In 2015, the writer then known as Luc Sante published The Other Paris. The following essay was originally composed as a foreword to that book, but not included in it; we’re excited to publish the piece here, in a form updated by the author whose gender identity has also changed, for the first time.

I’m not a Parisian, but French is my native language, so that Paris is to a considerable degree my cultural capital. I first visited in 1963, when I was eight and the city was still black with soot. The old Renault TN6A buses—the kind with the open platform at the rear you could jump onto if the bus was moving slowly enough—still plied the streets, along with the futuristic Citroën DS, the car Roland Barthes called a “new Nautilus,” with its conning-tower windows atop a fish-shaped body. Women’s skirts ended just about at the knee, predominantly as part of tweedy round-collared suits, accompanied by hair up in a twist. Men wanted to look like intellectuals, favoring neckline beards and mock turtlenecks and smoked glasses with frames thick at the top and thin below. Everybody still inhaled filterless Gauloises and Gitanes and Celtiques, sometimes wrapped in yellow corn papers; the air was blue in almost every indoor space other than churches and museums. The city looked the way in does in the early movies of the Nouvelle Vague. It was enjoying the birth of yé-yé, although I didn't see that part.

I spent months there as a student in 1974, in an eighteenth-century house owned by Columbia University that had been, among many other things, the Protestant boarding school where the young André Gide suffered and the American Art Students Club, an institution catering to young women of good families in the years after the First World War. My fellow students and I hung out on the nearby terraces of Le Dôme, La Coupole, Le Sélect, La Rotonde—all the hangouts of the Lost Generation fifty years earlier, by then an unremarkable cluster of cafés of the sort you’d find near any major intersection. We frequented an African disco in a tiny, barely ventilated cellar on Rue Saint-André-des-Arts; ate Vietnamese food on Rue de l’École Polytechnique after taking in the fire-eater outside; stood in line for movies at Place de l’Odéon while observing the mysterious gentleman who would accost people, make a vomiting noise while sliding a large rubber rat out of his sleeve, then ask for money. We’d go to Les Halles, where people still sold produce from stands and meat, fish, and cheese out of trucks, but we had no idea that Baltard’s pavilions had been demolished four years earlier and that what we were seeing was a last pathetic vestige of the ancient marketplace. Even so, the city in 1974 was closer in many ways to the beginning of the century than to its end. Children still played in the streets, and there was a bistro on seemingly every corner, and buildings were still autocratically ruled by their concierges, and students and bohemians could live for very little money in tiny top-story chambres de bonne.

I spent time there in the ‘80s as either a journalist or a layabout, depending on your perspective. I lodged with a set of young militant anarchists, friends of friends, in an apartment house way up in the northeast corner, not far from the slaughterhouses of La Villette, then in the process of demolition. It was one of the few remaining genuinely proletarian areas of the city at the time, with factories and train yards nearby, and people of every race mingling at the corner shop, and a fair number of vacant lots and gutted tenements. But much more than on my previous visit, it felt as though Paris were still immobilized in the muddy aftermath of ’68. Young rebels in Paris at the dawn of the era of Reagan, Thatcher, and Mitterand (that notable Socialist) felt themselves pressed to be agents of history, even though they were limited to small-time actions barely distinguishable from the rest of the police blotter. There was no organization or coordinated action, just a kind of personal-size insurgency. And those young rebels really did sometimes wind up in prison—the cops were everywhere, intrusive and not altogether stupid, while many people were sufficiently frustrated that they did not play safe, no matter the odds. But the city was beginning to change in ways so large that, ostrich-like, I may have avoided drawing conclusions. The coming tide of libéralisme—what English speakers would call “neoliberalism”—was quite discernible if you knew what you were looking at.

And I spent clumps of time there in the ‘90s and ‘00s and ‘10s, in a variety of contexts for a variety of reasons. Whatever I was supposed to be doing there, what I primarily did was walk. Over the course of my life Paris has been one of my greatest and most reliable teachers, a book I return to again and again because its text never ceases to change. The Other Paris, being set in the historical past, is necessarily constructed from other books, but of these the greatest one is the city itself, the accumulation of its streets. I’ve maintained a stubborn loyalty to Paris, site of a phantom second life that continues to exist in parallel to wherever I’m currently brushing my teeth. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first person to call himself an anarchist, spoke approvingly of a patriotisme du clocher, literally “patriotism of the steeple.” Although few think in terms of parishes any longer, for Parisians today the equivalent is Métro stations. Thus I proudly display the visas I’ve been accorded: Vavin, Ourcq, Chemin Vert, Rue des Boulets, Arts et Métiers, Anvers, Gambetta, to name the most significant. Some part of me has remained in each of those places.

Paris is an especially good laboratory for examining the city of the past. It was, you might say, in the avant-garde of cities, always proposing new forms of urban existence: new styles in street life, new ways of scraping a living, new methods of recycling, new horizons in improvised commerce, new ventures in popular entertainment, new extremes of dissipation, new categories of riot. Paris was a restless city, its center gradually and systematically moving west even as its configuration expanded in concentric circles and its arrondissements accrued in the form of a spiral. It began very early in its history to take in migrants and refugees, from the Hexagon and then the continent and eventually the wider world, and even if its acceptance of them could be grudging and conditional and snobbish—one Polish prince worth thirty Auvergnats or a hundred Italian laborers—it did take them in, for quite a long time, and at least at intervals allowed them to become as Parisian as they wished to become, and it was changed by them.

All cities aspire to the condition of Paris. It is their better self, the one with the light and beauty and glamour and culture that circumstances have not vouchsafed them. The distribution of such amenities is scant enough among the urban concentrations of the world that if a city has been so favored, however mildly and relatively, it stakes its claim. Thus there is the Paris of the East (Beirut), the Paris of the North (Tromsø), the Paris of the South (Asheville, North Carolina), the Paris of Africa (Abidjan), the Paris of Latin America (Buenos Aires), the Paris of Java (Bandung), the Paris of Massachusetts (Worcester), and you can probably name others. But each of those Parises is only too painfully aware that it is at best a pale reflection, a provincial franchise, a stand-in for the star. The moniker mostly underscores the ways in which any secondary Paris, however charming on its own merits, is not the City of Light.

Paris has inspired longing, envy, fantasy, ambition, and resentment around the world for the better part of a millennium. The injunction “See Paris and die,” which perhaps dates back to the sixteenth century, suggests that the experience of the city constitutes a summit of earthly fulfillment beside which all other experiences are dross, and proposes it as the destination of a secular pilgrimage, a Santiago de Compostela of the flesh. “When good Americans die, they go to Paris,” an aphorism that has been attributed to both Oscar Wilde and Oliver Wendell Holmes, takes the idea a step farther. While the phrase is nominally a satirical dart aimed at pretentious Americans, it still assumes that Paris is an ideal, one that the naïve, awkward, earnest United States will never be able to match. In suggesting that Paris is tantamount to the hereafter it is grinning on only one side of its face. 

Somehow Paris was already the object of such reverence when it possessed few if any of the features with which we associate it. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who spent much of his reign warring against France, defined the matter in 1539: “All other cities are merely cities, but Paris is a world.” At the time, Paris was less than a twentieth the size it is today, with less than a tenth the population. It did possess the cathedral of Notre Dame, as well as a royal palace called the Louvre that bore no resemblance to the present edifice and was a good bit smaller, but none other of today’s principal monuments. Montmartre was then a hill out in the countryside; the Champs-Élysées were merely fields; even the Bastille lay outside the walls. And yet Paris was seen as a world—not a nation or an empire or a land of Cockaigne, but a world. For his part, Charles revealed himself as more than just a would-be conqueror; he was an incipient tourist.

But then it could be said that tourism is an extension of war by other means. It, too, is all about conquest, after all, a bloodless kind of acquisition but acquisition nevertheless, involving as much campaigning and billeting and heedless intrusion and self-satisfied ignorance as the original model. Tourism as we know it today is generally considered to have begun with the British visitors who came over to Waterloo to stare at the battlefield after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815. That same year, British, Prussian, Austrian, and Russian soldiers descended upon the capital of their defeated enemy and proceeded to patronize its wine shops, whorehouses, gambling dens, and restaurants—the latter a recent Parisian innovation—making them the direct ancestors of everyone who ever signed up for a Wagons-Lits Cook bus tour of Pigalle by Night. The word bistro—Russian for “quickly”—entered the Parisian vocabulary that year, bestowed by visiting Cossacks who presumably flung it at waiters. “We’ll always have Paris,” you can imagine the Death’s Head Hussar saying to the Corsican trollop as he reattaches his spurs in the morning. Bismarck came to rekindle the romance in 1870, and Hitler likewise an even 70 years later, both bringing with them troops sufficient to fill up the nagging emptiness of the Champs-Élysées and seal the fervent impulse with firepower. All that was lacking was an impregnation, its issue a reimagined Berlin that would eclipse Paris once and for all. But that was never going to happen. Tourists can only bring home souvenirs that, like wet stones, quickly fade to dun in foreign surroundings.

Better than souvenirs are memories, especially when they have been adulterated by movies and pulp novels and nightclub ballads. Two entire generations of Americans were brought to Paris as a happy consequence of war. “How You Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm?” was a pertinent question especially on the eve of Prohibition, as well as in the light of postwar prosperity that affected one country but not the other, so that France was almost a third-world bargain for Americans from 1918 until well into the 1960s. I Love Paris, the survivors of that era said with one voice, wistfully remembering April in Paris—although they were there in endless November—and relishing the lingering flavor of Paris When It Sizzles, although they spent their time tweezing crab lice in a leaky hôtel de passe somewhere in the grayest reaches of the outer arrondissements. Paris was the world, the flesh, and the devil in all the best ways, and it had taken away their virginity, literal or otherwise. They would go home with a packet of dirty pictures (maybe Louvre postcards of undraped classical statuary, sold as porn in a sidewalk bait-and-switch), an Olympia Press edition of Tropic of Cancer, a genuine Basque beret, a recording of “Fleur de Paris” by Maurice Chevalier, an ashtray stolen from Harry’s New York Bar (“Sank Roo Doe Noo”), a garter (provenance uncertain), etcetera. But they had their memories, growing paradoxically more brightly colored as they dimmed. They forgot the soot, the dirt, the cold, the exhaust fumes, the bedbugs, the clap. They couldn’t remember how much they had missed ketchup, cornflakes, and being able to talk to people at the bus stop. Their memories had merged with An American in Paris and Funny Face and Gigi and The Aristocats.

At least their Paris was derived, however distantly, from something that had once actually been lived by them. Others nursed different notions, based on merchandising, pop culture, or thin air. Paris was a pink wash in which stylized Eiffel Towers dotted the landscape like oil derricks in Long Beach and topiary-clipped poodles pranced in step with variously lavender humanoids in flounces. Paris was a mafia whorehouse of gilded baroque curlicues, a city-sized badger game, a mortuary of expired ideas, a treadmill of obligatory culture, a place where people could understand you perfectly but pretended not to out of snobbery or pure sadism, and, of course, a moral sewer. “Atlanta gets her styles from New York, and New York gets her styles from Paris, and Paris gets her styles from hell,” thundered the Rev. J. M. Gates in 1926. Paris may have stood as the hallmark of culture to the bon ton, but down in the American streets “Paris,” like “art,” was a code word indicating smut. Every midway of every carnival in the United States housed its fan-dancers and hoochie-coochie girls in a concession tent bearing a banner that said something like “Streets of Paris.” If the words “Paris” and “art” appeared together in a description or company name before about 1965, you could be sure the product would arrive in your mailbox—assuming it arrived at all—in multiple wrappers of brown paper with a bogus return address.

We’ll always have Paris. Ah, but which Paris? All over the world the name trails behind it any number of fictions. To this very day, for example, a sizeable share of the couch-art market is given over to representations of Paris that depend on commonplaces of the Third Republic, sights no mortal eye has seen since 1914, expressed in palette-knife parodies of Impressionist delicacy. My own childhood living room in New Jersey—inhabited by French-speaking Europeans, mind you—was dominated by a reproduction, purchased at Woolworth’s, of a canvas by Antoine Blanchard (1910-88), who specialized in depicting the Belle Époque but whose works were mostly made after World War II. He manufactured hundreds of variations on a single theme: symmetrical vistas looking down a boulevard with a landmark at dead center rear, with various insubstantial pedestrians floating in the middle distance. His paintings are so similar that, looking at a website featuring dozens of them, I could not with any certainty pick out the one I had lived with for at least a decade. Blanchard converted Impressionism into an endlessly replicable formula; he was Monet without subtlety, Renoir without flesh, Caillebotte without lived experience. But he expressed what for many people is the essence of Paris: some dim memory, perhaps archetypal or ancestral or from a prior incarnation, of romance permeating daily life. (I confess I bought the thing and gave it to my parents for Christmas, maybe age ten.)

This vague, untethered nostalgia, which converts a living, breathing metropolis—with all the problems and complications and contradictions of a metropolis—into a permanent holiday for the senses, is nothing new. And the fantasies involved were of course not created by the Americans or the Japanese; the French themselves concocted every inch, down to the poodles. The twilight-years nostalgia of Jean Renoir’s French Cancan (1954), for example, has him not simply animating Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings of Montmartre nightlife circa 1890, but giving them a muscular Vegas treatment, everything multiplied and exaggerated for maximum oomph—more showgirls, more precision choreography, shinier costumes, louder music. You might wonder which is imitating which in that case; Paris and its showgirls influenced Vegas from the get-go, after all. To complete the circle, Renoir’s Americanized Montmartre 1890 would become the tourist Montmartre of the 1950s and ‘60s, selling back to American veterans a romantic technicolor facsimile of the place they had experienced in the cold, gray, shortage-ridden postwar.

It is almost as if over the centuries Paris has plotted and stage-managed its own image, like a canny, weathered, independent-minded star. Paris is the world’s leading tourist destination, and there are ten thousand ingredients listed on the side of its box, many more than, say, New York. In no particular order: architecture, art, sex, cuisine, wine, history, poetry, fashion, style, taste, hauteur, elegance, irony, extravagance, a variety of expressions primarily accomplished with the lips and the eyebrows, an encyclopedia of ways of walking down the street, a language that manages to sound variously witty and cutting and kittenish and lapidary even to people who can’t understand a word, a way of presenting goods without apparent hyperbole that nevertheless succeeds in convincing the mark that his or her life will lack meaning without their purchase—all these qualities exist in the present day. Immediately behind them stand, in rings, a host of items that are simply assumed by the piker, since they derive from decades or centuries of lore and tradition, even though they may have little or no verifiable contemporary existence. More than even Venice or Hollywood, Paris is a cultural construct you can walk around in, where the border between truth and fiction can seem exceedingly porous to the visitor, where the appearance of the Eiffel Tower in the background can call into question the material reality of everything in the foreground. To dazzled eyes it may not be apparent that the workaday proceeds inexorably above and below and behind all the gewgaws and clichés and casual beauty and ancient stones, and that was even more the case when harsh reality was far less concealed than it is now. ♦