MAIS ABSOLUMENT! BY DEALING WITH WHAT'S NOT SAID
If you walk along the Seine River in the city's legendary center, huge ads will hover over you.
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| On the way to the Latin Quarter by the pont Neuf bridge |
The message is quiet but unmistakable: Brands are everything.
This is the gospel of a capitalism that crushes the human spirit, stripping away everything that doesn't fit the corporate mold. Even Paris—a city built on monarchy and revolution — is having its history rewritten to serve this commercial narrative. The parts that don't fit are simply erased.
These pages are about those omissions.
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These "blooks" (books-blog) make their points briskly through headlines and pictures. Contents gives the complete list of topics, which the Menu summarizes. Index gives immediate access to the main ideas. History that illuminates shows their relevance now.
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A French-American who has lived in Paris for decades, in the U.S. I was a college professor of history, in Paris an acknowledged historian of Africa to whom without a French degree academic doors were closed, then a tour guide and since covid, a historian again. Once a member of the Office of Tourism (for seven years), I know the usual views of the city well.
There's space for comments at the end of each page: political discussions welcome.
Here's a summary.
BLOOK I.
1. BE LIKE A DETECTIVE
HEEDING WHAT'S IGNORED,
SUCH AS THE VOID IN FRONT OF NOTRE-DAME CATHEDRAL
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Twelth century, Grez computer image |
Claude Abron
Uncredited photos are mine.
The space was meant for massing troops in case of insurrection. That used to be explained. Not anymore.
2. OMISSION OF ANOTHER KIND:
THAT GIANT ADS AND BRANDS
INVADE THE CENTER IS NOT SAID,
OR THAT CREATIVITY HAS MOVED
TO THE OUTSKIRTS
The once miserable 13th district on the city's southeastern fringe is now a hub of innovative art that hosts two festivals.
Lights under the aerial métro, created after popular vote for the year 2026.
One festival is ten days of new or popular arts.
The other is the three weeks of the Chinese New Year. Media notice its giant parade, but ignore the multitude of other festivities.
The day before the Chinese New Year parade
3. ANOTHER: IMMIGRANT ENERGIES
The market under the aerial métro and the ribbon of Muslim shops that runs along it make Maghrebin Barbès one of the most dynamic parts of the city. During Ramadan, cheerful crowds come for gourmet specialties sold next to the tracks — going there would be the last thing the Office of Tourism would ever mention.
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La Goutte d'Or, the largely African area north of Barbès, is a place where the "look" flourishes as an art to communicate:
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The posters in the windows of the innumerable coiffeurs reveal an upbeat affirmation of individual uniqueness within a homogenous, supportive community.
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"Art," one may think, must be music, painting, etc. But the Communards (more below) defined it as any creation made with passion that addresses the public and an esteemed critic said, "Art must express a philosophy, or it is just decoration." The amiable art of communicating through appearance fits those definitions — and goes unnoticed.
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Not said either: that the grim "colonial periphery" with its rat-infested schools and lack of social services is a heartland of world and urban music.
4. THE PAST:
THE FORGOTTEN ROYAL IMPRINT
The grand perspectives that lead the eye toward a target give Paris its identity. They begin with the space that leads to the royal necropolis, continue with the straight streets that end with an equestrian statue of the reigning king, and culminate with the line that begins at the Louvre palace and morphs into the horizon to symbolize endless power. They are gifts from monarchy.
The Saint Denis Basilica, 12th century
Rue de Birague, once rue Royale, leads to place des Vosges, once place Royale, and to the equestrian statue of Louis XIII: it is the city's first straight street to be deliberately built and the site from which its grandeur takes wing.
I have never seen it noticed.
*Zoom: clicking leads to the original picture and to information about it.
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| Claude Abron |
One reason for ignoring a design that later capitals adopted is that it is so long that one must be in a helicopter to see it.
Another is that the focus on political history lightened up with anecdotes ignores the grandeur the kings bequeathed. An explanation appears here.
4. ALMOST ALWAYS DELETED,
THE CITY'S MILITARY TRANSFORMATION AFTER
THE WORKING-CLASS INSURRECTION OF 1848
Wide, straight arteries let troops march toward vast voids for assembling soldiers, horses and cannons. At their center colossal statues symbolized authority in neighborhoods where opposition was endemic. Those transformations extend the royal model that gives Paris is majesty, but were a side effect to the wish to make future upheavals easier to repress.
Since the insurrections themselves are as much as possible erased, the reason for the beauty is rarely understood.
Place Saint-Michel is much too vast for circulation to explain it. In the background, a statue of Saint Michel crushing Satan symbolizes the Emperor crushing socialism (in 1860). A plaque, however, says it honors the city's liberation from the Nazis (in 1944).
- Paris is the mythical city of insurrection. Yet so little is said of the upheavals that followed "the" French Revolution that people often think these iconic figures are storming the Bastille, when the forgotten Revolution of 1830 inspired the work.
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Liberty Guides the People by Eugène Delacroix, 1830-1831 (cropped) / zoom
- The musée Carnavalet (the historical museum) presents a French Revolution that is almost peaceful, and shows fighters of 1830 as elegant youth of the middle class.
February 1848 is an upheaval where furniture replaces drama. The insurrection of June of that year — which brought the military remodeling — obtains two sentences in tiny letters to introduce a subject that has nothing to do with it (the appearance of photography). Its barricades become a game for kids on a table at the back of the floor behind a panel.
- The Paris Commune, the last, most tragic and most memorable 19th-century rebellion, obtains a four-meter corridor between exhibits about elites. Taking up that space is a huge painting of a rebel's girlfriend who was a child at the time, and a showcase where two small images of carnage are almost impossible to decipher.
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An extraordinary change: for the Olympic Games of 2024 a work depicting the struggle for the eight-day week appeared. It covers a third of the platform in the métro station near the sports stadium. Thousands of fans pass it to and from the games.
Its foreshadows the 2026 upheaval.
Sheldon Jay Forest, Facebook
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BLOOK II,
AN ECONOMIC AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL
APPROACH TO HISTORY:
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A Royal Army on the March,16th-century tapestry (detail), Renaissance Museum |
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Royal cavalcades.
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These blooks include drawings by Harald Wolff.
Like the vast majority of Parisian artists he is foreign (German), and lives not in places associated with the arts (Saint-Germain, Montmartre, Montparnasse) but in a plebeian suburb (Montreuil) where rents are lower. So he fits the city that these pages describe.
