Saturday, March 5, 2022

IS THERE ANYTHING NEW TO SAY ABOUT PARIS?


MAIS ABSOLUMENT! BY REVEALING THE CRUCIAL AND SKIPPED


Major omissions exist in how historical accounts, guidebooks, museums, schoolbooks, historical panels etc. show Paris. * Highlighting them leads to reinterpreting much of the French past, to seeing Paris differently and to awareness of a general and usually unrecognized kind of misinformation.  

* For a link to the pages that show how they downplay, distort or simply skip indispensable information, please click.  

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Showing certain gaps reveals a reality more complex than we think...

     The mariage of Sainte Ursula by Cristovao de Figueiredo, toward 1525 / zoom
Black musicians centuries before we expect them  

...and lets oddities emerge

  • Parisian insurrections, endemic through much of the 19th century, contributed to shaping the modern world. Yet:

    • Many people think that the iconic figures below are taking the Bastille (in 1789). In fact, the Revolution of 1830 inspired the work: It finished what the  French Revolution had begun — overthrowing the nobles to let capitalism take wing — but that tie is usually overlooked, as is capitalism itself

Liberty Guiding the People by Eugene Delacroix, 1830-1831 (cut: for the full work, please click here and for some of its innumerable adaptations, here.

    • The vast 19th-century space in front of Notre-Dame Cathedral makes the giant church seem smaller and less imposing than when medieval houses huddled up to it. Built after the first conscious working-class revolt (in 1848), the void let troops assemble to repress any future upheavals: Nothing is said about it 






Etc.

These pages also highlight modern energies that are largely overlooked 

  • In central Paris the creativity and quality that so contributed to the city's fame has almost disappeared, as shown here and here. Throbbing vitality concentrates on outskirts where (almost) affordable rents attract artists in all domains

Paris Bossa Nova  / François Bibonne
Music in an 18th-century wine cellar, on the southeastern fringe

More later 
Studio of a costume jewelry designer in Ménilmontant, far to the east 


  • And where immigrant energies flourish




The coiffures, mustaches and beards that young men have universally adopted come from barbershop posters in Black neighborhoods (please click here). For street musicians, watch from a café terrace on rue Doudeauville in La Goutte d'Or on a Saturday afternoon.


For the color that illuminates sober Parisian streets, visit Europe's largest "Chinatown." 


Most media and tourism skip that vitality. As a tour guide and member of the Paris Office of Tourism for seven years, I speak from experience.

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This "blook" — book-blog — is based on these premises:

  • Accounts are inevitably subjective, since one must make a choice of facts. But some make much more sense than others.

  • Most narrators emphasize individuals, chance or details. They skip the role of economic forces, such as how rising capitalism made the fall of the Old Regime inevitable. So...

  • They don't show how institutions, laws and customs derive from the economy, reinforcing elites. For example, in western Europe until the middle of the 18th century nobles' intrinsic superiority was taken for granted, because all aspects of life reinforce that belief. Take executions in France: Commoners were hanged, nobles beheaded. Our own word "noble" in the sense of superior harks back to those times.  
  • They erase a tool that helps understand how our own society works — and so correctly identify the adversary.


  • Historians are usually unaware of their conservative slant. Emphasis on economies  —  the tangible bases from which people earn their livings — vanished in the United States with the Cold War * and in France with the rise of multinationals in the 1980's.

* An American, I encountered it at the Sorbonne during my Junior Year Abroad, at a time when the left was powerful and the economic point of view widespread. History classes at home had never mentioned it.

  • How the past is seen is one more way of reinforcing the status quo — that is, the power of ruling elites. Like the Old Regime belief in nobles' inherent superiority, it is taken for granted. * 

* The uproar in parts of the United States at the idea that racism underlies laws and institutions (Critical Race Theory) shows the unfamiliarity of that analysis as well as the political challenge it implies.


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The omissions just mentioned contradict multinationals' wish to transform populations into interchangeable consumers, which maximizes profit

Ad over a central Paris crossroad in 2022

Persuading people that buying will make them happy also makes them easier to control. Especially if they are isolated: most ads show individuals, perhaps couples, rarely groups.

That does not mean that the lords of our time cynically command (though it happens, and of course the ads are thought out). They believe in the mentality that buttresses them and are as oblivious of the omissions as the public is.

Pointing them out for Paris transcends that particular city: They appear in their broad strokes wherever globalized capitalism reigns, and awareness of them fights a manipulation all the more powerful in that it is sincere

Harald Wolff
To zoom into links toward such distortions, please click.

If you find that message useful, please pass on the blook ! *

* If by Facebook, stating that the publication is by Paris from fresh perspectives will interest perhaps, while saying by Catherine Aubin will not interest at all.


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I should introduce myself

I grew up in New Jersey, where my French Maman ignored my saddle shoes and Seventeen and detested Elvis Presley. She raised me as if I were French —  the ways of Middlesex County and Paris were so different! Dealing with two truths encouraged reflection.

My junior year was in Paris. I loved its past, which I saw as a series of exploits by individuals in largely political contexts. But a young man I met at the Sorbonne thought differently: to make sense, he insisted, events, attitudes, beliefs had to be placed in their underlying economic contexts, with the practical interests they reinforced or challenged. “And that,” he said, "comes from Karl Marx." 

My fascination for Paris lasted longer than our marriage and I have lived in this magnificent city ever since.
 
My father was a professor and I expected to become one (B.A. Vassar, Masters Harvard, Ph.D. Columbia, all in history). But teaching in a French university then was impossible without a French degree. So I became a tour guide, and this blook is the result.


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A memory

Harald Wolff
"Eisenhower is an old trousers of a general."  "No!!!"

Toward 1955, a French aunt, Magda Trocmé,
whom my dad called "Hurricane Magda"...

came to visit us in New Jersey while on a speaking tour. She and her husband, André Trocmé, were well-known for their anti-Nazi pacifism and after the war were critical of President Eisenhower's Cold War policies. My father, a stoical New Englander, would leave after dinner, leaving Maman and Aunt Magda to "discuss."

I would listen from the top of the stairs and remember their enthusiasm for exchanging ideas, without expecting to persuade. (But the discussion may have nuanced their extremely vehement points of view.)

There's a space for comments at the end of each page,
and I'd like to know what you think. 
Political critiques are welcome.


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Thanks...

Especially to Henry Aubin and Carolyn Ristau for their invaluable critiques, to Claude Abron for years of picture-taking and to Harald Wolff for his drawings

My sketch (on the right) and his interpretation step by step. 

For other direct help...



                     
To those whose pictures come from the Internet...




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Details

  • "Zoom" under pictures means that they have been taken from the web. Clicking leads to enlargements and to official data. When the Internet gives no further information, I say so.  

  • Modern images are credited to the artist or photographer. Photos without a credit are mine.  

  • For historical information I cite the source, and give page numbers for information that you might want to check.

  • Ads, shop windows, street art, haircuts, exhibits etc. change. I give photos' dates when relevant.   

  • This blook began in 2012 and keeps evolving.

As an American
 I sometimes compare France and the U.S.,
but this blook is meant for all.
 
*     *     *

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