The Napoleonic Complex
As I mentioned, a good number of public buildings are either from the First or Second Empire, and there are peculiar instances when one or the other intrudes, as at Notre Dame, when the treasures on display in the side room mostly date from the Second Empire. Additionally, most of the architecture that dominates Paris is from the late 19th century, or is an imitation.
When one goes to Washington DC, one is directed to top sites like the Capitol and the White House. In Paris, mention of the National Assembly or the Presidential Palace is perfunctory, and no one urges one to visit. One of the top sites in the Washington area is Mount Vernon, the estate of George Washington below Alexandria, on the Potomac. There is no comparable emphasis on public men that I can see in Paris, or if there is, it is one of the Napoleons.
It is like the monarchic and republican sentiments were both satisfied for awhile by the Empires, and now are fractured, and there is a difficulty in dealing with history now, a strange detachment, where it is all just so much spectacle.
Similarly, the uniformity and startling lack of change since Baron Hausmann laid out modern Paris for Louis Napoleon bespeaks a strong nostalgia. One of the favorite entertainments in the city is the chanson cabaret, where someone leads sing- a- longs, essentially, of old tunes. The Metro has signs that are in art nouveau style, as if they were mounted when it was laid out. Although I saw nothing particularly Jewish about the Marais district, but kosher restaurants were all over the place in the Opera district where I was staying, well, the Marais was once and forevermore the Jewish district, and the Opera is not.
Paris is also a comparatively poor city. That becomes clear when one sees the cars that most people drive, or the lack of houses in the city itself. Right now, gasoline prices are about the same as in the states, and, in any case, my Accord gets good mileage. No, they are driving cheap cars because that is what is affordable. Similarly, there are plenty of houses in Washington, not all expensive, either. Go to Capitol Hill or Anacostia, and one can find pretty affordable housing. We looked at some advertisements for chateaux, and they were amazingly inexpensive for the size of the houses and property. One possibility is that they required maintenance, but I don't think that is all there is to it. It is just hard to find people who can afford them.
It is a comparatively lazy and absent- minded city. In restaurant after restaurant, service was desultory, and it could take forever for the check. The guidebooks explain it by the French appreciation of the good life, and the pleasures of the table, so they do not understand the hurried meal. But things kept happening to belie this, like waiters forgetting to bring my wine with the main course, or knowing that we had refused coffee and asked for the check, yet doing a dozen other things before remembering we needed the check.
We had a cabbie drop us four blocks from our hotel because there were too many one way streets for him to handle. At a currency exchange, I asked for 10 franc notes, so that I would have smaller denominations. He explained that they did not have 10 franc notes, but did not mention that they had 10 franc coins. When our camcorder was stolen, no one suggested taking down our name and hotel in case it had been accidentally picked up by another tourist, and instead of calling a patrol car, we had to walk 6 blocks or so to the police station. These are the sort of things that make an impression on one.
Meanwhile, whether it is cheap or thoughtless, no one will turn on the air conditioning, even when some ventilation is required, and no one will give you ice with a soft drink, or more than a couple of cubes. They do not turn the refrigerators in stores up, unless ice cream is involved. This became a serious quality of life issue, especially on the warm days, but more than that, I was appalled at the conditions under which they stored their art. I did, in fact, see an Italian crucifixion, about the late 14th century, with one tip of the cross separated from the canvas, almost certainly from humidity rather than human handling.
At one time, France was perhaps the most advanced country in the world, and Paris was her greatest city. The apex of this was before World War I, however, and it has been a descent since. After World War II, even the art world shifted its center to New York, but that was almost an afterthought, since Americans had been a chief support of the Parisian avant- garde. Paris is stuck, in nostalgia for that past, and unwillingness to break free of long lunches with plenty to drink. It is lovely, but it is a coquette, and pretty nearly a dumb blonde........ |
