MAIS ABSOLUMENT!
What guidebooks and conventional accounts of Paris leave out is as important as what they say.
Part I deals with those absences. They range from such present-day features as the outskirts and immigrant neighborhoods that are revitalizing the city, to a history that downplays royal grandeur and insurrections. Part II shows how attention to the underlying economic base changes views of the past.
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These "blooks" (books-blog) make their points briskly through headlines and pictures. "Contents" gives the complete list of topics. "Menu" summarizes them. "Index" gives immediate access to the main ideas. "History that illuminates" shows their relevance now.
My background: a French-American who has lived in Paris for decades, a professor of history in the U.S. and a tour guide in that city. Once a member of the Office of Tourism (for seven years), I know the usual ways of presenting the city well.
There's space for comments at the end of each page: political discussions welcome.
TRAILERS
BLOOK I.
1. AN UNNOTICED ENIGMA
Originally, houses crowded up close to the facade of Notre-Dame Cathedral. Then visually, the house of God seemed to loom up over humanity. But with the demolition of the houses and the construction of a vast esplanade in front of the cathedral in 1853, this impressive sense of scale was lost.
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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. TOURISM DOES NOT SAY
THAT BRANDS HAVE INVADED
THE HISTORIC CENTER OR THAT INVENTIVITY
HAS LARGELY MOVED TO THE OUTSKIRTS
The once miserable 13th* on the city's southeastern fringe is now a hub of innovative art that hosts two festivals: ten days of new or popular arts.
*To skip repeating "arrondissement" or "district" I say simply "13th," or whatever the number, as the French do.
Lights under the the aerial métro, created by popular vote for 2026.
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And the three weeks of the Chinse New Year. Some media finally noticed its giant parade after 40 years (in 2025), but still ignore its other festivities.
Boulevard Vincent Auriol, 13th
Street show the day before the parade.
3. IMMIGRANT ENERGIES,
ALMOST ENTIRELY ERASED
Low prices of the market under the aerial métro and the ribbon of Muslim shops that runs along it make Maghrebin Barbès one of the most ebullient parts of the city:
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La Goutte d'Or, the largely African area north of Barbès, is a heartland of urban and world music, and a place where
an amiable art of communication through personal appearance flourishes:
That concert will last until 4 a.m.
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| On rue Doudeauville, "Main Street" |
The Communards (please scroll down) defined art as any creation that adresses the public and is done with passion, and an esteemed critic said, "Art must express a philosophy, or it is just decoration."
By expressing an upbeat affirmation of individual uniqueness in the context of a homogenous, supportive community such "looks" fit those definitions and suggest a view of human relationships to ponder.
4. THE PAST:
KINGS' GRANDEUR
AND ELITES' DREAD OF INSURRECTION
ARE THE MAIN REASONS FOR THE CITY'S ALLURE.
BOTH HAVE VANISHED.
Except for the Louvre, a former palace impossible to ignore, almost nothing is said of the majesty the kings bequeathed.
As for the terror insurrections provoked, many people have never even heard of them. They often think that these iconic figures are storming the Bastille, though the forgotten Revolution of 1830 inspired the work:
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La Liberté guide le people by Eugene Delacroix, 1830-1831 (cropped) / zoom*
*Clicking on "zoom" leads to the original image and information about it.
- Three days of street fighting ("the Three Glorious Days, July 27, 28, 29 1830) ended the transformation the French Revolution began — suppressing nobles' power, which let raw capitalism take off. Then life became even more difficult for the humble, leading to endemic revolts and to the first conscious working-class insurrection in 1848.
- Modernizing the medieval city was a necessity, but "barbarians" so terrified the privileged that the metamorphosis it brought was military, including the void for massing troops in front of Notre-Dame.
- The last, most tragic and most important upheaval, that of the Paris Commune, happened when military defeat and government myopia led young idealists to take control in 1871. In spite of the flight of seasoned administrators, siege and war but backed by the poor, they kept the continent's largest city (population a million and a half) running for 72 days. They sketched out a genuinely democratic society at the same time.
Proclamation de la Commune le 26 mars 1871, anonymous engraving / zoom
The name "Bloody Week" recalls the ferocity of their repression:
Un Peloton d'exécution [firing squad] pendant la Semaine sanglante [Bloody Week] by V. Sarday / zoom
A painting made a generation later, based on prints of the time and opponents' grudging statements of respect.
They still inspire the left.
Commemorative parade, 2021
Most modern narratives dismiss the social conflict that permeates Paris's past. The musée Carnavalet (the historical museum) presents the French Revolution as almost peaceful, shows 1830 fighters as elegant youth of the middle class, relegates 1848 to a single sentence at the back of a room, turns its barricades into a game for kids and sandwiches La Commune into a four-meter passage that a portrait of a rebel's later girlfriend takes up in part. Even the museum of a Social-Democrat municipality shows the upheaval largely from the victors' point of view, and an official panel on the site where La Commune began tells an impossible story while leaving it out.
But things are changing.
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BLOOK II :
AN APPROACH TO THE PAST
THAT IS ECONOMIC AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL
Societies based on non-mechanized agriculture depend on communal labor, which individual profit-seeking challenges.
So change takes place in cycles. Rising commercial producers overthrow authorities that restrict their rise, remove existing barriers to growth but set up new ones that limit more change, which another tide of challengers contest. The cycle begins again.
This blook compares such change in pre-industrial France and pre-colonial Africa.
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A Royal Army on the March,16th-century tapestry (detail), Renaissance Museum |
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Ruling elites use ostentation to eliminate profits that if invested would destabilize the status quo.
For more, please click.
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This blook includes drawings by Harald Wolff.
Like the vast majority of Parisian artists he is foreign (German), and lives not in the places associated with them (Saint-Germain, Montmartre, Montparnasse) but in a plebeian suburb (Montreuil) where rents are lower. So he fits the city that these pages describe.
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