Why, Oh Why, Do We Love Paris?

Oleh Butchatsky and Alice Grundy are two very different Australians – in age and in background. One from the business end of busy Sydney; the other from Canberra eager to be part of the literary and arts world and publishing. Both are enchanted by Paris – the city of enchantment for many millions over so many generations. Yet both fear what is happpening to Paris. Oleh Butchatsky spent months in Paris before co-authoring Paris Tragics with graham Jones. Oleh Butchastsky joined Alice Grundy on Tuesday 2 February to speak about his Paris experiences.

WHY, OH WHY, DO WE LOVE PARIS?

OLEH BUTCHATSKY

Somehow, we just can’t help to.

Despite what we might think of France as a nation, populated by those beguiling, sometimes infuriating, sometimes insufferable French themselves, we are helpless to resist the charm and mystery of the world’s greatest city….without argument. Somehow it infuses our imagination as it has from my 6^th class project at Marist Brothers Darlinghurst way back in 1963 (strewth).

I’m not sure whether the subject was History or Geography and I don’t know why I chose Paris as the topic. Maybe I stumbled on a magazine with lots of good photos of Paris, thinking I could handle that. My cutting and pasting skills were always atrocious but far superior to my drawing so a scrapbook approach was the way to go. I have not kept the scrapbook but it remains vivid in my memory … the photos of all the great sights: Notre Dame, Champs Élysées, Arc de Triomphe, Eiffel Tower, Invalides. The most mesmerising photo was of the Place de la Concorde and its obelisk. What is it about this spare and often bleak space that fascinates, despite the traffic noise, the hurly-burly of people and buses, the difficulties of getting across? Now, I realise it is the perfect example of one Paris’s great strengths: its use of grand public spaces. This is grandeur in its simplest and purest form and it is a recurring theme in the Paris experience that we all appreciate. And yet somehow the grandeur is not overwhelming because this space and others like it in Paris, embraces people and somehow balances the monumental with the human.

It might sound trite and fanciful but ever since the school project Paris has felt like home – a home that took me a long time to visit for the first time; a place that is familiar and foreign all at once.

Don’t we all agree with the wicked Josephine Baker who, in the Paris nightclubs of the 30s, would sound out the signature words: “J’ai deux amours – mon pays et Paris” (“I have two loves – my own country and Paris”)?

Paris is a place that begs exploration and investigation and by its very nature, through the human scale of its architecture, makes it easy to do so. A place whose streetscape deliberately mixes the residential with the commercial, the formal with the social, shops with offices, museums with cafes, boulangeries with pharmacies, parks with grand squares. A place where the streetscape invites you to participate, to go in, to take part, even in the more residential and less tourist-torn areas.

Of course, my infatuation with Paris is borne of many influences over many years of reading and thinking. The French sensibility has permeated Western civilisation in a way that only the strongest brands do. It is expressed in multitudinous ways, seemingly always present when we read or hear about the best of food, culture, fashion, art and the performing arts, movies and music. It is no surprise that France is the most visited country on Earth and Paris the most visited city. And it is no surprise that this Australian with exotic Ukrainian roots has fallen head over heels for everything that Paris can offer … and keeps going back and back and back. And, as Cole Porter declares, it really doesn’t matter when you are there:

I love Paris in the springtime

I love Paris in the fall

I love Paris in the summer

when it sizzles

I love Paris in the winter

when it drizzles.

I love Paris every moment …

Paris is decidedly the city of la gloire, a concept of which Louis XIV and later Napoléon Bonaparte were the greatest devotees. And today what is abundantly clear is the incredible civic pride on display everywhere, balancing the unshakeable importance of beauty and visually pleasing form against the need to modernise and make more efficient. Paris is constantly walking the line between respect for heritage and the need to allow novel, creative artistic expression, and to provide the conveniences of a modern city. Perhaps the best and certainly the most famous illustration of this balancing act is leoh Ming Pei’s Pyramid in the forecourt of one of the world’s most precious structures, the Louvre. What a bold experiment in architectural modernisation … and what a brilliant, breathtaking achievement! Though not everyone agrees, this juxtaposition of the traditional and ornate with the contemporary and streamlined is a masterpiece of design and urban function. The genius of its crystalline design is its ability to pay homage to the Louvre by physically reflecting the great building in the glasswork of its structure. A quintessentially modern addition extends the life, indeed permanence, of the Louvre by doing so.

Thus, in keeping with its own self-image as the “Creative Capital”, Paris celebrates its uniqueness by pursuing a blend of the latest architecture, contemporary art, design, fashion and cuisine. Far from being simply a museum preserved in stone, as some have argued, Paris takes risks in its presentation and consequently is an exciting, vibrant place to be whenever you visit.

Other examples of civic pride abound, whether it be the requirement (reintroduced by André Malraux in 1959) to fully clean the facade of every stone building in Paris every ten years so that Haussmann’s vision of quality and uniformity is preserved, or whether it is the attention given to new developments in and around the centre. There have been catastrophes of course (Exhibit A: Tour Montparnasse in 1973 – what on earth were they thinking? It stands out on the Paris landscape like the sinister black monolith appearing amongst the humanoid apes in the Neanderthal wilderness of 2001: A Space Odyssey; Exhibit B: Forum des Halles in 1979 – how crass can you get?). But witness the exemplary successes. The absolute model is of course the great and magnificent Musée d’Orsay which was originally the Palais d’Orsay (housing the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs), then converted to a railway station for the 1900 Paris Exhibition, and finally a museum from 1986. There are many others including the Pompidou Centre (1977), Institut du Monde Arabe (1987), Musée du Quai Branly (2006), and Viaduc des Arts (1996).

Today, Mayor Anne Hidalgo is on a mission to make Paris a vastly more liveable city. In mid-2015, Hidalgo released detailed plans to continue the “pedestrianising” of the banks of the Seine. This is the continuation of the process begun by Hidalgo’s predecessors in 2002 to again make the Seine terraces readily accessible to pedestrians. In effect this trend, which first began with the creation of summer beaches (“Paris Plages”) and was reinforced in 2013 by the banning of cars from a stretch of the Left Bank around quai d’Orsay, reverses the Pompidou “reforms” of the 1960s when much of the river’s embankments were turned over to roads.

Hidalgo described the new plan as “an urban, almost philosophical project, which consists of seeing the city in another way than through the use of cars.” The 2013 Left Bank initiative has already been a great success. There have been several million visitors to the promenades and parklands created and a dramatic reduction in exhaust pollution. The extent of the new project is subject to further public consultation. The more ambitious proposal is to pedestrianise 3.3 kms form Pont de l’Arsenal not far from Bastille to the Tuileries tunnel. The space will be wide enough to create a broad promenade complete with shading tress, kids’ playgrounds and sporting facilities (read Pétanque court). Parisians may plump, however, for the more modest proposal of a 1.5 km pedestrian strip between the eastern tip of Ile St Louis to Pont Neuf.

This endless obsession with renewal, improvement, revitalisation is evidence of the fact that Paris is not everything to everyone and is not above criticism. No, it’s not perfect. It may well be “The City of Light” for example. But is it the City of Enlightenment? Who knows?

Some might agree with BBC commentator, author and expatriate Australian John Baxter: “To go to Paris, the received wisdom has it, feeds the soul; to stay there rots it.”

And what is Paris anyway … the real Paris?

Is it a sonnet, a stench, an endless noise, a characteristic light, a timbre, an addiction, a reminiscence, a melancholy (to bastardise John Steinbeck)?

Is it the grand boulevards and monuments, which just about everyone is, rightly, impressed by?

Is it the captivating alleys of the historical Marais, preserved intact after all these years? But were the bars and boutiques there in the seventeenth century? How, then, could this be the “real” Paris?

Perhaps it’s Faubourg Saint-Antoine, with its roots in left-wing protest and agitation and its reputation as the home of the noble artisan and humble worker.

Maybe it’s in the neighbouring Belleville/Ménilmontant sector, which is another melting pot of change and where in 1840 the word “Communist” first gained currency anywhere in the world.

Is the real Paris the blank, weary faces of commuters on the Métro as they travel to and from la banlieue to their places of work?

Is it, perhaps, the soulless banlieue itself, where the majority of “Parisians” live, after all?

Could the real Paris be the riot of traffic, the exasperating confusion of buses, cars, motor-bikes, pedestrians and bicycles competing for priority access?

Could it be the beggars, not all of them professional, and the homeless, who seem to beset all Western cities now?

Maybe it’s the black faces of the Moroccan and Algerian sectors or the language, food and dress of the increasingly present Muslim population.

Is it an oh-so elegant night at the ballet, in tie and jacket, at Garnier, or rather, in the bleachers in scarf and club colours (and flare at the ready), at Parc des Princes?

Will the real Paris repast today be afternoon tea at Ladurée, steak frites at Hippopotamus or le Big Mac at McDonald’s?

Is it the immaculately clean, golden building facades or is it the dog shit setting smelly traps for the unwary?

The question of what constitutes the real Paris is a valid one, but one that has no simple answer. Perhaps we can all agree on one thing, however, and that is that Paris is one of the greatest repositories of pleasure in our world.

And on that subject please enter our own Patrick White, that incomparable vivisector of humanness:

Pleasure is a shocking word in societies where the most

luxurious aspirations are disguised as humble, moral ones

… Material objects were valued for their usefulness; if they

were also intended to please, not to say glorify, it was

commonly kept a secret. Only Norbert Hare, notoriously

rash, had been heard to confess that the word useful

sounded to him less modest than humiliating. It was so

intolerably grey and Australian. Brilliant and elegant were

the epithets applicable to Norbert’s aspirations, certainly

to his most ambitious, his Pleasure Dome at Xanadu.

Riders in the Chariot (author’s emphases)

How razor-sharp, how unfair as well, is “… so intolerably grey and Australian”. That’s why White, that man with the deepest connection to the great Australian landscape of emptiness and an even deeper disdain for the crassness of the society which now occupies it, escaped as often as he could to Europe, to London … and to Paris.

To see firsthand the brilliance and elegance of it all.

As we all do.