It’s hard to argue with Victor Hugo’s description of Paris as ‘the city of cities’. For over 2,000 years, it has steadily grown in size and reputation, and each of its many layers is rich in history and intrigue. Unlike many European cities, it was left almost unscathed by the two world wars, and its celebrated streets, monuments and museums still work their centuries-old magic today. And then there’s the artistic heritage of the ‘City of Light’; long a powerhouse of art, literature, music and philosophy. Little wonder that the Parisians are so proud to be part of a city that, according to writer Jean Giraudoux, has been home to ‘the greatest amount of thinking, talking and writing in the world’.
View from the Arc de Triomphe
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Culture capital
Despite concerted attempts at decentralisation in France, Paris continues to dominate the country’s art, literature, music, fashion, education, scientific research, commerce and politics.
Geography
Paris is where all the French channels of communication lead; it is the beating heart of the country. From its core, the 20 Parisian arrondissements (administrative districts) spiral out like a snail’s shell, a pattern that reflects the city’s historical development and successive enlargements.
Paris centers around the River Seine, whose flowing waters have long been the lifeblood of the city. The River Seine enters Paris close to the Bois de Vincennes in the southeast and meanders gently north and south past three small, heavily developed islands – the Île St-Louis, Île de la Cité and, on its way out, Île des Cygnes. Chains of hillocks add perspective to the city, with Montmartre (the city’s highest point), Ménilmontant, Belleville and Buttes Chaumont rising up to the north of the river, and to the south, Montsouris, the Mont Ste-Geneviève, Buttes aux Cailles and Maison Blanche.
Paris is notionally contained by the Périphérique; a ring road of 35km (22 miles). Built in 1973 to reduce traffic jams, the Périphérique is now invariably congested itself. With 1.1 million cars using the road’s 34 exits each day, its future is currently being discussed. Forming two concentric rings wrapped tightly around Paris, the suburbs (known, sometimes derisively, as la banlieue) are divided up into départements, or counties, much as the rest of France.
At the beginning of the 19th century, Napoleon imposed a special status on the city of Paris, giving it the powers of a département in order to maintain a firm hold on the capital’s politics and populace. Today, each arrondissement also has its own council and mayor to deal with local affairs. In the two houses of the French Parliament, 21 delegates and 12 senators represent the city.
Boat tours on the River Seine
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The River
Fluctuat nec mergitur (‘Buffeted by the waves but does not sink’), reads the Latin inscription on the capital’s coat-of-arms, symbolising a city born beside the River Seine. The city takes its name from the old Gallic tribe of the Parisii who, according to Julius Caesar, sited their chief city on the largest island in the river. However, the city did not divide the river for long; Roman Lutetia was later founded on the left bank of the Seine in the modern day Latin Quarter area. Today, the Seine cuts a swathe through the city’s middle. The Seine is the capital’s widest avenue, spanned by a total of 37 bridges, which provide some of the loveliest views of Paris.
The river is the city’s calmest thoroughfare, notwithstanding the daily flow of tourist and commercial boat traffic. In the 19th century, the banks were encumbered with wash-houses and watermills, and its waters heaved with ships from every corner of France. More difficult to imagine are the 700 Viking warships that sailed up the river to invade Paris in the 9th century, or the thousands of bodies that floated past in 1572, victims of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, turning the Seine into a river of blood. Today, barges and pleasure boats ply the river, some on their way to Burgundy via the St-Martin and St-Denis canals, which cut across the northeast of the city.
Legendary Left-Bank Café de Flore
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Paris Ambience
One of the most persistent images of Paris is one of long avenues elegantly lined with chestnut and plane trees. Flowers and plants abound in a patchwork of squares, parks and gardens, tended in the formal French tradition, or following the English style so admired by Napoleon III. Divided up by two long ribbons of streets, one tracing a long line north to south (from boulevard de Strasbourg to boulevard St-Michel) and the other running from east to west (from rue du Faubourg-St-Antoine as far as La Défense), Paris is a mosaic of quartiers (quarters) or ‘villages’, each with a distinctive character. Chains of boulevards encircle the city centre, marking its medieval boundaries. Several streets contain the word faubourg, indicating that they were once part of the suburb outside the city wall.
The most important, unofficial division in Paris is between the traditionally working-class eastern end of the city and the mostly bourgeois west. In general, the further east you go, the further left you will find yourself on the political spectrum. Rents are steep in the western arrondissements, whereas property is less expensive, though hardly affordable, in the east. City planners have been struggling for decades to improve the balance, culminating in massive urban renewal projects at Bercy and the ‘new’ Left Bank in the southeast.
Paris rooftops
Kevin Cummins/Apa Publications
Population
Paris is more densely populated than Tokyo, London or New York. At odds with the spacious boulevards, Parisians live literally on top of one another, squeezed into small apartments, packed into the city’s 100 sq km (40 sq miles). A house or a garden are almost unheard-of luxuries. There is intense competition for desirable living space, with an average of 150,000 people looking for a home at any one time. It is an oft-cited paradox that this battle for a place to live occurs in a city where 16 percent of apartments lie vacant. Soaring house prices since the 2000s have left many landlords happy to sit on vacant investments. High rents can mean that many Parisians have neither the time nor the money to appreciate the city they live in, being trapped in a monotonous routine they describe as Métro-boulot-dodo (commuting, working, sleeping).
Nonetheless, for anyone fortunate enough to live in the city centre, the rewards far outweigh the demands. Human in scale, clean, safe, cosmopolitan and lively, Paris lives up to its reputation as one of the best cities on earth for enjoying the good life.
Café Culture
Cafés have long played a key part in the city’s intellectual, political and artistic development. Café Voltaire (1 place de l’Odéon) was where, in the 18th century, Voltaire used to meet fellow philosopher Diderot to discuss their Enlightenment theories. The 19th-century poets Verlaine and Mallarmé also conversed here, and in the 1920s the American writers Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald extolled the café’s ‘sudden provincial quality’. Between the two world wars, other writers in Paris spent hours at their favourite tables in Le Procope (13 rue de l’Ancienne-Comédie), while the Existentialist writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and his lover Simone de Beauvoir consolidated the highbrow reputation of Les Deux Magots (6 place St-Germain-des-Prés) in the 1950s. The Art Deco Café de Flore (172 boulevard St-Germain) was another intello favourite. Today, politicians congregate at Brasserie Lipp across the road.