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There is a new advertisement in the Metro which is the quintessence of French culture. It is for Galerie Lafayette, which is a big luxurious department store. The target and subject of the advertisement is one and the same: L’Homme, written in a deliberate indeliberate scrawl, dominates the lower middle of the ad, behind which a half-naked French guy stares out. He’s bearded and with long hair, and he seems to project a sort of steamy, arrogant intellectualism. In his hands, he holds Jean Baudrillard’s La Societé de Consommation.

That is a very complicated ad to deconstruct for the foreigner, but, here is the joke: Baudrillard believed that reality was “hyperreality” and a simulacrum due to the profusion of images and mass media, which of course meant that people consumed a lot of stuff, which is the defining characteristic of the capitalist economy (i.e. The Consumption Society above). And, of course, this is mass media attempting to convince you to consume based on the fact that L’Homme must consume; it is his duty. It’s a high-irony, postmodern version of a very typical ad: everyone else is doing it.

Actually, myself, I’m not sure that the ad communicates in the same shorthand that most advertisements do. Both foreigners and citizens have paused in front of the ad and really considered it, as if it were a work of art hanging in a museum until they get the joke, which probably bodes well for their brand, both that people are willing to try and figure it out and that people will eventually walk away thinking, that’s pretty smart.

On the other hand, I saw an ad on TV tonight that is utterly obvious (I thought by starting with American, but we are pretty good at advertisements). It was a coffee machine making coffees all on its own while James Brown’s “Sex Machine” played in the background. It’s the type of joke where you laugh involuntarily, almost out of shock that someone would try something that amateurish.

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Of Napoleon III, Karl Marx declared, “History repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” On the upper corner of the Opera Garnier, amongst all the baroque ornamentation, a shield depends, declaring “Agriculture. Industry.” Baudelaire quotes a woman, his girlfriend, in “The Eyes of the Poor”, saying, “I cannot stand those [poor] people with their eyes open wide as a porte cochere. Please ask the manager to get them out of here!” Le Temps asked anxiously, “Are we no longer anything more than the capital of elegance and pleasure?”

Incredibly, all of these things are related more than just temporally. They are related by the vitality of the Parisian social scene of the Belle Epoque that came from Baron Haussman’s new urban design that made Paris walkable. In making the city walkable, the cultures, once provincial, began to mix. That mixture created a cultural explosion that led to those diverse reactions quoted above.

Shelley Rice writes on page 19 of Parisian Views, “This was the moment, this Age of Revolutions, when historical events changed faster than individual lives; when cities altered their faces more rapidly than people did…” There was “madness” about this time. The clamor, the great to-do, all were manifestations of the great energies propelled by Baron Hausmann’s reforms: of demolishing old neighborhoods and building grand boulevards in their place.

The sources for Baron Haussmann’s reforms were the malaise that blighted the previous era and the economic boom of Napoleon III. They unleashed potential energy like the removal of a dam from a pent-up river. Once removed, the welcome result was a grand mixture of classes and peoples.

Let us start with the earliest cause. There was, undeniably, a malaise suffused throughout Paris, and it was more than just the untreated cesspools. It was poverty at home and impotence abroad. There was a sense that the past had been better, and that the best move was a return to the source of that glory. Napoleon I was unavailable, but Napoleon III was. However, Napoleon III, by virtue of his perceived socialist leanings and Bonaparte familial relations, found himself distrusted by many of the powerful. Simultaneously, to make good on his reputation with the poor, he needed to establish something dynamic, of somehow evoking some perpetual motion machine traveling towards a prosperous future.

Part of his solution was to assert himself on the international state—it’s no accident that commentators always refer to his foreign policy as his “adventures”—to show France’s vitality on the world stage. The other part, more relevant, is to his actions in Paris to create a kind of permanent vitality.

Focusing on the Opera Garnier illuminates exactly what I mean. It is, as is frequently noted, built in a pastiche of different styles but emphasizing baroque ornamentation. I’ve seen the Opera Garnier before, and, between the enormous statues and warm interior colors, I had always been convinced that it was built in 17th century. Obviously not, but it shows that Napoleon III’s aim had been met: he had established roots with the past. But roots only nourish; there must be an object of their nourishment, in this case, a society to feed. That is why the shield in the upper corner of the façade declares, “Agriculture. Industry,” as if to assure all who see that France is about more than mere frippery, that the nation still has “it”.

But it seems to be no accident that Haussmann’s urban renewal program is centered on monuments like the Opera Garnier. As was noted in several different readings, his boulevards and grand avenues all terminate at monuments or squares—public spaces, in other words, where people could mix. There is something distinctly Parisian in that, of still retaining the treasured past even as the future washes over us.

The idea of the public space, though, is where that unleashed energy showed its full effects. Consider the use of the word flâneur in both Baudelaire and historical texts. Everyone writes that genre of person, and deservedly so: the people-watcher becoming a central character in the drama of the city is a positive development. It means that people are mixing, that the poor can be seen along with the rich. That some, like Baudelaire’s girlfriend quoted in the opening paragraph, prefer to actively not see (a different thing from never seeing) underscores the obvious reality that that obvious reality is there to be seen.

There were some that decried the changes to the city, of the destruction of old neighborhoods, the forcing-out of the poor and the rising rents, as awful and sad. Obviously this can be considered bad. But it was, in fact, necessary for the city, for it was stagnating. The boulevards liberated the city. It was as if a shut-up, sweltering, heavy room had had its windows flung open: the breeze invigorated and relieved to great effect. The energy that pervaded Paris seems to me to be directly responsible for the growth in Realism, Impressionism and all those great artists and writers of the era.

It contains lessons for our own time. As has been demonstrated in study after study, isolated neighborhoods, especially by class, stagnate in their own assumptions. Much of the urban anomie of our time is caused by isolation. One of the most worrying studies I’ve seen is that Democrats tend to move in to congressional districts with Democrats, Republicans with Republicans with an accompanying hardening of opinion. But in Haussmann’s Paris, the rich saw the poor and the neighborhoods stayed open all night, mixing the social sphere together in a rich alchemy. Napoleon III, if he failed at many other things, succeeded in creating the closest thing to a perpetual motion machine as is possible: the Parisian social scene of the Belle Epoque.

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People are shoving and pushing now on the metro, and frustrations have, non-shockingly, gone up a notch. The ordinary etiquette is being thrown out in slow motion. Now there are RATP conductors manning the halls of Chatalet, acting like airline traffic controllers, ferrying people into lines and order. It’s probably necessary.

For me, while I am unhappy about the strike, I’m trying to let it affect me as little as possible. I cannot control it, and it is of little use to rage against forces beyond your control. This is a policy easier to say than to enact, but I am trying as best I can.