Creative types have a problem. They love Paris with its history and art, but by definition need to be virulently anti-nostalgic. For nostalgia is the un-creative adoration of how things were, and artists need to remain focused on the present state of things and the state of future things. As the calendar year turned and energy everywhere is pointing to the end of many things and the beginning of others, I thought it'd be a healthy exercise to take a visual inventory of the changes that Paris has undergone since I've been here some 20 years. When the scale tips heavier on the years you've been away than your age at the time of your arrival, it's clearly time to faire le bilan. If you've been in Paris a short while you might want to know that it's not always been like this. If it's been years that Paris has been home, taking stock of the transformations is a sure way of growing out of the worn images that paper the walls of your memory. For me, it's hard to believe that that year or two jaunt grew into 20 and a generation has passed since I first climbed off the train in the Gare de Nord. I've seen hundreds of friends come and go, becoming short-lived expats doing the "Paris thing" for awhile and returning to briefly interrupted lives back home. Admittedly, everyone should live in Paris at least once preferably twice, once in your twenties and once after retirement but for some of us the "once" never stops. You may be asking yourself when your "once" will come to a close and you go back to who you were, but only different. But, although there are no published statistics on the subject, like for smokers trying to quit, people who've spent a year or more in Paris can't seem to get the habit out of their systems and tend to try it again. So, after 20 years in an adopted city it's time to clean out the cobwebs of nostalgia, to look around and note the real changes that have occurred, and the evolution we've undergone as Parisians, Europeans and citizens of the world. In many ways, despite the slowness of societal change here, this is no longer the Paris we first set eyes on. And acknowledging this is key to getting unglued from a past that is no longer true. To be sure, the world everywhere has erupted in the sphere of technology and information: a very hip full-page ad for the Internal Revenue Service News and World Report strongly encourages American taxpayers to make their declarations on the government's Web site, while Delta Airlines just announced that passengers who book on the Delta Web Site will pay less than those that still call the airline or stop in at a travel agency... In contrast, France still appears to lag behind. Largely due to the centralization of the administration, it has only been in the last five years that there seems to have been a real shift in mentality of French managers. Yet, I tend to forget that the Paris I came to in the fall of 1978 pre-dates the Carte Bleue,the guichet automatique,and the telephone card. Not only did we put coins in the phones, we ran around the city late at night on news of a broken cabinefrom where you could place your overseas calls for free. In the late '70s and early '80s, there were a good number of us that were rejecting middle-class American life and its overbearing commercialism. I remember cutting up an unsolicited Mobil Oil credit card that the company sent to all graduating seniors at top-ranked colleges. Today our wallets in Paris tend to thrive on plastic and the digit is deeply encrusted in French daily life. Thinking of coins, the replacement of the old clunky 10-franc coin symbolizes for some of us the change in an era. Having four or five of those heavy chunks of grey-green metal in your pocket made you feel rich. The "new" smaller clad coins today buy you a Trib, a can of Coke or a half-hour of parking. Other icons of change: the replacement of the very French police uniforms with those roundish angular hats and dark blue capes. Something very Parisian died when les flicstook on the current, New York-inspired garb and traded in those puny Renault 5s for the more robust and less-laughable Renault 19s. Concealed pistols replaced whistles and crime seemed to arrive. Physically, Paris has changed radically. Perhaps the soul of the place has shifted only slightly, but the aesthetics and the form of the cityscape and urban life has transformed Paris over the last two decades far more than we tend to (or want to) realize. Looking around town, it's hard not to stumble on grotesque examples of change and the proof of time past. Surely, everyone knows that every French president leaves his mark in architectural terms. American presidents think of legislation, but not in France. In truth, when François Mitterrand lost power and then finally died of prostate cancer, a certain aesthetic and spirituality died too. When I first moved into my boulevard du Temple room, Les Halles was in its last days as the Central marchéfor the city. The words "Les Halles" today evoke images of The Gap, Footlocker and Quick rather than wholesale boucheriesand marchands de primeurs.I had friends living in sixth floor studios at the back of very seedy courtyards a hundred meters from Châtelet. Today the site boasts a Novatel. La Défense was that far-off eruption of skyscrapers à la Le Corbusier,our mini-Brasilia, but there was no Grand Archeto be seen, and the number one metro line stopped at Neuilly. All the metro lines have been extended and some of us still refer to the old destinations as the end of the line. Of course the new robotic line 14 feels more like the airport shuttle in Atlanta than anything related to Paris. But this is relatively positive, and I plan to make better use of the new Bibliothèque Nationale as a result. No one in Paris was talking about I.M. Pei until he was brought in to construct his controversial glass pyramid at the Louvre, an addition to the cityscape that revolutionized the new Paris aesthetic and its relationship to functionality. (It took years for the Pompidou Center aesthetic to lose its shock value.) With the Pyramid, people started feeling differently about the Louvre; it emerged from the era of being a dark, haunting and timeless institution of the past, where you'd mill around on rainy gray Sundays pausing to write in your journal or to compose an overdue aerogram. The Museé d'Orsay was yet to be converted from the shell of the old Gare d'Orsay and the Louvre's Impressionist collection was housed in the Jeu de Paume above the place de la Concorde, whose obelisk of course had no golden point at the top. In fact, there was a lot less gold leaf and gilt in Paris in the '70s and '80s. Much of the shine came with the Mitterand push to beautify the city for the Bicentennial of the Revolution in 1989. (the Pont Alexandre III, les Invalides, etc.) And of course for that occasion, the Bastille Opera was inaugurated, a change that transformed the entire Bastille area and launched the march of Paris night life progressively east. The Bastille quarter, not all that long ago, was cluttered with impoverished bohemians and avant-garde artists. Areas east were considered remote and few visitors to Paris ventured as far out as Nation or the Gare de Lyon. Today some of the most interesting neighborhoods to live in and explore are in the 20th, 18th, and banlieues rouge. No review of Paris' changes these last few years could ignore EuroDisney, renamed Disneyland Paris for marketing purposes, which opened in the Marne Valley and injected itself onto every RATP map. A "devastating" detail for me was the publication of a Michelin green guide for the park, as it merited the status of a region like the Loire or Alsace. The list of instances of commercialism that have spilled over from the American global mall ethic could go on for ever, but I'm scared now of falling into the trap of nostalgia that I'm fundamentally opposed to.... So, the artists in us must move on to discover new creative ways of being Parisians in today's Paris. It wasn't better; it was different... Contributing writer David Applefield is the author of Paris Inside Out, and the Unofficial Guide to Paris. He also edits the literary journal Frank and the Paris Anglophone web site www.paris-anglo.com. |
