Paris is a reflection. It's tightly bound to the past, though it's newer than the cities of its stature. Paris is still young, relatively speaking. At worst, middle-aged. And there's something special in its relationship to time. Its memory is more vivid, and its story more present, than the poles of Europe's past: Rome, Istanbul, Athens.
What these cities are to antiquity, Paris is to modernity. Time has passed, and newer cities have been built, but there will never be one more modern than Paris. Here, contemporary life is embodied. The modern struggle along class and intellectual lines to replace aggression, exclusion, subjugation, fear, peasantry, enslavement, bondage, superstition, etc. of the classical and feudal eras with tolerance, reason, inclusion, liberty, leisure, equality, experimentation, aesthetic values—this struggle is Paris's last three hundred some years.
Of course, it's unfinished. As it is everywhere, in every political culture, where the same struggle takes place concurrently, on different timelines, on tracks that can and often derail. This being the case, Paris is a microcosm of modern life, modern struggle, and modern people with whom we share a continuity. There is a short, straight line from Robespierre to you. Less so with Mehmed, Caesar, or Pericles. Paris is more a mirror than museum. Maybe it's called the City of Light because it throws back more of it than it absorbs.
Nowhere is a city's history both so opaque and not. The land has seen continual inhabitation for at least a couple thousand years, beginning as a Gaullic tribal settlement in the Iron Age and later as Lutetia under Roman administration in the 1st c. BCE. Although you can truncate its story to the last 250 years without missing much; basically, everything from the revolutionary era on (1789-) is its origin story and coming of age. There's no public place in the city bereft of commemorations, in one form or another, to a tragedy or glory of this period. But it's usually the monuments to victory or conquest, like the Arc de Triomphe (1806) or the Monument Moncey (1870), standing just outside my doors at Place de Clichy, that hog our attention. Living records of the city's darker chapters need closer attention.
Some three hundred inconspicuous black slates are affixed to the walls of primary schools throughout Paris. They tell the story of the French government's willing participation in the deportation of 70,000 French Jews during WWII, of which only 2,500 survived. At least 11,000 of them were only children. People young enough to be our grandparents today.
“More than 700 of these children lived in this neighborhood.”
Here's a similar sign at a school in the neighboring arrondissement:
“Innocent victims of Nazi barbarism and the complicity of the Vichy regime.”
It didn't take long for me to realize that these weren't an anomaly or an exception. There are hundreds of them around the city. Once you've seen one, you notice them all. Virtually every primary school in Paris has a Holocaust plaque. Colleges, lycées, and daycares are spotted with little black mirrors held up by children for whom our reflection is their only resting place.
How could you not see a part of yourself on the walls? If the line to Robespierre is short, the line from Marshall Pétain is shorter, the French-Nazi collaborationist responsible for handing over 11,000 children to their death. These aren't fossils. This isn't ancient savagery. These are modern men from whom we're only generations removed.
Paris isn't all sunshine and americanos on the terrasse. The modern project of creating a society built on the preservation of autonomy and self-expression came at a high cost. In June 1832 to May 1968, and many instances in between, we've been reminded that the road to a better life is built with speed bumps. That sometimes they're seen clearer in the mirror. And that there exists a continuous struggle to make a better world, and a continued need to center ourselves in it and not distance ourselves from our history. To live it, in full faith that you are its continuity.
Maybe I'm reaching, but I think this is what we all inherit from Paris: The recognition that that's us, up on the walls. Knowing we all have the capacity to be on either side of it. That we aren't historically distanced from our past, but a living part of an unbelievably larger story and shared struggle. Aaaand words are no longer doing what I need them to, so I'll end it there.
Kickball: Ruined
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The Political Spectrum
Like most European countries, France is lucky enough to not be stuck in a two-party political system.
Previously, there were two dominant factions in French politics: First, the left-wing coalition comprising the dominant Socialist Party, propped up with the support of two minor parties, the Greens and the Radical Party, and, second, the right-wing coalition led by the Republicans supported by the Union of Democrats and Independents.
I also find it interesting that France's Communist Party still holds 10 seats in the National Assembly and another 18 in the European Parliament. Though I guess it isn't uncommon for fringe parties to gain national representation in majoritarian/PR electoral systems. For example, Belgium's Communist Party has 12/150 seats in the lower chamber and 5/60 in the upper; Finland has 16/200, Germany 69/709 (Note: the Bundestag has 709 members, holy fuck), and Greece has a 86/300 spread if you count Syriza as sufficiently anti-capitalist.
The traditional French coalitions changed during the most recent elections in 2017. A brand new party led by Emmanuel Macron, En Marche!, which brands itself as neither left nor right when placed on the North American political spectrum, went head-to-head against a longtime fringe party National Front (now renamed National Rally). Macron won in a landslide second round run-off (66%), becoming the youngest French head of state at age 39 since Napolean Bonaparte became Emporer at 35.
Macron is the prototypical liberal, Third Way centrist. He's an explicitly pro-European environmentalist with a strong internationalist perspective. He is the de facto leader of the European Union, to my mind. He favors an expansive welfare state and believes that France's role in the ongoing refugee crisis should be greater. At the same time, the progressive social vision he campaigned on has given way to a more hardline approach on sensitive issues like police brutality, irregular migration, and a rising tide of Islamism in a constitutionally secular state.
What I like about him is that he doesn't think in slogans. His recent interview with Brut, a Vice-esque media group, is evidence enough of that. I can't imagine Trudeau or any other G7 leader taking 2-3 hours going back and forth with not-very-subtly hostile journalists on subjects such as Uighur forced labor in China, menstrual insecurity, Islamist separatism, police violence, and the limits of free expression.
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IP Law (Zzzzzz zzzz)
Search “Eiffel Tower'' on Shutterstock and up pops a page of photos of the iconic parabola-shaped tower standing in the daylight. That's because there aren't any legal stock photos of the lit-up Eiffel Tower at night. Which is not incidental. It's illegal to take and publish a photo of the Eiffel Tower at night for commercial purposes. Doing so violates French intellectual property law, which is among the most strict in the developed world.
Both the Eiffel Tower and the tower's light display are considered artistic works and are thus protected by copyright. The difference is that the tower's (1889) expired in the 1950s, while the light display's (1985) are still in force for another few decades.
The French Cour de cassation (court of last resort) has defined exceptions in which an author's IP can be used without permission from the original author, such as having the protected work in the background or off-center, or having the copyrighted work be secondary to the true intended subject of the reproduced work. None of this obtains if the intended use is non-commercial.
That's why you probably won't get dinged for posting an aerial photo of the tower lit up at night on your story, but you'll get cease and desist'd if you sell close-up night photos on Getty or wherever people sell photos these days. It makes me wonder what the legal situation would be like for a social media influencer, whose Instagram is their primary income, posting pics in front of the tower at night.
Apparently, all the case law on the issue involves postcards. If, say, the photo of the illuminated tower can be photoshopped out of your postcard and still retains its essential value, then it's fine. If the card loses its value after you've removed the tower, then it's infringement. The test is really that simple, apparently. The same goes for stock photos. If it's “no-tower, no-value”, then it's copyright infringement. (I can't imagine a photo of an empty night sky above the Champ-de-mars carrying much sentimental value. But a photo of the tower with the lights edited out in post-production would be an interesting case—the postcard of the dark, unilluminated tower retains its sentimental and economic value but doesn't technically include the specific work protected by copyright.)
Within a week I found out first-hand just how far the French state will go to stiff-arm access to copyrighted works after I tried to log into Sci-hub, a Swedish-hosted website for pirating scientific articles. Immediately it 404'd. After a quick check, I found out that the domain was up and running, only that I'd been stiff-armed by the French government. A first goal-against for France, a country that was doing so well to make me feel politically at home.
In March 2019, the High Court of Paris ordered all the major French ISPs to DNS-block Sci-hub and sever the flow of public knowledge, taking a seat next to Russia and India, in a move that probably violates the principle of net neutrality—the commitment to data non-discrimination—for which the EU is supposed to be a model for the world. This, for a website hosting free access to the sum of human knowledge, an achievement worthy of a Nobel prize under any other circumstances.
Scientific publishing should not be a commercial pursuit protected by copyright. If copyright exists to protect the creative or innovative effort of an author, how does publishing a photo of a lit-up 130-year-old wrought iron skyscraper get in the way of that? How is downloading a scientific article—which any academic would happily send for free if asked—a violation of their creative effort? If primary research is (mostly) publicly funded, why is the finished product not for public use? If scientific research isn't a common good, then what is? To whose benefit are these laws intended?
Hey uhhh, I got a photo for sale.
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No Surprise There
When I wrote fiction I'd read what I'd written and find that I'd tried too hard to sound poetic and I'd hate it. Now I'm reading my nonfiction back and finding that my style is a dumb person's version of what a smart person sounds like and I hate it.
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The Table as a Sacred Space
Eating lunch at your desk is illegal under French labor law (Article R.4428-19 of the 3,324-page Code du travail). It's not uncommon to hear of lunch breaks where employees gather around a table or terrasse and eat and smoke together for two straight hours. It's no revelation that meals are social experiences in France, as in much of Europe.
My nights in Lorraine saw dinners span four, five hours straight, easily. Getting out of your seat was reserved only for bathroom breaks or for taking the next course out of the oven. After a few courses, there would be music; from where I can't remember. The lights would dim. First they throw on Johnny Hallyday, then I throw on the Hip. They'd go Vianney or Claude François, then I'd go Arcade Fire, Neil Young, more Hip. We'd play this game all night, exchanging the sounds of each other's cultures, shouting or singing across a table where bread is abundant, wine more available than water.
Then the hostess retrieved the photo album from her trip to Canada in the 90s. The whole time I had no idea she'd been. She did the whole Niagara-Quebec City corridor. We pored over the photos: her coach bus parked in front of little VIA Rail stations in the Thousand Islands, or the banks of the St. Lawrence River, or wearing wet ponchos at Niagara Falls, waving little red and white flags. My French was useless, as was her English, but I didn't need to be told that she knew something of my own country better than I did. We flipped the pages while poking at duck cutlet, leaving oil fingerprints on the lamination, feeling fed in every way.
It's a tragedy to eat alone in France. Sometimes even a crime. For the French, food is more than nourishment and the table is more than wood and varnish. They are a medium, a gathering place, a memory box, an exchange. Something to share.
“Visitor, who are you?”, A sign next to the front door.
Travel is an exercise in discretion. In being conscious of what I pay attention to and what meaning I distill from experience. But this is also a life's work. This is one step of many in fulfilling that ambition.
I've enjoyed my time in France. What I've found here is nothing new: liberty, equality, fraternity. Only now I have new ways to say them.
Thanks for reading. Have a good one, wherever you are.
Superb! I am really enjoying this series.