Paris: Beyond the End of History
Quai d’Orsay: From Commuters to Connoisseurs
French culture is dead, Time magazine’s Don Morrison recently proclaimed. Complacently subsisting off plentiful government subsidies, it has failed to keep up and compete with any of the noise issuing forth from the anglophone world. If France’s capital city is any reflection of the country’s cultural decline, one might be inclined to agree with him — superficially, at least.
The museum-like quality of Paris, which remains a sort of improbable continuation of its late 19th century self, has long been lamented. The City of Light is bathing, perhaps, in too much of a stage-set’s glow, and one could be forgiven for feeling like one was traipsing through a theme park when strolling through the Tuileries in the evening – especially since half the park literally serves as a sort of fairground. It’s telling that the two most controversial building projects in central Paris – the reconstruction of Les Halles, a former marketplace turned mall and train station, and the potential rebuilding of the Tuileries palace, are, respectively, an attempt to snuff out one of the few 20th century intrusions into central Paris, and the attempt to restore a building lost to fire in 1871. The recent installation of a bike-rental system has only added further to Paris’ 19th century flair: never since then have there been so many pedal warriors on the city’s boulevards. All in all, Paris is not only ossifying, but taking active steps to turn back the clock.
Place Vendôme: Sepulchral City
Morrison claims that that hope for French culture lies in the twin engine of neoliberalism and the immigrant ghettoes of French cities’ banlieues: the latter providing new twists on what “French” means, the former allowing France to competitively export itself to the rest of the world. It’s true that these two forces have brought considerable change to Paris, though not, perhaps, in the positive ways Morrison expects. The offices of American law firms have quintupled along the Avenue Georges V, and St-Germain has steeply declined from Bohemian Rhapsody to Banana Republic. This sort of sterility, more than the mere preservation of belle époque facades, has paralyzed Paris.
Champ de Mars: Military Discipline
Meanwhile, the cultural cauldron of the banlieues strains to penetrate the Périphérique: French rap may have global currency, but it’s not being made anywhere near the 8th Arrondisement. While its suburbs burn, central Paris may breathe a sigh of relief that access to the city centre from the banlieux has been made deliberately difficult, but this hardly bodes well for surmounting the challenges to syncretism that may be depriving Paris, and France, of its full cultural potential. What France is without this slaking fusion, a liberal state suffused with ethnic angst, is no more inherently French than it is British, the only difference being that, in Paris, the children of empire hail from the Comoros, Cameroon, and Cambodia, rather than Barbados, Bangladesh, and Botswana.
Quartier Latin: The Banlieues Invade
Compare this with Berlin: there, the Turkish minority, the city’s largest, has long been established in Kreuzberg. Once a peripheral neighborhood near the edge of the Wall, Kreuzberg assumed a central position in the reunified city, building on its reputation among German artists and immigrant Turks alike, each of which had been drawn to the neighborhood’s cheap rents. Kreuzberg has been a cauldron of intercultural forces ever since, producing not only the German Döner Kebab, as unique to Germany as Tex-Mex food is to the United States, but also music from German and Turkish artists alike that has pushed against the boundaries of Germans’ discomfort with patriotism to assert the transcendent values of the new, ethnically inexclusive Germany. In contrast to French artists, living off the fat of subsidies that supposedly protect them from rapacious Anglo-Saxon cultural influences, German artists and musicians have audibly resisted British and American culture through their work itself. In Berlin, survivance is a grassroots phenomenon, and it has engendered an unlikely esprit de corps.
Anglophones: The Sack of Paris?
Of course, Berlin has not been conquered by market forces as easily as central Paris, which now plays a somewhat stuffy version of Manhattan to the outer banlieues. With the decreasingly relevant exceptions of Belleville and Ménilmontant, few neighborhoods inside the Périphérique will soon play hosts to the sort of creative society that legendarily animated Montmartre and Montparnasse. For a period over the last decade, the Marais’ star shone bright, until it succombed to the pressures of Americans seeking pieds-à-terre and their taste for multinational boutiques of the sort that now line the Rue Francois-Xavier. Banned from France’s airwaves, les États-Uniens managed to subvert the culture of the French capital nonetheless, via the unguarded conduit of real estate.
Place Benjamin Fondane: Quo vadis, Paris?
Nevertheless, neoliberalism cuts both ways. Paris will never be left as clean a slate as, say, Singapore. A thriving street art culture continues to subvert the forces laying siege to the city’s creative capacities. On the walls of the capital’s back alleys, a cacophonous conversation persists: a tiger proclaims “Je vote!” An offensive poster is papered over by another demanding “Êtes-vous Européen?” A series of ambiguous figures are painted across the city, commenting on the space around them. In a tiny square in the Latin Quarter named for a survivor of the Holocaust, the figure poses questions: is it falling into an abyss, or reveling, in defiance of the heavy weight of memory, of the historical burdens of the city as museum? As long as one can still encounter such quandaries amid its time-frozen streets, Paris’ history has not met its Fukuyaman end: its potential, at least, lives on.
Tags: France, Gentrification, Ideas, Identity, Paris, Street Art
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Douala says:
First of all thank you for a such wonderfull topic, well i have to say it is difficult for me to say if i agree with you or not. I will read it for a second time and let you know what i think
July 5th, 2008 at 7:11 pm