympathetic towards their protesting or striking compatriots.” In actual fact, the French do not strike as much as the Germans, British, or Americans do, but since Paris is the political, economic, and intellectual center of France—unlike the capital cities of more decentralized or federal states—this guarantees more visibility, and therefore the city is the “obvious choice for almost any protest over any issue.”⁶⁶

To be frank, it’s hard to make sense of the ethos of nonpasteurized romance. The ethos seems to be both politicized (engagé) and disengaged from real politics, for and against tradition, ironic and naïve, relativist and absolutist, elitist and populist, violent and peace-loving.⁶⁷ But it’s not supposed to make sense, especially not economic cents. So long as it’s not bourgeois, it’s fine. Pace Karl Marx, the deepest problem with the bourgeoisie is that it’s so boring. That’s the real target, and the demand for consistency is beside the point. Better to be wrong than boring! But what if romance is not consistent with morality?

ROMANCE VERSUS MORALITY

Avner and Daniel head to Les Halles in central Paris, site of the city’s central provision market since the twelfth century. It was the hub from which produce made its way to outdoor markets that sold fresh food to individual shoppers, as well as a wholesale market that supplied the kitchens of the thousands of restaurants that have been among the distinctive landmarks of Paris since the early nineteenth century.⁶⁸ What a wonderful symbol for a nonpasteurized city: the “stomach of Paris” in the middle of town! Unfortunately, the wholesale marketplace was demolished in 1971 and replaced with an underground shopping center, the Forum des Halles. Avner and Daniel take an escalator down to the shopping center, and they are dismayed by what they see: the two friends feel as though they had wandered onto a film set from Blade Runner: it looks like a high-tech future gone bad. They are glad to leave the strolling drug dealers and depressed mental patients for the light outside.

But maybe we should be careful about romanticizing Les Halles as it used to be: in 1182–83, King Philip II cleared land at the expense of Paris’s Jewish community in order to organize the construction of the “stomach of Paris.”⁶⁹ In fact, one of the recurring themes in Parisian history is discrimination against the Jewish community, stemming from prejudices such as blaming the Jewish people for the death of Jesus.⁷⁰ As a result, Jews were forced into professions that were regarded as socially inferior or were forbidden to Christians—moneylending, rent-collecting, and accounting—and they became stereotyped as avaricious financial speculators. Similar phenomena took place in the rest of Europe, but even otherwise progressive Parisian voices expressed anti-Semitic sentiments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, if only because the passion for money seemed so at odds with the ethos of nonpasteurized romanticism. For example, one of the characters in Guy de Maupassant’s novel Bel-Ami (1885) voices the following words: “The boss? A real Jew! And you know, the Jews, we can never change them. What a race!—And he cited shocking traits of avarice, of the avarice which is particular to the sons of Israel, of savings of 10 centimes, bargainings over stoves [marchandages de cuisinières], shameful discounts asked for and obtained, all kinds of ways of being usurers, pawnbrokers.”⁷¹ Authors such as Honoré de Balzac portrayed stereotyped Jewish bankers with similar traits. Of course, there were also heroic stances to protect the human rights of Jews, most famously, “J’accuse!” (Émile Zola’s 1898 defense of the Jewish captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was falsely accused of spying for the Germans). But it could be that widely shared antipathy to “Jewish” capitalism made it more difficult for Parisian intellectuals to really confront the evils of anti-Semitism.⁷²

The clash between the nonpasteurized ethos and morality came to a head in World War II. The Nazis occupied Paris but they also tried to maintain a vibrant cultural and intellectual life. At the end of the war, Hitler gave orders to blow up the bridges and key monuments of Paris, as he did in Warsaw, but the order was disobeyed by the German general von Choltitz, who thus saved Paris.⁷³ Of course, the same Nazi occupiers had no qualms about killing Jews: in July 1942, fifteen thousand Jews were trapped in the Paris vélodrome without water, food, or lavatories, before being sent to death camps.⁷⁴ It’s as though—no, it really is the case—that the Nazis valued aesthetic beauty over human life.

Summer 1990. Bing and Daniel spend a month in Paris, Bing to study French, Daniel to finish his doctoral thesis. They visit the Musée Guimet, one of the world’s leading museums of Asian art, established in the late nineteenth century, at the height of France’s imperial glory. The newly married couple is in love, and the beautiful objects around them seem to magnify their love. Bing mentions that she hasn’t seen so many Chinese treasures in China itself.

In March 2009, Pierre Bergé, the personal and business partner of Yves Saint Laurent, put on sale two eighteenth-century bronze heads that had been looted by French and British forces from the imperial gardens of the Summer Palace outside Beijing in 1860. The site is still rubble, and it is a bitter reminder of China’s humiliation at the hands of Western powers.

The Chinese government had requested the return of the bronze heads and a group of Chinese lawyers tried to block the auction, but a French court allowed the sale to proceed. Pierre Bergé had the chutzpah to claim that the Chinese government could have the looted goods if it would “observe human rights, give liberty to the Tibetan people, and welcome the Dalai Lama.” One can imagine the reaction to a collector who says he will return goods looted by the Nazis only if Israel pulls out of the occupied territories!

As it happens, the sale went ahead and the heads were bought by the Chinese collector and auctioneer Cai Mingchao. With equal chutzpah—or perhaps we should say “nonpasteurized romance”—Mr. Cai said that he wouldn’t pay for the goods on moral grounds. As of this writing, the case is still in the courts.

In 1861, Victor Hugo wrote, “I hope that a day will come when France, delivered and cleansed, will return this booty to despoiled China.” Maybe we can agree, but Paris will be much less beautiful—and perhaps less romantic—if Hugo’s wish comes true.

In 1986, Daniel visits his aunt Marie and uncle Maurice in Pontgouin, a small village (population 985) in northwestern France. Marie left Quebec to marry Maurice in the early 1950s, and they started a small company in the village making flowers encased in glass to adorn tombstones (a fashion at the time). Two of their children and their grandchildren live nearby (the third child—the lovely and flirtatious Annick—died tragically of cancer at a young age). Marie and Maurice live in a four-hundred-year-old house with one-meter-thick walls. Maurice takes Daniel to a large supermarket, where he feels about twenty camembert cheeses before finally settling on one with the right texture. He does the same with baguettes, and teaches Daniel how to distinguish among different sorts of wines. They return home, and Marie cooks dinner while Daniel and Maurice sample different wines and cheeses. Marie brings out half-cooked dishes from the kitchen so that Maurice can taste them and suggest improvements. Daniel and Maurice begin to talk about politics. Maurice openly calls himself a bourgeois, he criticizes the socialists for imposing onerous conditions on the owners of small businesses, and he expresses his admiration for Charles de Gaulle. Marie serves her wonderful food, another bottle of wine is opened. Daniel is enjoying himself—perhaps the bourgeoisie is not so bad after all. Who needs to go to restaurants and the theater when you have this sort of life? And what if the romantics (pasteurized or not) are somehow parasitic on the stable lives of the bourgeoisie? Imagine if everyone led lives like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, writing and criticizing without getting married and having children? Who’s going to produce things and reproduce people for the future? Over the next two decades, Daniel was to spend more time in Pontgouin than in Paris. There was nothing he enjoyed more than an extended meal in Marie and Maurice’s garden, basking in the human warmth of a dozen or so relatives. In the summer of 2008, Daniel was devastated to hear that Maurice had been killed in a car accident near his hometown in Brittany: he was hit by another car while on an expedition to buy fresh scampi.

If Parisians feel superiority over the provincial bourgeoisie in the rest of France, the latter regard Parisians as morally decadent.⁷⁵ It’s hard to imagine too many people outside Paris sympathizing with the sorts of sentiments expressed by Guy de Maupassant in “Ode to Adultery”:

What I’m about to say will no doubt seem deplorably subversive. Too bad; one must seek only the truth, without worrying about taught morality, orthodox and official; of morality, the supposed natural law, infinitely variable, optional, the thing that differs for each country, appreciated in a new way by each expert, priest or legislator, and which is always modified by everybody.

The only law that matters is the supreme law of humanity, the law that governs human kisses, and that serves as the eternal theme for poets.

We live in a society that is disgustingly bourgeois, timorous, and mediocre. Never before has the spirit been so limited and less human….

I do not want to absolve adultery. I just want to show the absolutely unjust situation that is created by marriage….

Let us first consider [the fact] affirmed by most doctors and philosophers, that we are polygamous and not monogamous…. All it takes is a bit of reasoning to prove it. A woman can have only one child per year, while a man … can reproduce more easily. The law of nature therefore wants the male to have many wives. Whence it follows that the harem is a wise institution….

I would like somebody to show me one man—only one man—with a normal body and soul, who stayed absolutely monogamous his whole life.⁷⁶

Today, the sorts of advertising campaigns that may sell products in Paris—such as the ad for the national train service showing two pairs of feet popping out from under a duvet, with text that reads, “Tell your spouse you’re on a business trip”⁷⁷—won’t be effective in Pontgouin.

In an otherwise insightful book analyzing the “national character” of the French, titled Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong, Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow fail to clearly distinguish between the Parisian ethos and that of the rest of France. Yes, the country is highly centralized,⁷⁸ all roads (almost literally) lead to Paris, and what happens in Paris has great influence on the rest of France. But Parisians are still viewed as somewhat strange by people outside the city. As an empirical matter, Parisians go out more often to restaurants, attend church less,⁷⁹ vote more to the left,⁸⁰ and, of course, protest more against bourgeois values. In some ways, such as state-sponsored restaurant and theater coupons, the rest of France may be subsidizing the Parisian lifestyle. And perhaps the ethos of nonpasteurized romance could exist only on the foundation of more stable family—bourgeois—values.

Another conversation with Daniel’s stepbrother. Ugo (a handsome young man, it must be said) prowls the streets of Denfert-Rochereau wrapped in a cardboard advertisement for a beauty product. He must earn money to support his wife and adopted daughter in Thailand (he lived there for two years and speaks fluent Thai). He now lives with his mother in a tiny apartment and complains that Paris is so expensive. Don’t believe the hype, he says. Go to the suburbs; that’s more real than what you see here. Daniel responds that he did in fact visit the suburbs once. In 1987, he went to Paris with the Oxford University ice hockey team and stayed with a family in the bleak suburb of Cergy-Pontoise. This doesn’t look like Paris, he thought to himself. Daniel remembers entering their home with a sinking feeling: no book shelves and a few tacky pictures. He perked up when his host opened a bottle of champagne. The host talked about working on the assembly line of a major French car manufacturer, with story after story of abuses inflicted on his working-class compatriots. By the end of the bottle, Daniel Ortega—as he was then known by his hockey mates—was ready to mount the barricades.

Let us return to Haussmann’s legacy. On the plus side, he built beautiful buildings in the center of town that would be occupied by middle- and upper-class Parisians, thus ensuring that the downtown core would not empty out after office hours as some American cities do today. But high rents in central Paris pushed the poor into the suburbs, and the rich-poor geographical divide is still the key challenge facing Paris today. The ring highway—the Périphérique, completed in 1973—“is if anything even better at separating the city from the hinterlands than its predecessors [city walls] were, and today that means keeping the immigrant masses at bay in their featureless housing project clusters.”⁸¹ In fact, only 2.1 million people live in the famous inner city; the other 7.1 million residents live in the suburbs.⁸² Not all suburbs are poor (and not all of central Paris is wealthy), but the more notorious suburbs are viewed as a no-man’s-land by residents of the inner city, and few dare to venture into them. The division is both real and psychological: asked to produce hand-drawn maps, 82 percent of inner-city Parisians “drew on the administrative boundary of the city—a feature that would almost certainly be totally absent from maps drawn by Londoners or Romans, and a reflection of the separation of the city from its suburbs.”⁸³

The suburbs came to the attention of the rest of the world in 2005, when the worst unrest since the student riots of May 1968 hit the northern periphery of Paris. The deaths of two Muslim boys—electrocuted while evading a police identity check—and a teargas bomb explosion inside a mosque galvanized the Muslim community, causing widespread vandalism and rioting in towns around Paris. The underlying problem was not just poverty, but also discrimination against French citizens of Arab and African descent, most of whom were residents of dehumanizing public housing developments on the urban periphery. Nicolas Sarkozy, then the minister of the interior and later the president of France, exacerbated the situation when he referred to the rioters as “scum” and suggested that the solution was to expel the “foreign agitators” responsible for it. In reality, most of those arrested, though ethnically African, were native-born French citizens. In late November 2007, rioters in some of those same suburban communities repeated their protests.⁸⁴

The French government has embarked on programs designed to break down the isolation between the outlying neighborhoods and the historic center. President Sarkozy convened a meeting of prominent architects and asked them to come up with a new blueprint for Paris designed to clean up the city’s working-class and immigrant suburbs and, at the same time, build a greener Paris. They put forward proposals for modest improvements, such as building more public parks in the suburbs and putting bigger windows that would let in more light in working-class apartment blocks. More daring architects suggest ideas such as moving the presidential palace to the city’s grittiest outlying neighborhoods, burying the tracks that connect the city’s main train stations and draping a vast system of public parks over them that would connect center and periphery, and building a commuter line and multitiered mall underneath the Louvre so that immigrants and workers would mix with tourists in the city’s great palace of culture.⁸⁵ At the moment, such plans exist only in theory. But if there’s one city where reality can be made to conform to theory, it’s Paris.