Unhappy City: On the Cultural Dimensions of Happiness, or the French ‘Joie de Malheur’

“Imagine dying and being grateful you’d gone to heaven, until one day (or one century) it dawned on you that your main mood was melancholy, although you were constantly convinced that happiness lay just around the next corner.” This, writes the American expatriate writer Edmund White in his 2001 book, The Flâneur, is what it is like to live in Paris for years, or in his case, even decades. “It’s a mild hell so comfortable that it resembles heaven.”

The French have such an attractive and sophisticated civilization, and their taste in every domain—from gastronomy to fashion and philosophy—is so sharp and yet subtle, that the foreigner can easily be seduced into believing that mastering the French way of life is a sure although jealously guarded path to existential happiness. But if this true about France, White continues, “then why is [the foreigner] so lonely? So sad? Why is there such an elegiac feeling hanging over this city with the gilded cupola gleaming over the Emperor’s Tomb and the foaming, wild horses prancing out of a sea of verdigris on the roof of the Grand Palais? . . . Why is he unhappy . . . even when he strolls past the barnacled towers of Notre Dame soaring above the Seine and a steep wall so dense with ivy it looks like the side of a galleon sinking under moss-laden chains?”

Even by European standards, the French enjoy a relatively high quality of life, ensured by a liberal welfare state, universal healthcare, free access to higher education, and generous labor benefits, including a minimum of five weeks of paid vacation a year and a mandatory thirty-five hour workweek. And for someone from chaotic yet obstinately optimistic America—where an entire generation of college graduates has been crippled by debt and an unexpected illness or accident can bankrupt the uninsured—France appears an idyllic hamlet of sanity and social comfort.

But despite their cultural affluence and material prosperity, the French remain notoriously unhappy. In a recent poll conducted by the European Social Survey group, France consistently obtained “high scores in negative dimensions of mental health, such as psychological distress and mental disorders.” Among thirteen European countries surveyed between 2002 and 2010, France ranked second-to-last in perceived wellbeing and life satisfaction, trailed only by Portugal. Similarly, in 2011, a WIN-Gallop poll revealed that expectations for the coming year ranked lower in France than in Iraq or Afghanistan. The prevalence of depressive tendencies in France correlates to one of the highest suicide rates in Europe, constituting the primary cause of death among French adults between the ages of 30 and 39, and an exceptionally high consumption of psychotropic drugs.

The economic implications of these findings are paramount. While American enterprises like have gone to exorbitant lengths to ensure the happiness of their employees, the French continue to languish in an idiosyncratic gloom, reinforcing concerns about the declining influence of the French nation in an increasingly globalized world.

In a study published in 2011, the French economist Claudia Senik describes the apparent contradiction between material prosperity and perceived wellbeing in France as the French happiness paradox. In her study, Senik attempts to disentangle the influence of objective circumstances versus cultural factors by comparing levels of perceived wellbeing among immigrants and French expatriates. She found that while immigrants who move to France report higher levels of happiness than their French counterparts, the longer immigrants live in France, the less happy they claim to be. Meanwhile, individuals native to France who have emigrated to other countries continue to report comparatively low levels of happiness. These findings are consistent across different socioeconomic strata, suggesting that there is something peculiar about French culture—that is, “the ensemble of psychological and ideological mechanisms and dispositions that constitute the process of the transformation of experiences into wellbeing”—that is making France’s population miserable. The mere fact of living in France, writes Senik, “reduces by twenty percept the probability of declaring oneself happy.”

Senik concludes by arguing that the French education system and other instances of early socialization are largely to blame for the unhappiness of the French. In stark contrast to the liberal education system in America, education in France is characterized by its conservatism and severity. In the year I spent teaching English in a high school in southwestern France, I was shocked by the austerity of my colleagues, who were quick to deliver criticism and discipline yet withholding of counsel and encouragement.

Writing for The New Yorker in response to Senik’s article, Richard Brody instead attributes the characteristic malheur, or unhappiness, of the French to the critical content rather than the formal structure of the education system in France. Put another way, Brody suggests that it is the what rather than the how of French education that is responsible for the ennui of the French. “Unhappiness,” Brody writes, “often implies the desire for change—in circumstances, or even in oneself—and so dissatisfaction with life despite its material benefits suggests a kind of idealism—of intellectual vision of possibilities beyond the actual.” From this perspective, Brody suggests, the collective discontent of the French might be the expression of an idealistic intellectualism invested in introspection and ideological critique.

Indeed, French philosophy has long explored the intersection between the private and the public, the personal and the political. As early as the sixteenth century, the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne examined subjective experience as a form of ideological critique; his innovative essays combine introspection with sociopolitical commentary. Similarly, in the eighteenth century, the radical political philosophy of the French Enlightenment coincided with an increased focus on self-reflection; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who contributed to the constitution of modern political thought with the publication of Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité (“Discourse on Inequality”) and Du contrat social (“The Social Contract”), also revolutionized the autobiographical mode with his Confessions, and later, Les rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire (“Reveries of a Solitary Walker”).

While France is known for its decadent aestheticism and joie de vivre, an international reputation that further complicates the French happiness paradox, Brody suggests that the French instead revel in a kind of “joie de penser, a joy of thinking that derives pleasure from its [own] displeasure and derives constructive energy from its self-conscious sense of resistance.” In other words, if the introspective skepticism constitutive of French culture is a constant source of “self-renewing, self-critical, self-affirming unhappiness,” it also produces a peculiar kind of pleasure in and of itself, an auto-affection that Brody terms joie de malheur, or a “joy of unhappiness.”

The apparent contradiction between material comfort and existential ennui is an absurdity that suits the French like a well-tailored jacket, and for centuries, the French have refined their paradoxical joie de malheur into an unparalleled artistic expression. Indeed, argues Brody, “rhetorical pessimism in the face of a perhaps unparalleled atmosphere of aesthetic sophistication and dialectical nuance may be precisely . . . [the] most remarkable and distinctive product” of French society.

Brody cites the experimental documentary Chronique d’un été, directed and produced in 1960 by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, as a case in point. An early experiment in cinéma vérité, the film begins with a series of interviews on the streets of Paris, each initiated by the deceptively straightforward yet strangely disarming question: “Are you happy?” Over the course of the discussions and digressions that follow—with factory workers, struggling artists, impoverished immigrants, university students, and even a suntanned starlet from Saint-Tropez—the basic premise of a person’s private happiness becomes inextricably linked with politics and the ability to speak and be heard in the public sphere.

Each of the subjects portrayed in Chronique d’un été is, in their own way, both happy and unhappy (and the one in spite of the other). And while many of the subjects portrayed express private concerns about work, money, family, and love, Brody argues that “the howling unhappiness that the film uncovers has its roots in politics and history, or, rather, in the repression of politics and history.” Over the course of the film, personal happiness (or a lack thereof) becomes a means of talking, albeit in abstract terms, about the Algerian War and allegations of the French Army’s use of torture in Algeria, as well as the pervasive silence regarding the complicity of the French government with the German Occupation and the deportation of French Jews to concentration camps during the Second World War. In this way, Chronique d’un été breaks down the barrier between the private and the public, constituting even the most intimate of confessions as a form of sociopolitical commentary and ideological critique.

How, then, can we define what it means to be happy in France, and what precisely do we mean when we say that the French are unhappy? Is the French happiness paradox the product of an austere and inflexible education system, as Senik argues, or is rhetorical pessimism just French for a joie de penser, as Brody suggests? Is the collective discontent of the French contributing to France’s economic decline, or is the distinctiveness of France’s cultural sphere a product more valuable than worker productivity? Are the French truly unhappy, or are they simply lacking a language to express an underlying condition that might otherwise be described as happiness? Is this place heaven or hell?

One way to understand the French happiness paradox is to read it in the way that Albert Camus, the existentialist author and philosopher, reinterprets the myth of Sisyphus in his 1942 essay by the same name. In the Greek myth, the gods punish Sisyphus for attempting to evade death and condemn him to perpetually push a rock to the peak of a tall mountain, at which point the heavy stone would tumble back down the steep slope.

Camus reads the myth of Sisyphus as an allegory for the absurdity of human existence. For Camus, the feeling of the absurd comes from the realization that the world lacks any inherent meaning, order, or reason. Camus writes, “At this point in his effort man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need [for reason] and the unreasonable silence of the world.”

Yet despite acknowledging the absurdity of existence, Camus rejects suicidal despair as an ethical response to the meaningless of life; instead, he offers the myth of Sisyphus as a radical affirmation of life. The lucid recognition of the absurdity of existence “drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile sufferings. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.” Paradoxically, by liberating us from the futile search for future meaning, the recognition of absurdity allows us to live fully in the present, in the beauty, pleasure, and “implacable grandeur” of existence.

Camus concludes his essay by leaving Sisyphus at the foot of his mountain, preparing once again to push his mortal burden to its peak. “At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, [like] Sisyphus returning to his rock, in that silent pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him.” Recognizing the “wholly human origin of all that is human” is what allows man to attribute meaning to an inherently absurd existence. And for this reason, Camus concludes, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

To take up Camus’s famous refrain, I like to imagine that the French, for all their existential grumblings, are happy. And it is their relentless recognition of and reckoning with the absurdity of their own existence that gives meaning to their joy.

Thanksgiving City: On Everyday Gratitude

Last week, in observance of Thanksgiving, the American expat blogosphere was flooded with its annual outpouring of heartfelt expressions of gratitude. While I recognize the sincerity of my fellow bloggers, and I share their desire to celebrate Thanksgiving, especially in the absence of the culinary comforts of home (shout out to my partner, Adam, who brought me canned pumpkin from Chicago so I could bake homemade pumpkin pie for my cohort in Paris), does the blogosphere really need another post listing hastily composed truisms in thanks for family, freedom, and health? And do we really need to wait until Thanksgiving to acknowledge how fortunate we are?

I am, of course, thankful for the support of my family, my social circle, and my loving partner, the financial security and powerful passport that grant me freedom of movement, and my strong health despite a broken healthcare system in the United States. But this Thanksgiving, I want to focus on a few of the everyday aspects of living abroad for which I am truly grateful.

1. Butter

The other day I went to my local supermarket, Les 5 Fermes on the Avenue Secrétan, and discovered that the shelves in the butter cooler were almost entirely empty. It was a deeply disconcerting sight. A notice was posted discreetly in the top corner of the cooler door, informing customers of a countrywide butter shortage. With a slump in European dairy production and a surge in worldwide demand, France is facing something of a culinary crisis.

The International Dairy Federation reports that the French, on average, consume a heaping eighteen pounds of butter per capita each year, a five percent increase from 2013. In response to the butter shortage, local news outlets offered suggestions for butter replacements, including avocado, zucchini, oil, fresh cream, or almond paste; another published a step-by-step guide to churning your own homemade butter. Fake advertisements surfaced on social media selling small quantities of butter for exorbitant prices, and a group of artists produced a satirical film imagining what would happen if butter ran out in Brittany, the salted butter capital of France.

The French take their butter very seriously. Legend has it that the Gothic renovation of the Rouen cathedral in the fifteenth century was funded in part by donations from wealthy citizens in return for the privilege of eating butter during Lent, which had been banned during the religious fast by the Catholic Church.

Imagine for a moment a France without butter, which is to say, a France without croissants, mille-feuilles, or upside-down apple cake, without buttered baguette sandwiches with cured ham, without escargot simmered in garlic butter with herbs, without steaks topped with a thick slab of beurre Bercy that marinates the red meat as it melts, without Julia Child’s famous beurre blanc sauce, served over scallops, salmon, cod, or asparagus.

This Thanksgiving, in light of the recent dairy shortage (and also in honor of my mother, who developed an aggressive intolerance to lactose in her forties), I am thankful for butter, which is to say, the decadence of French gastronomy and the pride that the French taken in their culinary culture and regional cuisine. On a related note, I am also thankful for my gym and my dedicated running group. After our long runs on Saturday mornings, we celebrate at a local café, Le Cercle du Luxembourg, with a post-run breakfast of baguette tartines spread thickly with, well, butter, of course.

2. The 1981 Lang Law

On August, 10, 1981, the French government enacted a regulation known as the “Lang Law,” which regulates the price of printed material across France, regardless of where they are published or sold, allowing for a maximum of discount of 5% off of the price set by the publisher. Regulating the price of printed materials has allowed independent bookshops to compete against industry giants, supporting an atmosphere of intellectual pluralism and the decentralization of information distribution across France.

“This [regulatory] system,” argues the Syndicat National de l’Édition (“National Federation of Publishers”) in favor of the Lang Law, “is founded on a refusal to consider books as a banalized commodity, only responding to the [market] demands of immediate profitability. Indeed, pricing discounts can lead, in the long term, to the rarefaction of available titles, in favor of texts with a quick market turnaround that are popular with a mass audience (bestsellers, guides, etc), and to the detriment of original works.” In the age of Amazon (remember when Amazon was just an online bookseller?), the Lang Law has continued to encourage the publication of consequential, courageous, and creative works and in France.

I am thankful this Thanksgiving for the Lang Law, and by extension, for the plethora of independent booksellers in the French capital, which increasingly represent the rich diversity of French and Francophone voices. Just last Thursday, while wandering through Gibert Joseph in the sixth arrondissement, as I often do, I almost scooped up an entire shelf of modern French philosophy (I settled on two volumes of Paul Ricoeur’s Temps et récit (“Time and Narrative”) and Algerian author Assia Djebar’s last book, Nulle part dans la maison de mon père (“Nowhere in My Father’s House”), all for less than twenty euros!). On a related note, I am also thankful for the pocket editions of popular French titles, which are the perfect size for train reading and whose uniform aesthetic and dimensions appeal immensely to my obsessive-compulsive sensibilities.

3. Net Neutrality and VPNs 

Last Tuesday, Ajit Pai, the Republican chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), released a proposal that would dismantle landmark net neutrality regulations enacted under the administration of President Obama in 2015.

If you are unfamiliar with the expression “net neutrality,” please immediately watch these three John Oliver clips explaining the concept in comic yet immensely clarifying terms (links to Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight” content here, here, and here). To summarize, net neutrality prevents Internet Service Providers (ISPS) from reducing or restricting access to digital content or services, including competitors’ content or dissident political opinions, or offering a fee-based “fast lane” for users willing to pay for preferential treatment online. By obstructing the creation of a stratified cyberspace, net neutrality levels the digital playing field, ensuring that everyone from industry giants to struggling academics and humble bloggers (like me!) can access the digital content and services on equal terms. For more information on net neutrality, the Internet Society and the ACLU have both compiled excellent resource pages.

As Medium reported in June 2017, recent polls reveal “overwhelming support across party lines for net neutrality, with over three quarters of Americans (76%) supporting net neutrality. Eighty-one percent of Democrats and 73% of Republicans are in favor of it.” In its proposal to abolish net neutrality regulations, the FCC is acting in direct contradiction of the will of the vast majority of the American people.

As an American abroad, net neutrality is absolutely essential to my success as a scholar, the health of my long-distance relationships, and my ability to participate actively in American political discussions. Net neutrality ensures equal access to digital content necessary for my research without discriminatory firewalls. And net neutrality allows me to communicate efficiently and effectively with my family, friends, and loving partner back in the United States, day-to-day communications that would be thwarted by slow broadband access.

This Thanksgiving, I am thankful for our henceforth endangered net neutrality, but I am also, as a bonus, thankful for Virtual Network Providers (VPNs), which allow me to access American streaming services like Netflix and HBO that are otherwise unavailable on computers operating on foreign IP addresses. I get a lot of my news (and, in this interminable age of Trump, plenty of comic relief) from satirical news programs like Trevor Noah’s “The Daily Show” and Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show.” VPNs allow me to stay connected to the American news cycle, as exasperating as it may be.

4. Heated Café Terraces 

Even before I moved from Ohio to Chicago, with its interminable winters and the occasional polar vortex or arctic blast—meteorological gimmicks that conceal how much it literally hurts to breathe when it is –16^­ºF (–26.7ºC) outside—I knew that my mental health suffered during the winter. The cold and darkness of the winter months aggravate my depression, and by extension, fall becomes an agonizing waiting game, as the sunset creeps earlier and earlier over the horizon, a sunlight thief.

Perhaps the greatest contributor to my seasonal depression is the claustrophobic feeling of being cooped up inside. When the snow is up to your calves and a cruel wind is blowing off of Lake Michigan, its frigid waters coughing up chunks of ice onto the deserted beach, even the slightest errand feels like Roald Amundsen’s 1911 excursion to the South Pole. It takes so much mental and physical effort to leave the house in the winter that it is easier just to stay inside, even if it means skipping class and eating nothing but pasta for a week (Polar Vortex 2014).

In contrast to the humid continental climate of Chicago, Paris benefits from a mild oceanic climate, tempered by the North Atlantic Current. Even in the dead of winter, the temperature rarely dips below freezing, except occasionally at night, and fall slips so gradually, so gently, into winter that it hardly feels like an affront. The mere fact of being able to breathe outside without the searing lung pain of sub-zero temperatures (–17.8ºC) does wonders for my mental health.

If the greatest contributor to my seasonal depression is the claustrophobia that comes with being cooped up inside away from the cold, then the ability to walk and run and simply sit outside year-round in Paris comes as a great relief. It may seem trivial to some, but I have to express my genuine gratitude for the powerful heat lamps that radiate warmth onto every café terrace in Paris. To be able to sit outside on a café terrace with a crème or steaming glass of spiced vin chaud, to watch the world walk by while sheltered behind the pages of a book, to breathe in the aromas of Paris at the cusp of Christmas (smoked chestnuts, anise seed, orange liqueur), in short, to exist outside in the city, is a joy worthy of Thanksgiving.

5. The Nineteenth Arrondissement

Last February, while my friend Rachel was visiting me in Paris from New York, she observed with a bemusement that betrayed her big city sensibilities that Paris was more like a collection of contiguous neighborhoods than a city proper. I felt a twinge of resentment at her remark, because before Chicago, before New York, Paris was my first big city, my cosmopolitan ideal.

But while running last weekend through the Parc des Buttes Chaumont in the nineteenth arrondissement—with its Sunday strollers, newspaper readers, and huddled lovers, its refreshing lack of tourists, with its tapas bar and café terraces, with its hidden waterfalls and wooded pathways, the startling view of Sacre Coeur in silhouette from the top of the imitation Italian temple constructed atop a rocky crag—I recognized, or rather, reconciled myself to the fact that Rachel was right after all. Paris is indeed an assortment of small neighborhoods, each arrondissement wheeling outwards from the Seine in a clockwise spiral.

This is one of the many paradoxes that I love most about Paris: its urban cosmopolitanism is ever humbled by the small-town charm of its neighborhoods, where small businesses and artisanal industries continue to thrive, where café servers know their clientele by name, where locals of all ages haul their shopping caddies to open-air markets on weekend mornings to stock up on fresh produce and bulk provisions for the coming week. For all its culture and sophistication, its arrogance and pretension, its gleaming luminaries of progress, Paris still can’t quite shake its provincial air, and for that, I admit I am grateful.

This Thanksgiving, I am thankful to find myself living, almost by accident, in the nineteenth arrondissement, a modest working-class neighborhood on the northeastern outskirts of Paris. The nineteenth arrondissement has an understated appeal. There are no boutique culinary shops here, selling artisanal chocolate or expensive tea or organic olive oil, but on my street alone there is an excellent halal butcher, a fishmonger, a greengrocer, a wine seller, a cheese shop, and an African wholesale grocery that sells plantains and fresh sugar and bulgar wheat in bulk. I am thankful to live in a neighborhood where I feel like I am part of an authentic Parisian community.

Encrypted City: On Cultural Literacy, Continued

I moved to France after studying French for four years, and when I first landed in Paris nearly a decade ago, I had a sufficient mastery of the language to earn an approving nod from the border control agent who stamped my virgin passport in purple. But it took years of living in France and a brief romance with a French politician to even begin to understand the nuances of the morning news, and I am still a little afraid to listen to talk radio.

In a word, where I flourished in linguistic fluency, I faltered in cultural literacy.

Cultural literacy is a notoriously difficult concept to define. In his 1987 book, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, E. D. Hirsch defined the concept as the ability to communicate effectively and participate actively in a given culture. For Hirsch, cultural literacy is akin to linguistic fluency; while a fluent speaker must know the alphabet, grammar, and a sufficient set of vocabulary to communicate effectively in a given language, a culturally literate individual must understand a certain number of signs and symbols to participate actively in a given culture, including its language, history, legends, predispositions, and idiosyncrasies.

Two decades before the adoption of the Common Core standards under President Obama, Hirsch argued that all American children need a body of “core knowledge” in order to develop into fully rounded citizens. To this end, Hirsch collaborated with two of his colleagues at the University of Virginia to compile a list of 5000 events, names, and concepts whose significance every American should know.

Hirsch’s book and its lengthy appendix sparked an intellectual polemic in elite American circles, a rare honor for a professor of English literature. Conservatives, recognizing many of their dead, white forefathers on Hirsch’s list, lauded him as a defender of the patrimony. Liberals, duly noting the lack of racial and sexual diversity on Hirsch’s list, attacked him as retrograde and Eurocentric. But in a severely divided nation whose elected officials cannot agree on what constitutes an objective truth and with a president who regularly peddles fiction and ridicules fact, it turns out that Hirsch was right.

While cultural literacy is essential to communicate effectively and participate actively at home, navigating the cultural landscape of a foreign country requires an entirely different set of knowledge and skills. As an American striving to build a life abroad, acquiring cultural literacy in France has been a challenging and yet immensely rewarding experience.

Eric Lui, writing on Hirsch’s legacy for The Atlantic in 2015, argues that cultural literacy, above all, requires an intimate knowledge of particulars and the ability to recognize patterns in an encrypted cultural landscape. In order to understand what is being said in public (by politicians and influential public figures), in the media (by journalists and entertainers), and in colloquial conversation (by friends and the friendly server at my neighborhood café), it is necessary to understand what is not is not being said.

A couple of recent examples from the French news can illustrate the importance of detailed knowledge in deciphering public discourse. To understand the controversy sparked by the comments of Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right Front National party, concerning France’s responsibility in Vél d’Hiv incident of July 1942, it is necessary to know not only that Vél d’Hiv refers to the roundup and subsequent deportation of 13,000 French Jews to Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War, but also that seventy-five years later, France remains extremely sensitive about the collaboration of the Vichy Regime with the German Occupation and France’s complicity in the extermination of hundreds of thousands of Jews, and that for many French people, Marine Le Pen still bears the damning stigma of her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded the Front National in 1972 on an openly anti-Semitic platform.

Or to comprehend why the French Academy recently denounced l’écriture inclusive, or “gender-inclusive writing” as an “aberration” that posed a “mortal danger” to the French language, it is necessary to know that the French Academy was created in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu to defend and promote the integrity of the French language, which in the early seventeenth century was still threatened by regional languages in provincial France and ongoing territorial conflicts, notably with Great Britain across the English Channel; that the French Academy consists in forty “Immortal” members, and that in its nearly four centuries of existence, only eight of its 726 members have been women, the first of whom was elected in 1980; that French is a gendered language that gives precedence to the masculine form of a noun over the feminine; that since the advent of globalization and waves of immigration from North and Sub-Saharan African following decolonization in the twentieth century, the French Academy has been waging a losing battle to inoculate the French language from the contamination of urban slang and imported idioms; and that both Emmanuel Macron, recently elected President of France, and Anne Hidalgo, the first female mayor of Paris, insist on using gender-inclusive language in their public discourse.

Is it any wonder that while I can breeze through bulky French novels from the nineteenth century, dense with detailed descriptions of bourgeois parlors and obsolete fashion accessories, the political satire published weekly in the French periodicals Charlie Hebdo and Le Canard Enchaîné still regularly baffles me?

The trouble with cultural literacy is that it is impossible to define a definitive set of particular knowledge necessary to acquire it. If the ongoing controversy surrounding Hirsch’s 5000-item list of “core knowledge,” which was criticized for its lack of inclusivity, is any measure, cultural literacy is something that must be acquired on the ground, through an infuriating yet ultimately illuminating process of trial and error. Cultural literacy comes with getting lost one too many times on the unnecessarily complicated RER C line in Paris, or making an unintentionally tasteless joke about Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the disgraced former director of the International Monetary Fund, at a party among friends. And as I wrote last week in my post about Johnny Long, a professional hacker that I met on a documentary shoot in Uganda, acquiring cultural literacy requires the patient effort, risk mediation, and pattern recognition of a righteous hack.

France once existed as a magical place in my mind: Provence in full bloom, all olive light and medieval streets and the pulsing cadence of cicadas at dusk; but today, I see my adopted country as a machine whose internal mechanisms and encrypted codes I am determined to hack.

It is one thing to impress my French friends with my intimate knowledge of the history of French colonialism in Algeria, for example, or to surprise seasoned Parisians by taking them to an underground speakeasy tucked away on a side street near Odéon, but it is an entirely different matter to decipher the dizzying array of intricacies involved in acquiring the benefits of legal residency in France. I have a Bachelors degree in French from Ohio University, and I am presently pursing a PhD in French at Northwestern University, but no amount of education could have prepared me for the exasperating challenge of navigating the French bureaucracy, an impenetrable administrative apparatus reminiscent of Franz Kafka’s best bureaucratic satire. In the perpetual battle to acquire cultural literacy in France, the French bureaucracy is every expat’s final frontier.

As a case in point, let me relate my experience applying for rental assistance through the Caisse d’Allocations Familales (CAF) in Pau while I was working for a meager government salary as an English language assistant in southwestern France. I applied for the position in Fall 2011, and I was accepted in March 2012. After waiting several weeks to receive my official arrêté de nomination, or job appointment letter, from the high school near Pau where I would be teaching, as well as a last-minute trip to the state capital to have my birth certificate notarized, I took an eight-hour bus ride from Columbus to Chicago for my scheduled visa interview at the French consulate. I take pride in my meticulous documentation; I arrived at the French consulate armed with my completed visa application, my bank statements, my job appointment letter, my passport, two additional passport photos, my birth certificate, my travel itinerary, a self-addressed return envelope, and enough money to pay for my visa in cash. Retrospectively, I recognize that the initial visa application process was relatively straightforward, and I received my visa in the mail a couple of weeks later.

But the process of acquiring the benefits of legal residency in France was far from over. Upon arriving in Pau in September 2012, I had to find a place to live, open a French bank account, and set up a cell phone plan; and in a self-defeating cycle of administrative inefficiency, each of these steps—the lease, the bank account, and the cell phone—required the others to have happened first: in order to lease an apartment, I needed a French bank account, but in order to open a French bank account, I needed a French phone number, but in order to set up a cell phone plan, I needed a French bank account, but in order to open a French bank account, I needed an address in France, and so on. It was exhausting and infuriating. I felt like I was stuck on one of M. C. Escher’s infinite staircases leading nowhere.

A couple of weeks later, I received the necessary paperwork from my employer to complete my application for legal residency in France. But before I could schedule my mandatory medical visit, which consisted in a comically anachronistic screening for tuberculosis, I needed a notarized translation of my American birth certificate. And it wasn’t until all of these administrative details were complete—the lease, the French bank account, the cell phone plan, the immigration papers, the translated birth certificate, the medical screening, and the social security card—that I could even begin to apply for rental assistance through the CAF, which provides housing subsidies to low-income individuals like me, who was living through this whole ordeal on approximately 100€ a week after rent.

By the time I was finally able to apply for rental assistance, I was somewhat familiar with the inanities of French bureaucracy, so I was hardly surprised when in February 2013 I received a letter from the CAF dated from December 2012 to inform me that they were unable to find a document that I sent them in November 2012. I immediately visited the CAF office in Pau to rectify the situation, but it wasn’t until April 2013 that several months’ worth of backdated rental assistance was deposited into my bank account. I took my roommates out for an evening of drinks to celebrate. But my contract with the high school where I was teaching ended the following month, and I returned to the United States in May 2013, at which point I had to submit a new batch of documents to request the termination of the rental assistance that I had finally received, lest I incur legal penalties.

In his article for The Atlantic on cultural literacy, Eric Lui argues that beyond its importance to civil society, “literacy in the culture confers power, or at least access to power. Illiteracy, whether willful or unwitting, creates isolation from power.” Cultural literacy confers power because it allows you to understand the way society really works, from the unspoken cultural codes underpinning everyday interactions to the elaborate rules governing the bureaucratic apparatus.

As my Kafkaesque experience with the CAF illustrates, the value of cultural literacy can be measured, perhaps crassly, in economic terms. Learning how to navigate the French bureaucracy allowed me to reap the financial benefits of legal residency in France, but it also taught me the economic value of time. France has maintained the social welfare policies of a socialist state, but its economy functions according to the free market principles of modern capitalism. To put it simply, time is money. And nothing derails a workday like taking the bus across town, or worse, across the country, to an administrative office only to be turned away by an unaccommodating government functionary because your identity photos are deemed unacceptable or because you are missing a duplicate of an official document, or to discover that the office is closed in observance of an obscure public holiday.

Ultimately, cultural literacy is a question of socioeconomic empowerment, at home and abroad.

In his 2013 memoir, Les derniers jours (The Last Days), Jean Clair, a member of the aforementioned French Academy and an esteemed cultural critic in France, reflects poetically on the connection between cultural literacy and socioeconomic empowerment. As I wrote in a previous post on the perceived decline of France on the global stage, I suspect that Clair’s ardent defense of the French language stems from his experience of socioeconomic marginalization as a peasant child educated in Paris in the interwar period. Clair saw his mastery of the French language as a means of socioeconomic assimilation in an elitist intellectual culture that scoffed at his provincial roots.

In Les derniers jours, Clair recalls the language games he and his classmates used to play: “My classmates and I got into the habit of collecting, combining, or inversing the components of words. . . . We would make them our own through cabalistic operations. We acquired the knowledge of words, like loot or plunder, and we forged them into pseudonyms, or hidden names, words that would later serve us, once we pronounced them according to incantations we had learned by heart, like an abracadabra, capable of making us invisible to those who would perhaps one day reproach us for our origins and our poor manners, and would even cause us harm, much like the experience of the miserable inhabitant of the projects (banlieues). . . . This humorous disarray would allow us to discretely emphasize our difference with the others, and by keeping our distance, the game quietly allowed us to critique, to question, to doubt, to smile, and to be surprised, like a learned interpretation of the Talmudic texts or a gay science (gaia scienza).”

Despite the author’s avowed social conservatism, I frequently reread the sections of Clair’s memoir that are dedicated to language—on reading, writing, pronunciation, naming, assimilation, dictation, the library, the paranoia of losing one’s language, or dreaming in a foreign tongue—because they remind me of the unparalleled joy that comes with acquiring linguistic and cultural literacy in a foreign country. The pursuit of cultural literacy is an exhausting passion, but it has also been one of the most rewarding and illuminating challenges of my life abroad.

Measuring cultural literacy means celebrating small victories, like understanding the Paris underground well enough to know the shortest transfer between the #3 and the #5 metro lines at République (last car in the back of the #3, right up the stairs, left, down the stairs, right, right again at the Relay newspaper stand, past the entrance to #11, up the stairs, right, and then straight down to the end of the platform, first car in the front of the #5 to exit at Laumière), or the difference between an authentically artisanal bakery and an artisanal bakery in name only (the longevity of the baguette is a fine indicator). Since moving to France, I have learned the color of the leaves in autumn (medallion gold) and how to earn the good graces of the notoriously unfriendly servers in a country that doesn’t tend to tip wait staff (respect for restaurant protocol and regular patronage). And after a few embarrassing mishaps, I can now confidently swear in French (knowing when to use punaise as opposed to the more vulgar putain, for example, or the nuance in meaning between je m’en fiche and je m’en fous).

Paris, like any urban center, is an encrypted city, and it takes commitment, curiosity, and a healthy sense of humor to uncover its secrets. Any guidebook will tell you where to find the best potato gratin near Saint-Michel, but it is rarely mentioned that the Bistro des Augustins routinely stops serving lunch shortly after 2 p.m. A single weekend in France suffices to learn that most French businesses close after noon on Sundays, but it takes patience and little luck to discover that foreign-run épiceries often stay open in defiance of Sunday trading laws. And while the blogosphere is full of helpful tips for surviving the French bureaucracy (one American expat blogger even published a flowchart to illustrate the interminable process of renewing his visa in France), nothing compares to the lived experience of being led, stark naked from the waist up, into a radiography lab to be screened for tuberculosis (the upside, of course, is that I got to keep a physical copy of my chest x-ray).

Like hacking, which I discussed last week, the pursuit of cultural literacy also requires a patient understanding of potential risk. To get the most out of living abroad, I have gotten into the habit of stepping outside of my comfort zone (like a ski trip to the French Alps or a political march through the streets of Paris), but I have also come to recognize that with opportunity comes risk. Despite having very little experience with downhill skiing, I managed to navigate the slopes at Serre Chevalier without breaking any bones or careening off of a cliff, and the political march I participated in last January remained peaceful throughout. But I was lucky, and for all of my confidence, I am not immune to mistakes. I have accepted invitations that veered dangerously close to disaster, and I have sometimes trusted the wrong people. I have walked down the wrong streets at the wrong time of the day, and I have been hurt, harassed, and assaulted.

It is easy to romanticize the jet-setting life of an expatriate, but living abroad is exhausting. Every errand, every interaction, every excursion comes with the additional challenge of deciphering a cultural code that is designed to keep foreigners out. As I wrote a few weeks ago in a post on French fashion and fitting in, sticking out as a foreigner can be tiresome when it isn’t outright dangerous. It invites questions, unwanted advances, and even the occasional aggression.

But I moved to France because I admire its cultural ideals, and for all of its absurd eccentricities, I love this country. I love the pride that the French take in the quality of their butter and their bread and their produce. I love that I once walked into my kitchen in Pau to find two of my roommates, both basic French men in their twenties, in a heated argument about which white wine (Chardonnay or Pinot Grigio) to use in the chicken dish that Romain was making us for dinner. I love that the French take their universal health care for granted and consider psychoanalysis a rite of passage. I love that everyone educated in France has at least an elementary understanding of the foundations of modern philosophy. I love that a new exhibition at the Louvre draws massive crowds at 9 a.m. on a weekday.  I love that the French routinely take to the streets in massive numbers to protest perceived injustice (after all, the manifestation is the French national pastime, after cocktail hour). And I have even grown to love the challenge of dealing with the French bureaucracy, because there’s nothing more distinctively French than complaining loudly about the CAF.

Beyond effective communication and active participation, I want to belong here. I want to laugh at jokes at parties. I want to disguise what accent I have left (my French friends say I shouldn’t, that it’s charming). I want to march into the immigration office with duplicates and triplicates of all the right paperwork, signed and stamped by all the right people. I want to understand, with all of its intricacies and inanities and irreconcilable contradictions, what it means to be French.

Adventure City: On Narrative and Future Nostalgia

I think often about what I will one day remember of these strange, vagabond days. I cast my gaze forward if only to turn back and look at the present from a better vantage point, in an anticipatory future anterior. How will I have spent all these years on the run? What will I have done with all this freedom?

Sometimes I catch myself in a vain turn of phrase (“I was on the train to London the other day,” or “This fried ricotta reminds me of the papanași I tried in Bucharest,” or “Let’s meet up when I’m in Copenhagen next month. . .”), dropping names of exotic locales like celebrity acquaintances. I trace a map of my adventures in my mind.

But if I compulsively project myself forward into the future, it is because sometimes the only way I can make sense of time as it flows relentlessly past is in regards to some imaginary denouement. That is to say, there are days when I am so overwhelmed by the beauty and the chaos of the present that I have to imagine some kind of narrative to contain it. To write is to impose reason on a world that resists it, to tame the turbid divagations of my mind as it wanders the streets of this solitary city, adrift and alone.

How else am I to make sense of this cobbled together life of studio apartments in far-flung neighborhoods and the books I keep stubbornly lugging across continents?

In his 1938 novel, La nausée (Nausea), Jean-Paul Sartre decries the autobiographical impulse as a form of fatalism; for Roquentin, the novel’s schizophrenic narrator, an adventure only appears as such retroactively, when discerning hands write raw experience into existence through narrative. He writes: “This feeling of adventure definitely does not come from the events [themselves]. . . . It is rather the way in which the moments are linked together. . . . [Y]ou suddenly feel that time is passing, that each instant leads to another, this one to another one, and so on; that each instant is annihilated, and that it isn’t worthwhile to hold it back. . . . [T]his is the feeling of adventure.”

I like to call it future nostalgia.

It is a bit like falling in love: facing eternity and begging it on bended knee to descend into time, or catching a glimpse of the sublime and calling it a rose. The words will never be enough. Yet we continue to try, and we kiss with open eyes.

Many years ago, when I was living for a summer in Nice (there I go, dropping names again), I thought I caught a glimpse of that pure, unmediated presence that in Sartre’s novel drives Roquentin to the edge of insanity. I was too poor to be living in the French Riviera, but the Mediterranean flamed gold every evening at sunset, and I had never felt more alive and in love. All that summer I was aroused and unstable. The Mediterranean inspired a certain madness in me, like the sun at high noon. It was the burning madness of waves of loneliness of love of sunlight so bright that it seared the sky to a bleached white blue.

I was hungry for experience, but I hadn’t quite learned to protect myself. I was beginning to understand desire, but I didn’t know what I wanted, let alone how to ask for it. And so I would plunge headfirst into the salty sweet sea because all I could understand was that I was desperate for some kind of embrace, something strong to hold my skin together and to fill my empty spaces.

That summer I met a Tunisian man named Walid while walking home in a crowd of people along the Promenade des Anglais. I was wine drunk and France was celebrating its bloody birthday, Bastille Day. We sat together on the beach, and he held me in his arms. It was all I wanted, an embrace. The moon was nearly full, and I was content just to watch its reflection leap over the crests of the inkblack waves. But I was there on the rocks with the body of a man. His Italian jeans. His clean shoes. His dark hair. So I listened to the waves on the shore and let him kiss me. We would later meet up for drinks on the promenade, and then one night we walked up the hill to his minuscule studio apartment, where he held me in his arms for a long time. He was strong. He left handprints on my neck shoulders thighs. I thought perhaps I should say something but I didn’t.

Five years later, in July 2016, sitting alone in a New York apartment that I would abandon soon thereafter—along with the love that had brought me there in the first place—I watched wide-eyed with horror as a Tunisian man drove a lorry down the Promenade des Anglais through that very same celebratory crowd, killing eighty-six. I couldn’t help but think of my Walid, his quiet anger, the weight of his hands on my chest, the tender way he washed my hair when we took a hot shower together in the wee hours of the night.

Suddenly, retrospectively, that summer made sense. Nice had been my flaming youth: all those sensual, bisexual novels by Nina Bouaroui and Marguerite Duras that I was devouring at the time; the fleeting, reckless love affair with a man I barely knew; the cheap Corsican wine that my friends and I would drink straight out of the bottle on the rocky beach; the nervous, melodramatic album by The National that I would listen to on repeat while walking for kilometers along the coast; the sight of the sea after a sudden storm, groaning on the horizon like a sleeping giant under a thin sheet, deep and dark and black and blue as a new bruise.

Late that summer I went to see the final installment of the Harry Potter movie franchise with three friends, and as the French subtitles scrolled across the bottom of the screen, I remember feeling as though I had crossed some kind of temporal threshold and entered someplace (sometime) new. We all exited the movie theater blinking back tears but pretending not to and then drank huge goblets of wine at a bar in the Cours Saleya and tried to laugh about the end of our respective childhoods.

The bus system in Nice is expansive but stops running just after one in the morning. The bars don’t close until at least two, so I would inevitably miss the last bus despite my stated sober intentions. That night, like so many others, I ended up walking the five kilometers home with the sea gently cresting on the rocky beach to my left. I loved the sound of polished pebbles tumbling beneath the retreating waves. I could walk the length of the Promenade des Anglais in just under an hour.

It took five minutes for the perpetrator of the Bastille Day attack to slaughter eighty-six innocent revelers there on that same promenade. Reading news of the attack on my phone, I sunk to the wooden floor of that claustrophobic apartment in Queens, surrounded by framed art that we never got around to hanging on the walls, and I sobbed. Suddenly something that I had thought of as my youth was gone.

That September, I left the New York apartment that had never felt like home and moved in with two close friends, a married couple, on the north side of Chicago. I was scheduled to lead discussion sections for a large lecture course on French Existentialism at my university. By late October, the relationship that I had left behind in New York had finally come to an end after four and a half progressively painful years.

My former partner had the decency to fly to Chicago so we could have “the talk” in person. That same evening, after he had left for the airport and I had cried myself dry, I contacted a few close friends, the ones that had consoled me when I would burst into tears in the library or the graduate office, and invited them to a bar on Devon Avenue in Rogers Park and threw myself a goddamn party. I called it my “rebirthday.”

I returned to New York in December to pack up my belongings and then caught a flight to Martinique, a rum-soaked self-care vacation that I felt I deserved, even though I had originally planned to take the trip with my former partner. I graded a stack of final Existentialism papers on the plane and drank a glass or three of red wine and wrote increasingly whimsical comments in the margins. My dear friend Rachel, who let me sleep on her couch in Washington Heights while I packed up my belongings in Astoria, kept telling me that Martinique was my “Eat, Pray, Love” adventure. (Did I skinny dip in the moonlight with a sculpted Martiniquan fireman named Gilles on an undisturbed beach near Les Trois-Îlets? Yes, yes I did.) Upon my return to New York a week later, my parents graciously helped me schlep my belongings down Route 80 in the snow to their house in Ohio. I brooded in my childhood bedroom reading short stories by Vladimir Nabokov until New Years.

I had never gone through a major breakup before. My longest prior relationship had only endured six months of my own emotional unavailability and had ended a few weeks before I moved to Nice in 2011. I soon discovered that one of the hardest aspects of this first major breakup, something that no one had warned me about, was confronting the vacuum where a shared vision for the future had once existed so vividly in my imagination. The narrative that I had been constructing about my (our) future for the better part of my twenties had suddenly lost its primary point of reference: love.

So I applied for a research fellowship through my university, and last January, I moved to Paris. Out of heartbreak, a homecoming. Let’s call it a renaissance.

I am not religious, despite growing up in a conservative community in rural Ohio, and any talk of being “born again” inevitably triggers memories of evangelical megachurches housed in boxy warehouses behind strip malls selling sporting goods and scented candles. But I do like to think of my move to Paris as a kind of renaissance, which in the French translates literally as “rebirth.”

Adventure starts with an inventory. This year, I went careening down eight kilometers of packed snow on the Col d’Izoard in the French Alps on a toboggan with two French dentists. I stood on a balcony at dawn overlooking the Mediterranean in Tel Aviv to listen to the morning call to prayer. I drove to the Black Sea on a whim because it was raining in Bucharest. I stayed out too late in Chicago and watched the sun rise over Lake Michigan on more occasions than I am willing to admit. I wrote my first short fiction in years and started a blog with a modest but devoted following (thank you). I ran a personal record in the Lyon half marathon, and after a dozen years of running, I have finally decided to train for my first full marathon. I met and fell in love with a man named Adam, who smells like cedarwood and cinnamon and freshly mown fields and sometimes recites me poems by E. E. Cummings or Pablo Neruda in lieu of pillow talk. And  I am making a home for myself in the nineteenth arrondissement of Paris.

The narrative thread will come later, but for the first time in years, I am writing again.

Found City: On Finding Value in the Everyday

1.

On the southern edge of Paris, in one of those nowhere zones south of Necker where the fourteenth and fifteenth arrondissements collide just inside the Boulevard Périphérique that chokes the city center in smoke, a five-thousand-square-foot basement houses the Bureau des Objets Trouvés, or the Bureau of Found Objects.

Patrick Cassignol, who has directed the Bureau des Objets Trouvés for over a decade, likes to call the agency’s vast underground storeroom “Ali Baba’s cave.” Inside, six kilometers of identical grey shelves hold carefully labeled key rings, wallets, cell phones, shopping caddies, stuffed animals, prosthetic limbs, and lonely gloves. The agency maintains a surprisingly simple system of valuation to account for the hundreds of thousands of items it receives each year. If an object is valued at less than one hundred euros, it is kept for four months; more valuable items are stored for one year. After the designated period, unclaimed items are either donated to charity or destroyed.

In addition to processing everyday items, the Bureau des Objets Trouvés also maintains a private museum of miscellanea. The musée de l’insolite at the Bureau des Objets Trouvés houses a whimsical collection of oddities: an unclaimed funeral urn, a taxidermied lobster found at the Orly airport, a nineteenth-century sword, a human skull retrieved from a train station near the Catacombs, two-hundred-twenty-two pounds of copper wire, a collection of forsaken wedding dresses, and even a few shards of concrete from the World Trade Center—the Berlin Wall of my generation—recovered from an abandoned suitcase along with the bright orange vest of a New York City transit employee.

When asked in a recent interview for The New Yorker why the agency is called the Bureau des Objets Trouvés rather than the Bureau des Objects Perdus, Cassignol responded pragmatically: “Because we do not know if they were lost or stolen. We know only that they have been found.”

Lost or stolen, what these items have in common is that someone, somewhere, had the heart to reach down and pick them up, and in a fit of generosity, to deposit them at the police prefecture with the absurd hope that these orphaned objects might one day find their way home. This generous individual, the finder, is referred to as the inventeur, or “inventor,” of the object; the designation suggests that the object’s value and identity derive entirely from the quality of having been found.

2. 

I found myself living in the nineteenth arrondissement of Paris, a working-class neighborhood on the Right Bank of the Seine, by sheer force of circumstance. I would say that I am lucky to be living here, but I am distrustful of the idea of luck, which smacks of entitlement and the blind apathy of faith.

I chose to live the nineteenth arrondissement (or rather, the nineteenth arrondissement chose me, as my mother used to say of the stray cats that my parents would occasionally agree to take in when they wandered, purring, out of the neighboring fields), because with the exception of some of the dark corners on the northeastern slope of Montmartre, the nineteenth arrondissement was the only neighborhood on the Right Bank that I could afford.

There are two types of people in Paris: Left Bank loyalists, and those who swear by the Right Bank; a river runs between them.

The Left Bank is a picture of Paris as it exists in every foreigner’s imagination, with warmly lit cafés on winding cobblestoned streets and hidden courtyards where ancient fountains babble for no one’s ears in particular. The place just aches with romanticism. The Left Bank is home to the Latin Quarter, Saint-Germain-des-Près, and Montparnasse, those illustrious enclaves of French intellectualism where everyone from Charles Baudelaire to Jean-Paul Sartre and Marguerite Duras had their humble beginnings.

I once went wandering there with a French banker that I met while returning my Vélib to a bike share stand. We were both on our way to a convenience store that stays open until two in the morning on the Place Saint-Michel, across the Seine from Notre Dame. He led me through the empty streets to the former home of the beloved French singer Serge Gainsbourg, hidden behind a densely graffitied wall on the Rue de Verneuil. He offered to buy me a drink, but it was already after midnight, so I took him to a cavernous speakeasy called Le Bar on a side street between Odéon and the Jardin du Luxembourg. Le Bar looks a bit like the Korova Milk Bar in the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s filmic adaptation of “A Clockwork Orange,” but without the glossy statues of naked women clad in nothing but in curly white wigs. We were drinking whiskey at a low table in the back when a drunk but pleasant enough poet approached us and asked if he could recite us a few lines of poetry. The three of us ended up wandering around the Hôtel des Invalides, where Napoleon is buried, to watch the sunrise over the Seine from the Pont Alexandre III. This is the Left Bank. It is a place of dreams and delusion.

The Right Bank, across the Seine, is home to most of the major tourist attractions in Paris. I still marvel at the arrow-straight path that runs from the Louvre through the Jardin des Tuileries and the Place de la Concorde all the way to the Arc de Triomphe at the far end of the Champs Elysées. Most foreigners stick close to the Seine and only stray north to visit the Centre Georges Pompidou, the largest museum of modern art in Europe, or to follow the footsteps of Amélie Poulain in Montmartre. But if you are priced out by the fashionable boutiques in the Marais and wander far enough north on the Boulevard de Strausbourg to the Gare de l’Est, you will cross an invisible frontier around the Boulevard Saint-Martin and enter the Paris beloved by progressive Parisians.

Don’t even bother with the lines at L’As du Falafel on the Rue des Rosiers in the Jewish quarter; go to the Daily Syrien, a newspaper stand qua food counter on the bustling Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis for the best falafel in Paris. The neighboring Canal Saint-Martin is like the New Brooklyn of Paris, if Greenpoint spoke a dozen African languages instead of Polish and the culinary scene and nightlife in Williamsburg were somehow less pretentious. Further north along the canal, up the hill from the micro-Chinatown on the corner of the Boulevard de la Villette and the Rue de Belleville, the underappreciated Parc de Belleville boasts some of the best views of Paris at sunset.

This is the Paris I call home.

3. 

I was perusing the permanent collection at the Musée de l’Orangerie in the Jardin des Tuileries when I came across a newly opened exhibition on the “sources et influences extra-occidentales” of Dadaism, which explores the impact of indigenous African, American, and Oceanic art on European avant-garde movements in the early twentieth century. My friend Vincent, the most dedicated museum-goer I know, had convinced me over drinks to buy an annual pass to the Musée de l’Orangerie, which includes unlimited access to the Impressionist galleries at the nearby Musée d’Orsay. I like to go to the Musée de l’Orangerie when I am feeling overwhelmed by the frantic pace of the city; eight of Claude Monet’s iconic water lily murals are on permanent display there, and those swirling pastels never fail to calm my nerves.

The new exposition at the Musée de l’Orangerie attempts to destabilize the dominant narrative that Dadaism was an inherently European movement. In the wake of colonial conquest and exploratory expeditions in Africa, the Americas, and Oceania, thousands of indigenous artifacts began appearing on auction blocks and in flea markets in Europe around the turn of the twentieth century. Despite knowing knew very little about the original meaning and function of these objects, which were treated as indigenous artifacts rather than works of art in their own right, European artists, critics, and dealers soon began collecting them for their unique aesthetic value and exotic allure. The highly stylized treatment of the human figure, pictorial flatness, vivid color palette, and fragmented shapes that have come to define the aesthetic of the European avant-garde can be attributed in large part to the colonial encounter between Western artists and the non-Western cultures they colonized.

Contemplating a glass display case of wooden Makonde masks, I am reminded of Cassignol’s comment on the value of the found object. These indigenous artifacts were not lost; they were stolen. This is the story of colonialism. To Marcel Duchamp and the Dadaists, it didn’t matter that these indigenous artifacts had a history, a function, and a symbolic significance of their own; they saw them primarily as found objects, whose value and identity were gleaned from their quality of having been found, much like the endless rows of everyday items collected at the Bureau des Objets Trouvés.

Inspired by Pablo Picasso’s incorporation of everyday materials such as newspapers, matchboxes, or rope into his Cubist collages, the Dadaists wanted to demonstrate the social construction of artistic value by transforming found objects into works of art (I am tempted to place “art” in quotation marks, but I will leave that debate for another day). Duchamp called these pieces “ready-mades”: manufactured objects whose artistic value and identity derived entirely from the artist’s intent, along with the context into which the found object was placed by the artist (a porcelain urinal poised on a pedestal in an art gallery, for example, to cite one of Duchamp’s most controversial pieces).

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Justifying the artistic value of his famous “Fountain” piece in an editorial published anonymously in the May 1917 edition of the avant-garde magazine The Blind Man, Duchamp writes: “whether [the artist] with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object.”

Duchamp’s idea was that by abstracting or isolating existing man-made objects from their intended environments, he could disrupt the symbolic systems of value—including artistic value—according to which all economic relations are expressed. The transgressive potential of the found object is perhaps best exemplified by the American avant-garde artist Man Ray’s 1921 sculpture “The Gift,” in which a common flatiron has been rendered useless by a vertical column of brass tacks glued down the appliance’s smoothing center. The domestic familiarity of the found object was intended to reinforce the abstraction of its artistic appropriation, producing what Sigmund Freud first described in 1919 as the unheimlich, or the uncanny, a feeling of foreign familiarity.

The avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century had an undeniable knack for sowing scandal in elite intellectual circles. Assuming Duchamp’s work can be said to have any artistic value in the first place (a debate that persists primarily amongst academics and art critics, whereas the general population seems to have largely discredited or simply forgotten about his work), one of the most fascinating discussions surrounding Duchamp’s “Fountain” piece concerns the status and authenticity of the porcelain urinal featured in his work.

Duchamp’s original “Fountain” was never exhibited publicly. After the piece was initially rejected for the first annual exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York, the American art collector Alfred Stieglitz agreed to display and photograph the porcelain urinal in his private studio. A staged photograph of Duchamp’s piece was then published in The Blind Man, cited above, and the original porcelain urinal was subsequently destroyed.

But despite his stated intention to disrupt systems of artistic and economic value, increased interest in Duchamp’s famous “Fountain” piece in the 1950s and 60s encouraged the artist to authorize an estimated sixteen reproductions. Of these “authentic” reproductions, eleven have been included in museum collections around the world, and four are owned privately; one has been indefinitely lost.

Ironically, however, the facile reproducibility of Duchamp’s iconic piece has finally succeeded in confounding the systems of value that the artist initially sought to disrupt. Reproductions of Duchamp’s “Fountain” are notoriously difficult to authenticate. Allegedly unauthorized reproductions of the piece have infuriated connoisseurs and befuddled potential collectors willing to pay millions for the privilege of owning a piece of Duchamp’s controversial legacy: a pseudonymous signature scrawled hastily on a porcelain urinal.

The exhaustive debate surrounding the relative artistic and economic value of Duchamp’s “ready-mades” often obscures the simple fact that “Fountain,” like much of the work of early Dadaists, originally consisted in a found object: prosaic, rudimentary, vulgar. Perhaps the only museum in which Duchamp’s work unquestionably merits inclusion is the musée de l’insolite at the Bureau des Objets Trouvés.

4.

Paris has a problem that is common to many of the iconic capitals of the world; the city has been so colonized by the international imagination that to the untrained eye it looks like there is nothing left to find. Paris has so many major monuments and historical landmarks that any sane itinerary to visit them all would take weeks to complete. After nearly a decade of passing through Paris, I still haven’t toured the Catacombs, a two hundred mile network of underground ossuaries where some six million bodies are buried, and I only recently took my first trip to the Château de Versailles when my American partner visited me in Paris a few weeks ago.

When I first visited Paris in March 2009 on my way south to a study-abroad program in Avignon, I remember feeling overwhelmingly disappointed in the city, and then even more disappointed in myself for having failed to grasp the essence of a place that had existed so vividly and for so many years in my imagination. Had I missed something essential? Had I done something wrong?

They say there is a mental ward in the Hôpital Sainte-Anne in Paris for Japanese tourists who are traumatized upon discovering that Paris isn’t what they thought it would be, all buttery croissants and effortlessly chic women wearing stripes and smelling of Chanel No 5. Mental health professionals call it the “Paris Syndrome,” a psychosomatic tailspin triggered by “the shock of coming to grips with a city that is indifferent to their presence and looks nothing like their imagination,” as Chelsea Fagan describes it an article for The Atlantic. The Japanese Embassy in Paris even has a 24-hour emergency hotline for tourists suffering from the condition and seeking medical help.

It is easy to dismiss the “Paris Syndrome” as an indelibly first-world disorder, or the result of an unforgivably naïve worldview. But there is something profoundly alienating about the disjuncture between the “City of Lights” as it exists in the international imagination and Paris as a living, breathing city: an unfriendly place, filthy in parts, where inequality and crime flourish as they do in any urban center. That cognitive disconnect can be disorientating.

But at the same time, Paris still plays something of a caricature of itself, especially in the central arrondissements that border the Seine, and it can be surprisingly difficult to break through the city’s glossy veneer. Writing in the journal that I kept the summer I lived in Nice, that ochre jewel of a city on the French Riviera, I described Paris as a place “where people fuck and drive and drink and smoke and shop and flirt and maybe even fall in love, but where no one actually seems to live.” In Paris, the café terraces are bursting at all hours with fashionable men and women whiling away hours over espressos and chain-smoking cigarettes. With the exception of the service industry, I had never actually seen anyone going to work. Where were the lawyers, the physical therapists, and the bankers, and where and when did they find the time to work between boozy two-hour lunches and the late afternoon apéritif, or cocktail hour?

Even after passing through Paris a half-dozen times, always on my way someplace else, the city still felt unreal. I could stock up on any number of high-end skin care products at the pharmacy, but where did Parisians go when they got sick? I knew where to find wicker baskets and vintage mirrors and decorative lamps, but where could I buy a replacement light bulb? How could people afford to get dressed in a city known for its high fashion and luxury accessories, and can anyone really tell the difference between drugstore brand makeup and the gold tube of Yves Saint Laurent mascara that a saleswoman once tried to sell me for 36€ at Sephora?

And where was the gritty underbelly of the gilded city? I was sure it existed somewhere, but I didn’t know where or how to find it. I had encountered the roaming Eastern European roumis that beg in front of Notre Dame and the predatory groups of Senegalese men that sell key chains and trinkets at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, but I had never come across the kind of poverty of which one finds traces on every street corner in American cities.

And then one day I took a wrong turn coming down the hill from Sacre Coeur, and suddenly I found myself in the midst of a bustling sidewalk bazaar near La Chapelle, where improbable crowds of African and Middle Eastern men loiter in groups devoid of women and traveling merchants sell an off-brand version of everything imaginable, their sundry wares unfurled on blankets on the sidewalk. Here, I remember thinking, is the Paris I have been looking for. It had been there all along; I just hadn’t found it yet.

5.

Nearly a center after Duchamp’s porcelain urinal scandalized the art world, the French filmmaker Agnès Varda returned to the subject of the found object in her 2000 documentary, Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I), an idiosyncratic film about finding value in the everyday. The documentary opens with an extended sequence of a single repeated motif: the rounded back of an agricultural worker as she crouches over a modest crop, following in the tracks of modern farming equipment to collect what the machines have left behind. In the opening scene of Varda’s film, shots of contemporary potato gleaners in rural Beauce are intercut with the image that accompanies the definition of glanage, or “gleaning,” in the Dictionnaire Larousse, a black-and-white reproduction of Jean-François Millet’s 1857 painting Les glaneuses. In each of these images, the gesture of the gleaner remains unchanged: her head is down, her arm extended, her back hunched in a humble posture of industry and bleak necessity.

The film then cuts abruptly to the streets of a gloomy Paris, under the elevated tracks of the metro as it runs away from the city center towards the banlieus, where urban gleaners pick through the leftovers of an open-air market: bunches of wilted parsley, small apples, blemished tomatoes. After another abrupt cut, Varda’s camera pauses in patient admiration before the imposing canvas of Jules Breton’s 1877 painting La glaneuse. The low perspective of Breton’s naturalist tableau magnifies the female gatherer in the foreground, who stands dignified with a healthy harvest of wheat slung over her broad shoulder. On the horizon, the red orb of the sinking sun is half visible, casting a warm glow on the gleaner’s tanned skin. The commanding figure of Breton’s glaneuse then fades into a shot of the filmmaker herself, positioned in a tall mirror before her own camera with a bundle of freshly picked wheat proudly balanced on her shoulder. “Parce que moi aussi . . . je suis une glaneuse” (“Because I myself am a gleaner”), Varda declares.

Les glaneurs et la glaneuse is a film about the time-honored tradition of artistic appropriation, but it is also, and perhaps more poignantly, an exploration of the economic, social, and racial margins of French society at the turn of the twenty-first century. In Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, Varda reflects on the social alterity of the gleaner at a historical moment when globalization, hybridization, and mass migration were increasingly perceived as an existential threat to the integrity of the French nation, its language, and its culture. Varda trains her patient camera on those organic entities living beyond the invisible frontiers of mainstream society, at the edge of financial security, in the margins of the law, and on the outskirts of urban centers: the itinerant laborers, the caravan dwellers, the illiterate immigrants, the misshapen potatoes, and the grapes left to rot.

The gleaners of Les glaneurs et la glaneuse are a delightful, eclectic bunch. Some of them rely on gleaning for basic sustenance and survival, picking through the dirt to collect produce that has left behind, scouring the beach for oysters washed up after a storm, gathering fallen fruit off of orchards grounds, or dumpster diving in back alleys to recover discarded scraps, stale bread, or packaged food that has passed its expiration date. We meet a man who claims to have eaten nothing but salvaged food for over a decade without once getting sick, and a young chef in a two-star restaurant who gathers his own herbs out of frugality, a commitment to environmental sustainability, and an aversion to conventional agricultural practices. Both men share a preference for food found first-hand, rather than purchased through a third party.

The gleaners in Varda’s documentary don’t just gather out of necessity; like Varda herself, they are artists, too. Varda interviews a brick mason who in his spare time constructs disturbing sculptures out of discarded dolls and an artist who incorporates wooden whirligigs, broken utensils, and scraps of leather into richly textured assemblages that are reminiscent of Picasso’s cubist collages. Louis Pons, the collage artist in Varda’s documentary, describes his peculiar collection of found objects as a “dictionary [of] useless things”; “People think it’s a cluster of junk,” Pons says, “but I see it as a cluster of possibilities.”

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6. 

A cluster of possibilities: that is what I sought in Paris when I moved here last January. Like any good explorer, I was fleeing something back home; on this most recent flight to France, I was fleeing the notoriously harsh Chicago winter and the lingering trauma of a painful breakup.

My first apartment in Paris was under the eaves of a Haussmanian residency above the noisy tracks of the Gare de l’Est on the Rue de Lafayette. My fifth-floor apartment had a stunning view of Sacre Coeur to the west, but for some reason, there was something about the psychic energy of the place that aggravated my insomnia. I would stay up until the wee hours binging on Bojack Horseman on Netflix or sitting on my windowsill watching the seamstress that lived across the courtyard work throughout the night.

After a month, I lugged my suitcases from the tenth arrondissement to a dingy apartment near the Porte de Clignancourt north of Montmartre. My decision to live there was based almost entirely on the fact that the apartment had a piano and a washing machine. My friend Simon had driven into town from Compiègne to help me move, and he immediately sensed my distress upon finding the apartment in a state of moldy disarray. He played darts while I immediately went to work scrubbing what appeared to be decades of grime and grease off of every surface accessible to a sponge. When I fell miserably ill a few days after my move, I informed my landlord that I would be cutting my contract short. To this day, I am not sure if it was the black mold infestation in the apartment or the frigid march I attended in protest of the newly inaugurated President Trump’s immigration policy that caused my malady; in any case, I was unhappy, and I needed to move.

Out of desperation, I impulsively rented an apartment beyond my financial means in the twentieth arrondissement, just up the street from the Buttes Chaumont, my favorite park in Paris. The penthouse of a six-floor walkup, the apartment was sprawling by Parisian standards; it had a bedroom with a real double bed and a desk where I could work, a kitchen, a living room, an alcove that served as a dining room, and a bathroom with a shower that didn’t make me feel claustrophobic—a rare luxury. I moved to the twentieth arrondissement shortly before the French presidential election, and when the French politician I was casually dating at the time won a pretend election among friends on social media, he recorded his acceptance speech in front of the giant map of the world that hung above the couch in my living room. It was there, perched above the tiled rooftops of Belleville, that I fell in love with this bohemian oasis in northeastern Paris.

7.

One of my favorite characters in Varda’s Les glaneurs et la glaneuse is a bespectacled man named Alain, an urban gleaner in his late thirties or early forties with a Master’s degree in Biology. We first meet Alain nibbling on a wilted bunch of parsley at an open-air market outside of the Gare de Montparnasse in the fifteenth arrondissement. When Varda approaches him to ask if he often snacks on fresh herbs, he surprises her by rattling off a list of vital nutrients found in parsley: beta carotene, magnesium, vitamins C & E, and zinc. Varda then follows Alain to the basement of a cultural center on the outskirts of Paris, where he volunteers every evening teaching French to a group of African immigrants. He is patient and full of encouragement. He asks one of his students to define “success.”

Alain is the final figure we meet in Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, and his character encapsulates the core of the story that Varda has been telling all along. For Varda, gleaning is not just about sustenance and survival; it is also an inherently political act. On the socioeconomic margins of French society, the gleaner represents a figure of resilience and resistance against the hegemonic forces of global capitalism, political conservatism, and cultural or linguistic purism.

Alain’s students, mostly immigrants from former French colonies in West and Central Africa, are gleaners, too. The French empire has fallen, and here to glean its abandoned crop are its former colonial subjects, the future native speakers of a new French vernacular. Or, to quote the sixteenth-century poet Joachim du Bellay, who defended linguistic appropriation as a form of creative colonization, “So the Roman Empire grew by degrees, / Till barbarous power brought it to its knees, / Leaving only these ancient ruins behind, / That all and sundry pillage, as those who glean, / Following step by step, the leavings find, / That after the farmer’s passage may be seen.”

By the mid-sixteenth century, when Du Bellay was writing, France had finally begun to resemble a modern nation-state. In 1539, the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts declared French the sole administrative language of France, replacing Latin, and in the same year, the first official French grammars were published. And by the time Du Bellay’s Défense et illustration de la langue française (Defense and Illustration of the French Language) was published in 1549, the contiguous territory of France had been incorporated under a centralized (albeit irregularly executed) set of administrative laws.

At a time when regional dialects continued to undermine the dominance of the administrative language and national borders remained subject to continuous contestation, Du Bellay defended the French vernacular as the burgeoning seed of France’s nascent national consciousness. Du Bellay explicitly links poetry to proto-national politics in the opening sonnet of Les antiquitez de Rome (The Antiquities of Rome), published in 1558, in which the poet imagines plundering the ruins of Rome to furnish the French king’s new palace at Fontainebleau:

“Unable to give you these ancient works . . . / I give them to you, Sire, in this little picture, painted, as best I could, with poetic colors / Which, . . . if you deign to view it in its best light, / will be able to boast of having pulled from the tomb the dusty remains of the ancient Romans. / May the gods one day give you the good fortune / to rebuild in France such greatness / that I would willingly paint it in your language.”

Du Bellay’s intent was not merely to dust off the ruins of a distant Roman past to refurbish the king’s present palace, but rather to actively revivify ancient relics in the modern French vernacular. In Défense et illustration de la langue française, Du Bellay expresses his vision for the future of the French vernacular through an extended horticultural metaphor, in which he defends the natural potential of the French language to bear fruit while criticizing his contemporaries for their negligence:

“I can say as much of our language, which is just beginning to flower without bearing fruit, or rather, like a seedling and fresh shoot, has not yet flowered, much less yielded all the fruit it is capable of producing. That comes certainly not from any defect in its nature, as apt to engender as others, but through the fault of those who have had it in their care and have not sufficiently tended it; but like a wild plant in that same uncultivated place where it was born, they have let it grow old and nearly die, without ever watering it, pruning it, or protecting it from the bramble and thorns that shaded it.”

Du Bellay’s defense of the French vernacular has a distinctly militant quality to it. In Les antiquitez de Rome, Du Bellay describes his appropriation of Greek and Italian poetic forms with graphic metaphors of cannibalism: “By imitating the best Greek authors, transforming themselves into them, and after having thoroughly digested them, converting them into blood and nourishment, selecting, each according to his own nature and the topic he wished to choose, the best author, all of whose rarest and most exquisite strengths they diligently observed.”

By comparison, the horticultural metaphors scattered throughout Défense et illustration de la langue française seem relatively tame. But even here, Du Bellay’s vision for the future of the French vernacular beats an unmistakably militant drum; by describing the present state of the French vernacular as a dormant and fallow land laid to ruin by the negligence of its inhabitants, Du Bellay anticipates the imperialist logic of nineteenth-century French colonialists, who justified the colonial conquest of North Africa by describing its stark landscape as a savage wilderness that had yet be domesticated (for more on this, see Edward Saïd’s canonical introduction to Orientalism).

In an earlier scene in Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, when a viticulturist in the vineyards of Pommard, an appellation d’origine controlée (A.O.C.), or “protected designation of origin,” in the famed Burgundy region of France, recites from memory a few lines from Défense et illustration de la langue française, which Du Bellay is he evoking: the patient horticulturalist or the violent imperialist? Varda’s camera scans the vineyard ground, contemplating bunches of second-crop grapes, known as verjus, that have been cut from vine and left on the ground to rot. Varda interviews another Burgundy winegrower, who justifies the destructive and predatory practice as an unfortunate but necessary measure to protect to integrity and value of the Burgundy name.

8. 

By the time I moved to Paris in January 2017, the massive refugee encampment known as La Jungle near Calais in northern France had been forcibly evacuated, and thousands of displaced refugees had migrated south to Paris to find shelter beneath the elevated tracks of the metro line that runs between La Chapelle and Barbès Rochechouart. The urban landscapes of Varda’s Les glaneurs et la glaneuse had been transformed by a new crop of migrant gleaners, in search of something more substantive than bunches of wilted parsley and pale endives leftover from the morning market. Having fled conflict and economic destitution in former French colonies and protectorates in Africa and the Middle East, thousands of migrants had convened upon the French capital to claim their rightful part of the French ideal of universal equality, a revolutionary concept to which Du Bellay had given expression as early as the sixteenth century.

I chose to put down roots in the nineteenth arrondissement because of its relative affordability, but also because its diverse, working-class character appealed to my bohemian sensibilities. The day I moved into my new apartment on the Rue de Meaux, I went walking in the neighborhood and came across a densely graffitied wall across from an elementary school on the Rue Henri Noguères, where even the trees and the lampposts are covered in a constantly mutating display of street art.

Similar displays of street art have transformed the nineteenth arrondissement into a vast urban gallery. The bridge over the train tracks of the Gare de l’Est on the Rue Riquet is covered with giant portraits of African American icons, from Rosa Parks to Jimi Hendrix and Malcolm X, and on the bridge over the Bassin de la Villette on the nearby Rue de Crimée, someone has scrawled the unforgettable lyrics to John Lennon’s “Imagine.” On my way to the Laumière metro stop around the corner from my apartment, I was delighted to find that Jérôme Mesnager, a world-renowned graffiti artist, had tagged the glass window of the corner café with his characteristic white silhouettes of the human form, a celebratory symbol of life and liberty. On the retaining wall of a Catholic high school on the Rue Bouret, around the corner from the Marché Secrétan, Mesnager has illustrated the Buddhist Eightfold Path to Enlightenment as a hopscotch game to Nirvana.

The more I looked, the more I found traces of the neighborhood’s progressive past. Henri Noguères, the namesake of the graffitied street mentioned above, was an important French socialist who participated in the French Resistance against the German Occupation during the Second World War. And on the southwestern edge of the neighborhood, the busy intersection between the Canal Saint-Martin and the Bassin de la Villette bears the name of Jean Jaurès, the founder of modern French socialism.

In contrast to the picturesque cafés and cobblestoned streets of Montmartre to the west and the artists’ studios and cagey music clubs of Belleville and Ménilmonant to the southeast, the nineteenth arrondissement has an understated appeal. This is the Paris I had been looking for all these years, with laundromats and a home improvement depot and a couple of Franco-Maghrebi brasseries that offer couscous specials on Fridays. There are no boutique culinary shops here, selling artisanal chocolate or regional jam or organic olive oil, but there is an excellent halal butcher, a fishmonger, a greengrocer, a wine seller, a fromagerie, and an African wholesale grocery that sells plantains and fresh sugar cane and bulgar wheat in bulk.

And the neighborhood has its charm, too. On sunny days, the decommissioned barges anchored along the Bassin de la Villette are transformed into floating bars, and the outdoor terraces of the Panane Brewing Company and the Pavillon des Canaux are bursting with locals unburdened by crowds of curious tourists. Up the hill from the canal, the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, with its forested paths and hidden grottos, stands in stark contrast to the manicured paths of the Jardin du Luxembourg in the sixth arrondissement or the Jardin des Tuileries, which stretches between the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde, where stark rows of stunted trees have been aggressively pruned into geometric shapes. At the center of the Buttes Chaumont, on a rocky crag accessible only by bridge, the Temple de la Sibylle, an imitation of the ancient Roman Tempio di Vista in Trivoli, offers an unexpected view of Sacre Coeur, a silhouette against the sunset.

The nineteenth arrondissement is uncharted terrain; I am an explorer here. But as an outsider, and a critically minded one at that, I am painfully aware that my presence here potentially contributes to the neocolonial forces of urban gentrification. The cycle is insidious.

I value this neighborhood because it is the place where I have finally found a home in Paris after nearly a decade of traveling in France. But in ascribing value to this neighborhood, and by proudly displaying it to the friends who have visited me in Paris, I transform it; I leave my mark. Like the generous individuals who deposit found objects at the Bureau des Objets Trouvés, I become its inventeur; its value consists in the quality of having been found.

Lost City: On Remembrance of Things Past

A favorite pastime of the French, particularly of the Parisian stock, is to lament the loss of their nation, language, or culture. This happens at neighborhood markets, on Mediterranean beaches, and frequently, on panels on evening news programs, where a graying member of the Académie Française (I am thinking here of the author and cultural critic Jean Clair) will bemoan the decline, or hybridization, or paralysis of the French patrimony in today’s post-modern, post-national, post-truth (what have you) world.

Something, it would seem—something vital and invaluable—has been indelibly lost, and France is quietly (characteristically) up in arms.

Of course, this quintessentially French compulsion to lament what has been lost is by no means a new phenomenon. By the mid-nineteenth century, the poet Charles Baudelaire was already mourning the “old neighborhoods turned to allegory” by urbanization, a favorite subject of Baudelaire’s contemporaries.

Among the artists, authors, and intellectuals who bemoaned the loss of old Paris was the itinerant photographer Eugène Atget, who in 1897 began meticulously documenting an urban landscape he feared was rapidly disappearing amidst the ruins of modernity. Alongside the stately monuments and ghostly palaces of the Ancien Régime, Atget also photographed the everyday details of Parisian life: fading advertisements on flapping café awnings, iron balustrades in eerie silhouette, canvas mannequins strapped in lace corsets in shop windows, or the gaping demon’s mouth that once opened onto the Montmartre cabaret known as “L’Enfer,” or “Hell.”

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One of Atget’s favorite haunts was the peripheral neighborhood of Montmartre, bordered to the south by the Boulevards de Rochechouart and Clichy. Until 1860, the neighborhood had functioned as an independent commune just north of the Parisian city limits, and following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the subsequent collapse of the Second Empire, Montmartre became the provisional seat of the Paris Commune, the radical socialist insurrection that laid siege to and briefly governed Paris in the spring of 1871.

Despite the profound changes brought about by urbanization, in which entire neighborhoods had been razed to make way for train tracks, wide boulevards, covered markets, manicured parks, underground sewers, and deep canals, Montmartre had escaped relatively unscathed. At the turn of the twentieth-century, Montmartre was one of the rare Parisian neighborhoods to retain the look and feel of a provincial village, with unpaved streets, modest cottages, and bucolic gardens hemmed in by wooden fences and overgrown hedges.

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In his Montmartre series, Atget frequently opts for a wide composition, mimicking the perspective of the pedestrian as he rambles down rustic streets bathed in a bright, uniform light that flattens the photographs’ contours. But Atget’s placid images of Montmartre belie the socioeconomic precariousness of the neighborhood, threatened by urban expansion to the south and an influx of migrant laborers in the industrial suburbs to the north.

Atget’s intent was as much to document a disappearing landscape as it was to apprehend the forms of community life this particular public space made possible. Atget frequently photographed street vendors—knife sharpeners and basket sellers and florists and rag-and-bone men—as they went about their work, paying particular attention to their postures, their practiced gestures, and their public relationships with clients.

While the cottage industries embodied by these street vendors would soon die out with the advent of automation and industrialization in France, Atget’s photographs remain an enduring testament to the socioeconomic structure of public space at the turn of the twentieth century. Half a century before the publication of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, the German sociologist Jürgen Habermas‘s groundbreaking study of public space in Europe, Atget’s photographs collectively capture the spirit of the street as a site of socialization, conversation, and exchange, constantly blurring the boundaries between the public and the private.

 

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But soon the Parisian picturesque that Atget had worked so passionately to preserve would be lost, paved over in the name of progress. Lost, too, would be the Left Bank haunts of Charles Baudelaire, and later, the Existentialist crowd, now commoditized for tourists who sip overpriced espressos on the terrace of Café Flore. Even the once seedy neighborhood of Montmartre, with its streetwalkers and peep shows and record stores, has been overrun by foreign tourists snapping photos in front the Moulin Rouge, the famous cabaret that was bastardized and romanticized and battered into kitsch by Baz Luhrmann’s musical romantic comedy by the same name.

But what do we mean when we say that a nation, its language, or its culture have been lost? While the city beloved by Atget and Baudelaire would be lost to urbanization, the popular mythology of old Paris—the romantic ideal of an authentic, eternal city—is perhaps just as pernicious as the ravages of time. This is the paradox of every lost city: an obsession with preservation too often can lead to the erasure of historical contours, as what was once alive and dynamic and contradictory is flattened and repackaged for mass consumption as myth.

The French philosopher Alain Badiou expresses this paradox in Images du Temps Présent (Images of Present Time), a series of monthly lectures delivered in 2001 and 2002. Reflecting on the question of the past and its representation in the present, Badiou writes: “A question of the present, it is that the present never presents itself as present. The present is not the presentation of the present. The present is in the obscurity of presence, in any case when it is a living present, enigmatic.”

“[U]ne question du présent, c’est que le présent ne se présente pas comme présent. Le présent n’est pas la présentation du présent. Le présent est dans l’obscur de la présence, en tout cas quand il est un présent vif, énigmatique, un présent de la question.” —Alain  Badiou

Despite Badiou’s bulky verbiage (is it any wonder that continental philosophy is often decried as alienating and inaccessible?), his underlying thesis remains prescient and poignant. In short, Badiou’s point is that the remembrance of things past is always a reflection of the present. And our understanding of the present, Badiou reminds us, is always incomplete, obscured by global currents of change that inevitably surpass our capacity for comprehension.

In my research for this post, I came across a February 2017 article in The New York Times that encapsulates the present perception of France’s decline on the global stage. (As a side note, I want to reassure my dissertation committee—should they ever stumble across this blog and discover that I am, in fact, capable of producing coherent writing on a weekly basis—that I am still plugging away at my chapter revisions, as promised.) Today, the anxiety that once surrounded the urbanization of Paris has been largely displaced to the provincial hamlets of France’s sprawling countryside, perhaps less primed to absorb the shocks of modernization than their urban contemporaries.

In an article apocalyptically entitled “As France’s Towns Wither, Fears of a Decline in ‘Frenchness,’” the American journalist Adam Nossiter, accompanied by the photographer Dmitry Kostyukov, examines the dismal state of Albi, a small town in the department of Tarn in southern France, which the author originally visited in 1982. In that stylistic prose so characteristic of American new journalism yet foreign to the French, Nossiter laments the deserted streets, shuttered storefronts, and crumbling infrastructure of the “jewel-like city” that first captured his imagination thirty-five years ago.

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Nossiter laments: “Turn a corner in Albi, and you’ll pass the last school inside the historic center, abandoned a few years ago. Down another street is the last toy store, now closed, and around a corner is the last independent grocery store, also shuttered. Walk down the empty, narrow streets on some nights and the silence is so complete that you can hear your footsteps on the stones.”

The journalist’s stated intent is to better understand the “cultural insecurity” (a term coined by the French sociologist Laurent Bouvet) driving the alarming success of the far-right Front National during the 2017 French presidential campaign. For Nossiter, the decline of Albi illustrates a profoundly French paradox: “the deep pride felt by the French in what they regard as an unparalleled way of life [is] always accompanied by anxiety that it is facing extinction.”

In America, Nossiter’s article seemed to confirm what we Americans have always quietly suspected: the pedantic, pretentious pride with which the French have obstinately defended the superiority of their own culture is ill-suited, if not downright antithetical, to the realities of global capitalism. But Nossiter’s doleful depiction of Albi unsurprisingly outraged the French.

The local press decried Nossiter’s alarmist prose and questioned the validity of the journalist’s main source, Florian Jourdain, an Albi implant whose meticulous documentation of the decline of local businesses had already antagonized the residents of his adopted town. Nossiter was accused of slandering Albi’s reputation, and the town’s center-right mayor, Stéphanie Guiraud-Chaumeil, even invited the journalist to return during the summer months, suggesting that the gloomy winter weather had perhaps overshadowed the medieval city’s enduring meridional charm.

While criticisms of Nossiter’s hyperbolic language may be warranted (to illustrate, here is a particularly obnoxious example: “[I]t was a frigid intersection combined with a soulless pedestrian plaza. Cars whizzed past.”), it is nevertheless telling that even the most outraged of French respondents did not directly contest the data supporting the journalist’s claims. At most, Albi locals pointed fingers at other French towns that had fared worse under globalization and the global recession. In Albi as in Paris, it is true that France’s formerly thriving local industries—the family-owned cafés and artisanal bakers and toy stores that were once at the heart of community life—have been threatened economically, sometimes to the point of extinction, by the competition of international corporations and big box stores.

The anxiety surrounding the decline of local industries in France is not merely economic. For the French anthropologist Marc Augé, the recent proliferation of “non-lieux,” or non-places—the shopping centers and high-speed highways and international hotel chains that are increasingly encroaching on the outskirts of French cities—is symptomatic of an impoverishment of community life, and concomitantly, French cultural identity. If cultural identity is constructed through meaningful relations with others within a public space with a shared history, as Augé argues, then the blissful anonymity offered by megastores and other non-lieux fundamentally threatens the collective imaginary that holds a nation, its language, and its culture together. To put it simply, Augé argues that when our daily social interactions—from buying bread to pumping gas—are carried out anonymously or in transit, our communities (whether local or national) suffer as a result. This is the kind of socioeconomic decline that the French so presciently and clamorously fear today.

The common thread linking Atget to Albi is that France, perhaps more than any other post-war European nation, has managed to not only maintain but also actively promote a uniquely centralized, commoditized myth of French cultural and linguistic particularity. Who else, if not the French (except perhaps the Italians), would launch a rigorous (and successful!) campaign to have their own gastronomic tradition recognized on the UNESCO “Intangible Cultural Heritage” list?

But what does it mean when my elderly neighbor gives a judgmental squeeze-and-sniff test to a tomato imported from Spain for sale at the local market, grumbling all the while about the quality of fresh produce these days? Should I take her complaint to be a veiled critique of free trade treaties under European Union economic policy? Did she grow up on an organic farm in southwestern France that was sliced in half by the construction of the high-speed train linking Toulouse to Perpignan to Barcelona? Or does her upstairs neighborhood just happen to be a pot-smoking Catalonian who hosts late-night EDM dance parties in an apartment complex with an interior courtyard prone to echoes?

Who else, if not French intellectuals and politicians, could twist a municipal ban on the “burkini,” the conservative beachwear favored by Muslim women, into a vigorous and very serious public debate on secularism and female sexuality? Was it blatant Islamophobia that fueled such municipal decisions? Or were the mayors of these municipalities simply striving to uphold the time-honored tradition of French laïcité, the aggressive secularism that emerged out of the French Revolution? Or was the “burkini” ban just another sexist imposition of the Western ideal of femininity on foreign female bodies?

And who else, if not a member of the Académie Française (again, I am thinking here of Jean Clair), could unequivocally state that the proliferation of ungrammatical speech and linguistic irregularities in the French language is responsible for precipitating the world into madness?

“Parler en ignorant la grammaire, cette autre forme du logos divin, c’est précipiter le monde dans la folie.” —Jean Clair

Is this ardent defense of the purity of the French language simply the natural outgrowth of the author’s own socioeconomic marginalization as a peasant child educated in Paris, who saw the mastery of the French language as a means to cultural assimilation? Or is Jean Clair just another alarmist observer of the evolution of the French language as it adapts to new semantic codes, both urban and imported?

It is impossible to ignore the various “–isms” (anti-Semitism, classism, protectionism, racism, sexism)  and “–phobias” (Arabophobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia) driving contemporary discourse about France’s decline on the global stage. However, the precarious myth of French particularity has also produced innovative forms of public discourse and debate.

In France today, marginalized communities have responded to fears of French decline by demonstrating how the pernicious myth of French particularity has worked historically to efface minority contributions to the construction of the French nation, language, and culture. In other words, when contemporary commentators lament the loss of “Frenchness” in France, they are really referring to the displacement or transformation of a certain image or myth of the past whose coherence is contingent on the erasure of marginal histories, from colonization to collaborationism.

The legacy of loss in France is also inevitably a story of recuperation. When we pause to problematize the myth of French particularity, what precisely is it that we find in its margins? This possibility of recuperation, of course, depends on how willing and aware the French are of who they are as a people, and what was lost and found in the founding of their nation, language, and culture. Stay tuned for “Found City,” scheduled for next week.

 

Sidewalk City, Continued: On the French Art of ‘Flânerie’ and the Sexual Politics of Public Space

Anyone who has spent time in Paris, of any class or gender or race, will have observed that Paris is a city designed for pedestrians. Apart from the café—that timeless Parisian institution to which I dedicated fifteen hundred words a couple of weeks ago—the sidewalk is the most democratic space in this gilded capital city. Indeed, the romantic allure of the café is wedded to the casual voyeurism of watching the crowd as it streams by on the sidewalk. If the café is a pacific island, the sidewalk is a tempestuous river, the crowd its pulsing current.

Pause: I remember a time when I was sucked underwater while braving the waves that batter the Anse du Diamant on the southern coast of Martinique. For a brief, panicked moment, I was afraid that I would drown then and there beneath the brilliant blue of the Caribbean Sea. But in my panic, I remembered that the only way to escape a strong current is to force your body to go limp and to allow yourself to float to the surface with the natural movement of the waves.

To be swept up in the swirling current of a crowd, to yield to a movement that surpasses the volition of any one of its individual actors, abides by the same principle: it is an act of deference or submission; it requires a respect for the crowd as an independent entity that ebbs and flows and obeys its own mysterious gravitational pull. It is a dangerous temptation, to be carried away by the crowd.

It has often been observed that Paris is a city that rewards those who take the time to explore it on foot. In his 2001 book, The Flâneur, the American expatriate author Edmund White writes, “Paris is a world meant to be seen by the walker alone, for only the pace of strolling can take in all the rich (if muted) detail.” In fact, walking in Paris has become such a culturally imbedded pursuit that the French have invented a word for it: flânerie.

In Paris, flânerie can become a compulsive addiction. The pace of walking, its contemplative rhythm, offers an invigorating compromise between steady motion and aimless idleness. And the urban landscape of Paris is particularly suited to the haphazard wanderings of the flâneur. Although the Baron Haussmann’s urban renovation destroyed the narrow, winding streets of medieval Paris, the modern city that came of age at the turn of the twentieth century gave new life to the urban wanderer. Indeed, the superficial uniformity of Haussmann’s Paris—with its broad boulevards lined with five-story limestone residences with narrow iron balconies, its sidewalks punctuated regularly by plane trees and identical benches and lampposts—compels the modern flâneur to walk on and on and on, endlessly.

Despite the unparalleled efficiency and reach of the Parisian metro system, with stops that are never more than a five minutes’ walk away (with the exception of a number of “trous noirs,” or black holes, on the outskirts of the city), the flâneur obstinately travels on foot, drawn to a quaint steeple peeking over the next row of tiled roofs, a shady square at the next intersection, or an antique bookstore just around the next corner, where dusty pages whisper secrets of a bygone era. This city invites the flâneur to wander until he’s hungry and exhausted and half-lost in some far-flung corner of the city he never intended to visit. Another block, another monument, another world. Descending into the underground labyrinth of the metro to take the next train home almost feels like a quiet defeat.

Flânerie, or the art of walking aimlessly, is a time-honored French tradition. Perhaps the first French flâneur was the eighteenth-century writer Louis-Sébastien Mercier, whose Tableau de Paris (Panorama of Paris), a twelve-volume, twenty-eight-hundred-page collection of Parisian sketches, captures the essence of the capital city on the eve of the French Revolution of 1789. Mercier was famously wrong about the prospects of the impending revolution, writing that: “The Parisian’s instinct seems to have taught him that the little more liberty he might obtain is not worth fighting for. . . . Any such struggle would imply long effort and stern thinking. He has a short memory for trouble, chalks up no score of his miseries, and has confidence enough in his own strength not to dread too absolute a despotism.”

Despite compulsively cataloguing the everyday behaviors and customs of the common people he encountered while wandering the streets of Paris, Mercier’s magnified perspective on Parisian life paradoxically blinded him to the revolution that rumbled just over the next horizon. Mercier’s miscalculation is a prescient reminder that even the most careful and committed observers of society can gravely misinterpret the instinct of the crowd, magnifying anecdotal evidence into broad ideological narratives. (Of course I am thinking of the 2016 American presidential election. How could I not? When am I not?)

Edmund White has written that flânerie is the wanderer’s way of imposing “a personal vision on the palimpsest of Paris,” of carving out his own individual narrative in a city with infinite layers of sedimented history. The inherent aimlessness of the flâneur’s path, determined by sheer curiosity rather than preexisting narratives or guidebook itineraries, means that every true wanderer will come away with his own personal interpretation of the urban landscape. The perspective of the observer always frames his perception of the observed.

It is significant, in this regard, that the prototypical models of the French flâneur—from Mercier to Charles Baudelaire and even the American Edmund White—have all been men. In French, a gendered language, the masculine noun flâneur reflects the gender traditionally associated with the role. The feminine substantive flâneuse does exist in French, but most literary accounts of flânerie nevertheless adopt a male perspective. The flâneur, by definition, is an individual uninhibited by domestic responsibilities and with enough financial independence to spend his days wandering aimlessly about the city with no apparent objective or destination. Historically speaking, this individual is a white man. Or, as the American writer Lauren Elkin observes in her recent book on the female flâneuse, published just this year, it is as if “a penis were a requisite walking appendage, like a cane.”

Edmund White, a gay man and elite Parisian socialite, exemplifies the pernicious gender-ignorance of most literary accounts of flânerie. In The Flâneur, for example, he blithely writes: “Whereas the word cruise is part of only the gay vocabulary in English, its French equivalent, draguer, is also heterosexual. Straight people cruise one another in Paris; unlike Americans, who feel menaced or insulted by lingering looks on the street, French women—and men!—consider la séduction to be one of the arts of living and an amorous glance their natural due.”

As an acculturated American woman who has been living in France on and off for the better part of a decade, I call bullshit. To be alone in public, to pass imperceptibly, to wander aimlessly on the streets of Paris oblivious of those invisible frontiers where gentrified neighborhoods turn suddenly into seedy slums, remains the privileged purview of white men. What, then, is the experience of the female flâneuse? And where does she wander?

Let me begin with the American journalist Elaine Sciolino, who has lived in Paris with her family for a decade and a half. I first learned of Mercier’s street reporting in Sciolino’s The Only Street in Paris, a loving biography of sorts of the author’s adopted street, the Rue des Martyrs, a kilometer stretch of cultural and culinary paradise just south of Montmartre. Sciolino is an adept female flâneuse in her own right; her meticulously researched account of life on the Rue des Martyrs is a testament to her keen observation, journalistic tact, and narrative wit.

The content of Sciolino’s book deserves its own post, but for now I want to focus on an innocuous, throwaway sentence from Sciolino’s book that rattled my nerves when I came across it. In her chapter on flânerie, Sciolino writes: “I have a complicated relationship with Mercier, as he was the subject of a doctoral dissertation I long ago started and failed to finish.”

Why this honesty? Why this willingness to admit defeat in the middle of a text that unambiguously attests to the author’s competence, discretion, and expertise? I suspect that Sciolino’s cast-off confession is symptomatic of the condition of the female flâneuse writ large. Contrary to the male flâneur, the female flâneuse feels compelled to justify her own position as a purveyor of knowledge while also constantly acknowledging her own positionality. As a woman, the female flâneuse cannot assume a detached objectivity with regards to her surroundings. And her surroundings, as I have previously written, often pose an imminent threat to her sense of safety.

There is a sexual politics of public space of which every female flâneuse is acutely aware. I cannot remember a day that I have not been harassed—either verbally or physically, with varying degrees of sexual intent—while walking alone in Paris or elsewhere in France. Granted, I currently live and work in an up-and-coming, blue-collar neighborhood in the nineteenth arrondissement, where gender politics may be more fluid (I am being generous here) than in the stuffy, aristocratic neighborhoods of Paris. Yet my experience underscores another aspect of flânerie to which my white, male interlocutors often choose to remain blissfully ignorant: to wander aimlessly without inhibition or repercussion is as much a function of gender as it is of race and class.

(I opened this post by stating that the sidewalk is the most democratic space in the modern city. But democracy isn’t always fair, and it certainly isn’t blind to gender or class or race.)

Another female flâneuse comes to mind: the French filmmaker Agnès Varda, who poignantly articulates the precarious condition of the female flâneuse in her 1961 film, Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7.). (“Comes to mind” is too facile a phrase; it took considerable wandering in my Sherlockian mind-palace to come across upon a suitable example.) In Cléo de 5 à 7, Varda traces the title character’s transformation from an insecure shell of Western femininity—emphasized by series of fragmentary shots in the film’s opening scene of a manicured, made-up Cleo as she anxiously consults a tarot reader about an undiagnosed stomach pain—to a self-assured woman confidently strolling the streets of Paris. In the film’s pivotal scene, Cleo rips off her blonde wig and ventures out into the Parisian streets, at last unencumbered by the societal pressure of performing her gender. Cleo’s curiosity and independence blossom as she finally lays claim to the right to observe without being observed or objectified as a female body in a public space. Thus transformed into a female flâneuse, an active, observing entity, Cleo embodies the liberating androgyny that Virginia Woolf (the unparalleled female flâneuse of London) imagines in A Room of One’s Own.

Although one could certainly quibble about the feminist politics of Varda’s film (it is somewhat problematic, for example, that Cleo’s liberation only occurs after she sheds her feminine façade like last season’s skin, which one might interpret essentially as an rejection of femininity), its underlying message remains relevant. As a contemporary female flâneuse, perpetually wandering the streets of Paris, I endeavor to occupy and to document the public space of the sidewalk, with all its contradictions and sexual politics, and through writing, to claim my place amidst the crowd.

Nowhere City: On Homesickness, or a Longing for Home

Last week, in a post entitled “Sidewalk City: On Parisian Café Culture and the Social Politics of Public Space,” I reflected on the paradoxical status of the Parisian café as a site of both sociability and solitude, on the margins of the modern city. Shortly after posting, my dear friend Arielle, who has long been a staunch supporter of my work, commented: “Love this academic piece. But what about YOU at the café?”

Where am I? Here I am.

I have spent much of my relatively short life in a nowhere city. I grew up in an unincorporated village in rural Ohio, near a crossroads called Kidron just south of Route 30, where the Amish still peddle their wares—sturdy furniture, fresh peaches, and fabric by the yard—on wooden signs posted at the end of long lanes on winding country roads. But that place is not what this post is about.

This post is about the non-places that every nomadic soul has at least once claimed as home—the train stations, the far-flung neighborhoods, the dark cinemas—those ubiquitous urban spaces whose constitutive anonymity affords a fleeting sense of belonging amidst the great migrations of modern life. This post is about a longing for home.

Arielle called my last post “academic.” I cringed when I read her comment. The allure of academia is to become an expert, and through expertise, to stake claim in a world of our own making: knowledge. Expertise is an academic’s way of belonging, of authoritatively declaring that we have something to say in this noisy, post-truth world. But ours is a lonely city.

For a decade (my god, even longer!), I have been performing my identity and my expertise by means of a language and a culture that will never be my own. Neither fluency in French nor an impeccable wardrobe will ever make France my first home. Yet when I am feeling homesick, or longing for home, I am not thinking of the corn fields and grain mills of Ohio; I am dreaming of sunflowers and red terracotta roofs.  This perhaps is what the American expatriate author Gertrude Stein meant when she famously stated: “America is my country, and Paris is my hometown.” Or, to paraphrase the Algerian novelist Malika Mokeddem: on whichever Atlantic coast I find myself, from the New York Rockaways to the beaches of Biarritz, the other side the ocean will always be my home.

“Que je sois ici ou là-bas, l’autre côté de la mer, c’est encore chez moi.”

We ambiguously aspiring expatriates are a lonely bunch. We just don’t know where we belong. We’ve stretched the cord to the mother country but we can’t quite sever it. We’re licking at our transatlantic wounds. We shop and read and cook and cuss in a foreign language, but we will count to ten and fuck in our mother tongue until the day that we die.

I chose to study French thirteen years ago because the Spanish teacher in my small town high school was notoriously crazypants, and as a young, disgruntled student, I had a desperate urge to distinguish myself through the mastery of language. For years before my time, the French teacher at my high school had been waging a losing war against the school administration, and when halfway through my education the French program was unjustly cut, I took up arms by writing the curriculum for an independent study of advanced French.

My grandmother, a teller of tall tales, likes to say that from my early childhood I dreamt of one day living in my own apartment in Paris. To the best of my recollection (and my mother’s), that story is not true. And yet here I am. There is a sympathetic appeal to childhood narratives; I wish I could say that my pursuit and eventual mastery of French was the fruit of some naïve and youthful fantasy. But in all actuality, my most vivid memory of French as a child was a passion for Impressionist, and later Surrealist, painting, which my artist grandfather fervently encouraged in our frequent family trips to the Cleveland Museum of Art.

There is another story about my childhood that my mother likes to tell. As a young child, at the age of maybe seven or nine or eleven, on a family visit to the Cleveland Museum of Art, I marched up to the museum docent and demanded to see Salvador Dalí’s iconic 1931 painting “The Persistence of Memory,” on loan from MoMA. That story is true. My passion for Francophone culture grew out of an early fascination for European visual art from the turn of the twentieth century. It wasn’t so much an innate desire for France itself (Dalí, of course, was a Spanish Surrealist) as it was an attraction to radical representations of an uncertain world, where aesthetic conventions were being uprooted and reexamined in the context of colonial expansion, technological advancement, and war. The specificity of France and Francophone culture came much later.

That is not to say that my love for France is inauthentic, but it is nevertheless true that my experience is, and always will be, that of an outsider. This perhaps explains my enduring attraction to the oeuvre of the prolific French novelist Patrick Modiano, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014, much to the surprise of his own compatriots. Modiano’s novels relentlessly explore the “zones neutres,” or neutral zones, of Paris, those ambiguous, in-between spaces, perpetually haunted by wanderers in search of belonging on the outskirts of the eternal city, forever lost. Modiano writes nostalgically of cheap furnished rooms south of Montparnasse where his characters go to disappear in plain sight, of transient crowds that frequent the seedy student bars between Odéon and the Jardin du Luxembourg, and of fleeting encounters in esoteric bookstores peddling paperback science fiction near Place Pigalle.

Suspended in space and time, the zones neutres of Modiano’s novels are places of refuge, offering anonymity as a kind of protective shield. But sometimes, when traveling alone through those neutral zones on overcast days so gloomy that I am not even accompanied by my own shadow on the sidewalk, I worry that I might disappear here forever, in a nowhere city where no one knows my name. 

This is the experience of marginality—a source of both anxiety and inspiration—that I endeavored to articulate in last week’s post. It was an attempt to situate my migrant cosmopolitanism within the cultural milieu of a country that I have been longing for a decade to call home.

What does it mean to occupy and to write about those solitary spaces that defy traditional norms of belonging and identity? And what if this nowhere city is my home? For now.

 

Sidewalk City: On Parisian Café Culture and the Social Politics of Public Space

On the corner of Rue de Meaux and Avenue de Laumière in the 19^th arrondissement, across from the neighborhood fishmonger and a Turkish kebab stand, there is an unassuming French café called “L’Avenue.” There is nothing remarkable about L’Avenue, except perhaps for the white silhouettes that Jérôme Mesnager, a local graffiti artist, has tagged on the glass café window. It is the kind of modest establishment that one would find in any Parisian neighborhood with enough enduring grit, with wicker chairs clustered around iron bistro tables and a chalkboard menu advertising happy hour prices and the plat du jour.

The café terrace spills out from under a faded red awning, over the cobblestoned street, and onto a triangular island of pavement wedged between Rue de Meaux and Rue Petit where the two narrow streets intersect at a diagonal. Sometimes, on my way home from the library in the late afternoon, I stop here for an espresso or a 3,5€ glass of Côtes du Rhône and sit under the silver coin shadows of a London plane whose roots push up through the pavement. Here, from this private island in plain sight, sheltered behind the pages of my book, I watch as my quiet neighborhood stretches awake after its afternoon slumber.

Between 18h and 19h, à l’heure de l’apéritif, locals gather here over glasses of cheap house wine, and for a moment, as the early evening light warms and lengthens, L’Avenue becomes the epicenter of neighborhood life. The café is a crossroads, or as the American novelist Thomas Pynchon puts it in Gravity’s Rainbow, the “restless crisscrossing of needs or desparations in one fateful piece of street.”

The history of the French café can be traced to the 1686 establishment of Café Procope in the elegant 6e arrondissement of Paris, near the Comédie Française. Until the late seventeenth century, coffee had been the common purview of street vendors, but Café Procope soon attracted a number of illustrious patrons among the capital’s intellectual elite. It was here in the cafés of the Latin Quarter that the luminaries of the French Enlightenment—among them, Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Voltaire—gathered together to elaborate the liberal ideas that would soon inspire the great intellectual and political upheaval of the French Revolution of 1789. Emerging in the eighteenth century as a space of intellectual exchange and civic engagement, the café came to represent the radical promise of the French Revolution, the liberté–égalité–fraternité of the First French Republic.

And yet by 1812, the French monarchy had been restored, and Paris had entered a period of unprecedented economic, political, and social transition. Over the course of the long nineteenth century (1789–1914), France would undergo three revolutions, several major regime changes, and massive urbanization. In the early nineteenth century, urban planners and politicians revolutionized public space in Paris through the construction of vast networks of covered passageways, known as les arcades. Initially conceived as commercial centers, the arcades dealt in luxury goods, foreign imports, and fashion, but also in sex, strong alcohol, and subversive ideas. The arcades, like the cafés of the eighteenth century, encouraged both intellectual conversation and liberal consumption (in his time, Voltaire is rumored to have consumed dozens of daily espressos cut with chocolate at Café Procope), acting as laboratories of social and political change.

In both form and function, the arcades were an experiment in the transitory; in his 1863 essay Le peintre de la vie moderne (The Painter of Modern Life), Charles Baudelaire describes these passageways as the embodiment of all that was ephemeral, fleeting, and fashionable about the modern city. Like urban aquariums wrought of iron and glass, the arcades siphoned the current of the crowd past a panoply of objects displayed for their constant and unmediated consumption, constituting the passing crowd as a perpetual consumer.

Producing both anxiety and inspiration, the crowd became a popular motif in nineteenth-century aesthetic and literary culture and philosophical thought. The crowd was at once an amorphous mass and the raw material of revolution; a source of both revulsion and delight; a site of seclusion in plain sight. For Friedrich Engels, a contemporary of Karl Marx, the crowd represented “the brutal indifference” of modernity, “the unfeeling isolation of each person in his private interest.” But for Baudelaire, the crowd offered the “immense joy” of taking up residence “in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world.”

If for Engels, the crowd produced a shock-induced amnesia (erlebnis) akin to the alienated subjectivity of the laborer, Baudelaire saw in the crowd an unmediated potential for poetry and aesthetic production (erfahrung). Alone in the crowd, the individual could become “a mirror as vast as the crowd itself . . . a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life. . . . an ‘I’ with an insatiable appetite for the ‘non-I.’”

But the arcades, and the peculiar social politics they engendered, whether positive or negative, were as revolutionary as they were ephemeral; what remains today of the original Parisian arcades is the memory of their transience. Between 1853 and 1870, under the direction of the urban architect Georges-Eugène Haussmann and the administration of Emperor Napoléon III, the labyrinthine corridors and medieval passageways of old Paris were destroyed to make way for the construction of the wide boulevards and stately parks that today distinguish Paris as one of the great European capitals. Haussmann’s plan for Paris connected aesthetic form to urban function; the grands boulevards were designed to eradicate the pestilent quarters of the poor while also rendering the erection of barricades impossible, an attempt to secure to the city against the ever-present threat of revolution.

The physical renovation of old Paris also transformed the social politics that had emerged in the public space of the arcades. In his surrealist novel Le paysan de Paris (Paris Peasant), Louis Aragon describes the arcades as fleeting traces of a dream world just before dawn, on the brink of destruction. While acknowledging that the preservation of these “human aquariums” would soon become impossible, Aragon nevertheless endeavored to accompany his reader on a retrospective visit of what would soon become ruins, paved under the cobblestones of the new boulevards. By the time Le paysan de Paris was published in 1926, the Parisian arcades had already become something of a modern myth, and the curiosities the novel describes—the coiffeurs and shoe polishers, the stamp collector and the gunsmith, the café in the Passage de l’Opéra where Aragon and André Breton supposedly conceived of Dadaism in 1919—the remnants of a rapidly receding past.

The modern French café as it emerged at the turn of the twentieth-century is in many ways the product of the great urban upheaval of the long nineteenth century. Soon, the café had become synonymous with the decadence and debauchery of fin-de-siècle Paris. Like the arcades of the nineteenth century, cafés were a place to both see and be seen, a perpetual spectacle, a pedestrian parade. By day, artists and authors would take up residence at the cafés of Montparnasse and Montmartre to work, drink, smoke, socialize, and sometimes just to keep warm during the rainy Parisian winters, as Ernest Hemingway recalls in A Moveable Feast, the American author’s memoir of Paris in the 1920s. The café by night, however, was a bohemian enclave of hallucinatory revelry and extravagance.

In every sense of the term, the café was a marginal space in the modern city. Couched between storefront and street, the café allowed clients to feel separated from the outside world while also subjecting them to a near-constant exposure, an unsettling voyeurism in which the viewer and the viewed were constantly changing positions. “This is the thing about cities,” writes the British cultural critic Olivia Laing in The Lonely City, “the way that even indoors you’re always at the mercy of a stranger’s gaze.” The café was a shared, democratic space, inhabited by those who sought (and often failed to find) human connection amidst the isolating apparatus of urban life. The café was therefore a site of both sociability and solitude, a sidewalk city of lonely souls.

This is the contradictory experience captured by Edgar Degas in his 1876 painting “Dans un café” (“In a Café”), also known as “L’Absinthe,” whose form and content anticipate the lonely cityscapes of American artist Edward Hopper’s New York paintings of the 1930s and 40s. Like Hopper’s iconic “Nighthawks,” Degas depicts two individuals, a man and a woman, sitting together on otherwise unoccupied café bench. The woman stares blankly over a glass of absinthe, her posture defeated, her arms hanging limply by her side; her companion, slouching over the marble table, smokes a pipe and looks away, out of frame. The canvas itself is bathed in the jaundiced hue of absinthe, like a sanitarium isolating sick souls from the outside world for fear of contamination. No one speaks.

 

Édouard Manet, in his 1882 masterpiece, “Bar aux Folies-Bergère” (“A Bar at the Folies-Bergère”), evokes a similar sense of disconnect in the absent gaze of the painting’s central figure, a barmaid at the eponymous café-cabaret in Montmartre. The barmaid stands in the foreground of the painting’s pyramidal composition, leaning slightly forward on a marble countertop strewn with bottles of champagne and rosé, crème de menthe, English pale ale, a vase with two pink flowers, and a bowl of mandarin oranges. The barmaid’s translucent wrists are exposed and vulnerable. Outside of the perspective of the painting, but reflected in a mirror to the right of the barmaid’s head, stands a mustachioed gentleman in a top hat.

At first glance, the barmaid appears to be staring straight ahead into the eyes of the viewer, but in fact her gaze is empty, detached from the spectator as well as the customer who has approached the bar. The strange perspective of Manet’s painting implicates the viewer as a member of the café-cabaret’s raucous public, and yet of course the viewer is absent from the painting’s frame, like the mustachioed gentleman who is only half-present in his reflection. Art critics have attributed the painting’s unnerving allure not only its off-kilter composition, but also to the relation between intimacy and estrangement that Manet depicts in the central figure of the barmaid, marooned behind a marble countertop in a sea of anonymous faces that fade into the background under the artificial light of chandeliers. Despite its unsettling intimacy, Manet’s painting is one of impenetrability, a failure to connect despite the almost claustrophobic proximity of other bodies.

To be alone in a crowd: this is the social politics of public space encapsulated by the modern French café; to be enclosed, sheltered, and intimate, but also to be exposed, isolated, and on display. A human aquarium, the café has walls like windows, and windows like walls.

Suitcase City: On French Style and Fitting In

The day before I left Chicago for Paris, I bought a pair of white Adidas sneakers. My suitcase was already packed and bulging: Breton stripes, black cashmere, two turtlenecks, a leather jacket. For months I had been cultivating a minimalist wardrobe in neutral tones and autumnal shades of burgundy, and my haircut kept inching shorter towards a wavy Audrey Tautou bob. I was determined to harness a tiny corner of that untamable je ne sais quoi that characterizes French style.

The fashion blogs that I had been following all told me that the secret to French style is to appear effortlessly chic. The Italians have a word for it: sprezzatura, a studied carelessness. French style (if one is willing to admit the Eurocentric essentialism of the phrase) has to do less with trends than with timelessness, a polished minimalism on which ethical clothing ventures have been quick to capitalize.

In my research (which was really just online shopping and dissertation procrastination, but let’s call it research), I came across a number of prescriptive rules. For the French, accessories rather than clothing itself are the realm of individuality, so I acquired a fabulous Fossil crossbody bag that just screamed “Left Bank intellectual” and scoured EBay for a pair of Timberland ankle boots to replace my disintegrating Aldo booties. The French value quality over quantity, so I invested in a pair of Brass ponte pants and asked for an Everlane cashmere sweater for Christmas (both pieces were well worth the investment, by the way). After reading about the history of la marinière, its classic navy stripes supposedly representing each of Napoleon III’s twenty-one maritime victories, I briefly considered splurging on an A.P.C Breton top. But I came to my financial senses and bought some UNIQLO seamless underwear instead and had two-dollar Clark Street tacos for dinner.

There was an undeniable allure to the idea that with just ten, twelve, twenty wardrobe essentials, I could buy a kind of aesthetic belonging, the privilege of fitting in. I was finally making enough money to start consciously investing in clothing, and the illusive promise of ethical consumerism in an age of mass consumption appealed to me.

Fashion had not always been such an important part of my self-image. Growing up lower middle class in a homogenous area of rural Ohio meant that my clothing options were basically limited to whatever Kohl’s or JCPenney happened to have on sale. I agonized over my appearance, of course, as all teenagers do, but really what I wanted was for my clothing to be the least interesting thing about me. I wanted to stand out by virtue of my mind, not the fabric draping my frame.

It wasn’t until I moved as a college freshman to Avignon, a medieval city in the south of France, that I understood how fashion worked as a kind of cultural currency, a wordless way to signal one’s belonging in a particular group or class or country. I was visibly out of place in my threadbare Chuck Taylors and my loose department store jeans, and I desperately wanted to fit in with the elegant French women in fitted blazers smoking cigarettes on café terraces. I was rapidly falling in love with France.

It was in Avignon, too, that I discovered the subtle femininity of the Chanel silhouette. Anne Fontaine’s Coco avant Chanel was showing at the Utopia, with the inimitable Audrey Tautou playing the film’s slender-hipped heroine. I began dreaming of expressing my androgyny in pearls and loafers and slim black trousers.

But clothing wasn’t just a means of fitting in; soon it became a second skin to protect myself from the apparent danger of standing out, of looking like I didn’t belong even though I spoke perfect French. In the span of two weeks, I was twice sexually assaulted: once by an acquaintance of an acquaintance in the women’s restroom of a bar on Place Pie, and then, violently, by a stranger on the sidewalk outside of a now defunct nightclub on the road that leads to Carpentras. My body had been violated, and the only way I knew how to reclaim its integrity was to control the narrative of its physical appearance. Like Greta Garbo haunting New York in an oversized trench coat, horizontal stripes and ballerina flats allowed me to feel invisible in a crowd.

Clothing became a kind of armor, yes, but also a screen onto which I could project a desire for belonging, a longing for integration, a sense of feeling whole. There is no solitude like that of a suitcase. For the better part of a decade, I have been shuttling my belongings between cities—Athens, Avignon, Nice, Pau, Chicago, New York, Paris—leaving a trail of outgrown relationships and discarded garments in my wake, perpetually paring down my possessions to the bare essentials.

It is a source of personal pride to be able to carry my belongings in two hands. But sometimes I miss having those flamboyant yet utterly impractical articles of clothing in my closet—the gold-sequined bodycon dress, the white snakeskin heels, the pink lace pencil skirt—the ones I could never justifying packing for a transatlantic stint. So my suitcase becomes a distilled version of myself, at airport regulation size.

The white Adidas sneakers were an afterthought, unnecessary. They didn’t fit in my suitcase (literally), but I wanted them. I wanted to wear them with my Everlane striped tee dress, or a pair of dark jeans and an Express boyfriend blazer. And that’s the elusive secret to French style, after all; it’s not about specific articles of clothing, or playing with proportions, or sticking to neutral colors and patterns, but having the confidence to wear what you want to wear, and walking down the street like you belong.