Paris is a changeable feast

Has this Olympics finally allowed Paris to live in the present?

Dear Friend, 

Et voilà ! Here we are on the last day of Paris 2024. I feel very lucky — maybe even a little smug — to have been here in Paris for the whole thing. I also already feel sad that it’s ending, making way for a return to reality. On TV this morning, the usual Olympics panel of commentators also featured a political scientist, who spoke about how the scramble for power in France will resume this week.

We have spent the last few days hosting my former colleague and dear friend Colette and her partner Taryl, who had tickets to the women’s football final. In the few hours before they arrived, I hurriedly tidied away piles of shoes and over-spilling papers, put away long-left-out laundry etc.

My partner has a song he sings for my last-minute activity on such occasions — it goes:

“For the guests…YES! For the guests…YES!”. 

It’s a simple song, but in its upbeat simplicity there is an intention — I believe — to highlight the contrast between my usual attitude to tidiness and that which I adopt for visitors. 

Well, there is something about the spirit of “for the guests…YES!” in the transformation of Paris over these past two Olympics weeks. The metro is reborn, from an ill-tempered maze to a well sign-posted subterranean train of jollity. The police are friendly and helpful, even funny! And Parisians themselves (those that didn’t leave) are unashamedly and unreservedly enthusiastic and positive. 

All week I’ve seen headlines in the French press like, ‘Are Parisians finally happy?’ (Le Monde) and ‘La France qui croit en elle’ / ‘France that believes in herself’ (Le Point).

Léon Marchand, Eiffel, quotes from Thomas Jolly

This is, of course, a kind of parenthesis. After calling the snap election just weeks before the opening ceremony, President Macron then insisted that there would be no political machinations during the Games — which would have been an easier point to make if he wasn’t the one who dissolved parliament in the first place!

In recent days, the president has been seen out and about basking in the glory of the French medal-winners, holding them tenderly in his arms (whether they like it or not) and snapping selfies with celebrities and foreign dignitaries.

More than once during these Games, I’ve seen the phrase “Paris est une fête”, the French translation of the title of Ernest Hemingway’s memoir, ‘Paris is a moveable feast’ recounting his time in Paris as a young man in the 1920s. 

This Games has put the city of Paris on display and French culture and history is alluded to and emphasised at every turn. Even the route of the marathon retraces the path of 6000 women who stormed Versailles palace in 1789 at the start of the Revolution.

Among the most striking locations are the Eiffel Tower, the Alexander III Bridge and the Grand Palais, which were all built during Paris’s Belle Epoque. The Eiffel Tower was built for the Universal Exhibition of 1889, celebrating the centenary of the Revolution, and the Grand Palais and the bridge were constructed for the next gathering in 1900.

This was a time when Paris was at the forefront of modernity and apex of innovation for art, fashion and engineering. The Haussmannian architecture was new and the Eiffel Tower was the tallest structure in the world. Dozens of countries across the globe were part of the colonial French empire and their cultures and resources were proudly put on display at the Universal Exhibitions. Hemingway’s ‘Moveable Feast’ was written at the tail-end of this period of French dominance.

Symbols of this time have become so almost clichéd in our collective imagination, that it can be hard to register how high-tech France was during this era. In a previous letter, I shared my theory that Paris was the Silicon Valley of the late 19th and early 20th century (and Pablo Picasso its Elon Musk). And in some ways — Hemingway’s ever-popular memoir being case in point — I think much of what we think about Paris still comes from this era: the art styles, the monuments, the architecture, even the music, like the can-can and the accordion ditties. 

A lot of Paris’s tourism centres around visiting the vestiges of this golden age, such as the Musée d’Orsay, which was a Belle Epoque railway station and houses the painting of the avant-garde of the late 1800s; or the streets of Montmartre, the epicentre of counter-culture in the 19th century. But I think Paris has often had a hard time convincing people that it’s a  real, living place that has a future as well as a past. 

As someone who lives in this city as a local but also writes about it for the benefit of other foreigners, I have struggled before with this tussle between Paris as a real place in the present tense versus what people often associate with the city, which is wrapped up in century-old heritage. Editors and producers can tend to be more interested in Paris as the world already perceives it, rather than what it might be becoming (this is one of the reasons I started writing these letters).

Huge crowds gather to watch the balloon rise every night

What I think these Games may just have managed — in line, I believe, with the intentions of the organisers — is an update of the image of Paris in the world’s collective imagination. The organisers have used the iconography of the last batch of century-old events as the backdrop of many of the Games and ran modern events in front of them. During the opening ceremony, the show evolved along the Seine from the more accepted traditional image of the city — cabaret, can-can and accordion — to an increasingly progressive and diverse display of contemporary French culture, including a feminist Marseillaise sung by a Guadeloupen Parisian, to an irreverent queer disco. 

Throughout the two weeks of action, athletes, commentators and visitors (including the ubiquitous Snoop Dogg) have been posting on social media showing Paris as it is today. Admittedly, it’s the “for the guests!” version of Paris, but still, it looks like a 21st-century city where new things happen, real people live, where a future is possible. 

Sketch of Teddy Riner

The city chose to use existing infrastructure for most of the events, so there won’t be the monument-building of the Universal Exhibitions that gave us the Eiffel Tower. Significantly, the only new buildings constructed for Paris 2024 are in and around the northern suburb of Saint-Denis, which is symbolic of the city’s outgoing momentum: the edges of the city are softening and the long-demarcated inner suburbs will be brought closer into the fold of the city proper – part of a huge infrastructure project called ‘Le Grand Paris’. 

Paris has had many opportunities to come together in fear, sadness or anger in recent years — the terrorist attacks of 2015, the pandemic, political unrest. Coming together over something largely positive has proved a tonic. I don’t know how long it will stay in the system of Parisians themselves, but I do think that this re-set in the public imagination — updating the roaring twenties for a different century — has to be a good thing. 

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Thirty-second book club

With all the Olympic excitement, I’ve been stirred from my usual state of staying in most nights, and have been OUT enjoying the city so much that I have hardly advanced with any reading! I am still working through The Lonely Girl by Edna O’Brien. However, this week I am taking a few days off and going to the South, and I hope to make up for lost reading time then.

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Thank you to all those who kindly wrote back to my last letter and shared your opinions about the opening ceremony. I’ll look forward to seeing what Thomas Jolly has in store for the closer.

I saw him on television yesterday presenting his continued artistic intention to show France as “pluriel” and “beautiful in its diversity”. While the guests (YES!) are here, I’ll savour enjoying the positivity for one more day. As many have pointed out, there is a big gap between the utopian, inclusive France on display for the Games and the reality — it is still a fantasy, but at least it’s an up-to-date fantasy.

I’ll write very soon after my holiday in the South. No doubt there will be plenty going on with the approach of the Paralympics and of course my favourite time of year, Rentrée season!

Have a lovely week until then.

Yours, 

Hannah