City of Lights

Paris has put its lights up. The Champs-Elysees glows blue and the Arc de Triomphe is brilliant white for Christmas. Other neighborhoods have followed suit. The Rue Mouffetard, a former student’s quarter (but now, like the rest of Paris, is gentrifying), winds up a slight grade with the same light tranquil blue glow as the Champs. It will be Christmas soon.

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The banlieues, too, are all lit up. Needless to say, it is not a festive spirit that illuminates them. When I last wrote of them, it was a he-said-she-said situation; now it is more clear that the government is lying. According to Le Monde, someone in a neighboring apartment building took a video of the incident after it occurred that completely contradicts the government’s account of the accident. Comparisons to Rodney King appear to be particularly popular in comment threads.

Now, as opposed to the riots in 2005, these riots occur with guns: the rioters have acquired hunting shotguns, one of the few types of guns legally available to Frenchmen. Apparently the police have shown restraint in shooting back; they merely disperse crowds with tear gas and shoot paint balls to mark suspects for later arrest (who knew that paint balls would be used by anyone other than warriors who fight in their mind?). The restraint is admirable and needed—I suspect that fighting fire with fire would unleash an inferno.

What is clear is that at least Villiers-le-Bel (the specific banlieue that the fighting has touched off in) has been organizing somewhat. That people have been taking affirmative steps to acquire weapons where before they did not have any. And now, they are fighting “guerilla warfare” (Le Monde’s take) against the police, with children as young as ten joining in on the rampage: they are burning cars and shooting police.

This represents yet another affront to France’s ideal of France: that it is a country where everyone is French, that there are no subgroups, that everyone is a citoyen first and foremost. Note well how no paper, neither Le Monde, nor Le Figaro, nor L’Humanité, nor Le Liberation mentioned the obvious fact, the obvious cause of all this: that the children who died in the accident were North African. I knew it must be so when I first heard of the story, but I did not know until I read The New York Times. That is the clear cause—they know it. Le Monde quotes a child saying, “Celui-là, il est à la famille.” (Here [speaking of a geographic location in Villiers-le-Bel], it’s to the family.”) They’re a family, and they’re building barricades. And the rest of France’s immigrants feel a kinship with the immigrants of Paris—in 2005, the riot spread to all the banlieue of France; the riot spread to Toulouse last night. How could they have felt like an ‘us’ without a ‘them’? How does the ‘them’ come about? It comes about through mutual self-definition, which means that the ideal of the Republic was compromised at that moment.

To my mind, not acknowledging the problem allows it to fester. The French speak of banlieue and of immigrants and of assimilation (who else could they mean but non-Caucasian faces?) but everyone knows that the problem is that those immigrants have high unemployment and few prospects. We were discussing education in French class today, and our teacher mentioned that there are hardly any non-white people in the grandes écoles, the most prestigious universities in France, the ones that mold the elites for the country. It’s true, looking at ISEP, there are hardly any non-white faces. So there is little to do for these immigrants but roil in the suburbs.

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My reaction to Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin, with its grid of plus-sign shaped apartment buildings in the center of Paris, and the renovation of Les Halles was largely the same: one of confusion, of “what’s the goal here?” The new ‘skyscrapers’ of Paris provoke a similar reaction for me. A dreary utilitarianism infects all of these concrete slabs, and it’s easy to see why so much anger was directed at these monoliths. They were the harbingers of a gray, standardized system that paid too much attention to the general and not enough to the specific which is part of the French genius and exceptionalism.

Take, for example, the renovation of Les Halles. My family rented in a friend of a friend’s apartment in the second arrondisement this week, so I found myself walking through Les Halles in many different instances and environments. When it is gray, a gloom descends on the exterior of Les Halles; when it is sunny, it is merely acceptable but no one wants to stay. No matter when I saw it, the merry-go-round was empty and stopped. The underground mall is not interesting in its architectural vision (it is the worst of unfilled spaces, a void) and in its specific stores (which are the closest thing to a suburban strip mall, hardly the best exemplar of the United States, that I’ve seen in France). Even on Sunday, its busiest day, it was a mere artery of the circulatory system, not a destination in of itself. The attitude of everyone, unusually so in Paris, is to get to where you’re going and fast. This would not be so bad if Les Halles were not such a historically important district or such a geographically central neighborhood, meaning that there are two highly important reasons why it should be vital rather than the French equivalent of a ghost town, lacking only a tumbleweed bouncing in front of a saloon.

Of all the designs featured in the New York Times website, I find all of them lacking, but Koolhas’ comes the closest to my ideal. The colors are too garish, but the idea is right: the center of the city should have energy bursting forth like geyser, spilling out into the surrounding neighborhoods.

In fact, according to “Assassination of Les Halles,” the city stumbled upon the perfect solution in the process of its renovation. In moving the food market to the suburbs, the void left in Les Halles was one onto which activities could be projected; new businesses moved in, creating a diversity of cultural events and interesting happenings. That, to me, better reflects the spirit of the hurly-burly of Les Halles than the current circulatory model.

But instead they went to the current ugly model, thereby losing the chance of fulfilling multiple ambitious goals. De Gaulle’s ideal inspires the rest of design. He wanted Paris to be the capital of Europe, as it was in Napoleon’s time, for everything from aesthetics to industry. But being the capital in one arena meant sacrificing its comparative advantages in another—for example, building the Tour Montparnasse meant sacrificing part of the aesthetic of Paris. Unless—and this is the potentially brilliant move—the necessary modernizing improvements could be located in the suburbs, where their ugliness could not infect the rest of the city with its contagion. By and large, the project worked well, excepting the Les Halles disaster.

The conviction that all of these goals were in reach, despite the atrophy besetting France in the early post-war period, was a special manifestation of French exception. Yes, we are the best in high culture and low; we have a pure language that is ours; we can manufacture; we know how to live. In Paris at its best, this pride manifests itself as slaving over each and every detail with a conviction that excellence is attainable in all of them. In this, French exceptionalism is the same as the American version, if focused on different goals.

Those concrete slabs thrust into the ground at the outskirts of the city are a betrayal of that; they almost seem a capitulation to France’s conception of the United States as summarized by America the Menace, the 1930’s attack on America: “For this French visitor, the symbols of America’s modernity were its mass-produced, artless, and tasteless food and its endless rows of tacky wooden houses.”

It is almost as if the French operated by the light-switch conception of life: either the light’s on, or it’s off, there is no in between. This is as true in economics as in restaurants (I think the concept of a fusion restaurant would be alien to the French). One can have economic modernity, but at the cost of an aesthetic sense of life. But it’s a continuity, and perhaps the French should look more closely at themselves right now: their productivity is among the highest in the world and yet their aesthetic sense is still, after all these years, strong.

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We met with Germaine Dagognet yesterday for lunch. It was for an interview; we ended up eating lunch along with it.

One particular comment of his jumped out at me. He said that the “People”-style of journalism was becoming far more prevalent in France. Before, details of politician’s private lives were largely uncovered, like FDR’s polio or JFK’s affairs. But now, with Sarkozy’s divorce and subsequent re-entry into the game (Germaine said that pictures of his “copaine” had surfaced; a host mother apparently believes he and Rashida Dati, his minister of Justice, are an item), the “Peopleization” of politics has apparently hit France in a big way.

It seems, however, that Sarkozy brought it on himself to a certain extent. I’m not referring to his divorce—I don’t know the details, I don’t care to know, and seeing as my knowledge is incomplete, I cannot judge. I mean a famous photo of Sarkozy’s, in which he took a picture of his family and him mimicking the posture of JFK’s family in a typical JFK-puff-piece-photo. Seeing as JFK remains America’s premier celebrity-president (I don’t exactly hear people singing the praises of Cuban Missile Crisis policy over his fucking Marilyn Monroe), that’s a pretty bold statement on Sarkozy’s part.

In a sense, though, the “Peopleization” of politics is inevitable, natural and more complex than its detractors give credit for. I too hate coverage of John Edwards’ haircuts and of Hillary Clinton’s cleavage, have no fear of that. But, upon thinking about it, “Peopleization” is a far more complex phenomenon than is given credit for.

The example that everyone brings up is JFK’s follies and FDR’s infirmities. Journalists did indeed keep that information secret. At the time. We know about it now, and both are seen as interesting, critical parts of the story of the two Presidents. Going back further, we love to talk about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln’s personal qualities. The reason is that the President is and always has been both a national leader and a moral leader. As such his personal life is, well, (how antique this phrase) a role model.

Nor is America alone in the elevation of its chief executive above mere technocrat. In that Vanishing Children of Paris book, the King Louis XV was demonized as a baby-killer, as a kind of vampire. De Gaulle fended off multiple coups largely on his moral prestige. As for Sarkozy, besides his marital business, he has made a point to meet both wounded police and wounded immigrants, as if to project by his mere moral presence the need for unity in France.

No, perceived moral standing in chief executives has always been important. And I think even the most cynical about the “Peopleization” of politics would agree that serious moral turpitude—no, religious conservatives, blowjobs don’t count—should disqualify a chief executive from legitimate office. So perhaps in some senses it is worthwhile to worry about the personal qualities and deeds of the chief executive.

But the problem with “Peopleizaton” is how very overblown it is. I very much doubt cleveage or haircuts reflect serious moral choices, for one. The whole phenomenon requires hordes to be deployed, and once employed, they don’t just go away, they have to justify their own presence. That’s how we get haircut stories.

Furthermore, that hordes hunt every spoor of a candidate’s life means that you, the candidate, either have to be really good at hiding your shit or not doing it in the first place. The first means we have exceptionally good dissemblers as chief executive, surely not the qualities we want to be encouraging in our leaders. The second means bland candidates who take no risks at all personally, and a lack of risks in one’s personal life denies one the chance to grow, meaning we get stunted sheltered bland candidates, again surely not the qualities we want to be encouraging in our leaders. So while we would love to have candidates with the public virtue of a Lincoln or Washington, it is clear that searching too hard for it destroys it.

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A haze hung in Paris. It surrounded the Tour Montparnasse, lending it a mountainous distant aspect. The light filtered through it, as if we all saw the world through bad glasses. In the 14th where I lived, the haze floated above Parc Montsouris going directly north—as soon as I made the slightest move east, it disappear—and dampened and distanced the lights on top of the buildings making them seem like stars at first sight.

I did not and do not know what the source is; I have never seen it before. My first thought was: the banlieue are burning.