Unsinkable Paris

One evening during the Summer Olympics last August, I wandered through central Paris at dusk with a friend. We watched on a café TV as the American sprinter Noah Lyles narrowly won the hundred-meter dash and became the fastest man in the world, then we continued down the stately rue de Rivoli and through the archway leading to the vast expanse of the Louvre courtyard, where I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid is illuminated from within. From there we could see our destination: the Olympic cauldron, suspended from a golden balloon powered by clean energy and hovering just above the Tuileries. We joined a large, happy throng and stopped to take selfies. The atmosphere was something I had never experienced in Paris, not even when France won the World Cup in 2018: pure, uncomplicated joy. The mood was festive, friendly, hopeful, and relaxed, with everyone, tourists and Parisians alike, gathered in easy conviviality.

That spirit of celebration was all the more meaningful to those of us who had lived through so many of Paris’s darker recent chapters, including a horrifying series of terrorist attacks in 2015 whose effects are still unfolding, the largest transport strikes in years, the Covid-19 pandemic, and demonstrations by the Yellow Vest movement and other popular revolts, such as the one against a pension reform in 2023, which revealed a fury often simmering beneath the surface in France. After months of running stories about Olympic disruptions, French TV pivoted to segments on Parisians who regretted leaving town because the summer games turned out to be so thrilling.

In the decade I’ve lived here, Paris has become a more global and more dynamic city, enlivened by an infusion of restless cosmopolitans, many of them Anglophone. Some, like the novelist Rachel Cusk, are creative-class refugees from Brexit; others are wealthy and in search of a certain je ne sais quoi. The next Trump presidency will likely send many more to Paris, which remains a first-world escape fantasy, although it is not tax-friendly for the rich. (For that, there’s Portugal.) Inventive non-French chefs have made the city’s food scene livelier and more open to foreign influences. (For better or worse, Paris seems to have reached peak matcha latte.) Rents are rising but regulated. Airbnbs are also regulated: homeowners can rent short-term for a maximum of 120 days a year, so Paris has not gone the way of Rome or Barcelona, where the middle class has been priced out by tourists and digital nomads.

Paris’s decision to build only Olympic structures that could be repurposed, like the Olympic Village, which will become public housing, or dismantled, like the beach volleyball court under the Eiffel Tower and the skateboarding ramp in place de la Concorde, seems wise, especially compared with cities whose Olympics left debt and underused arenas. Notre-Dame has just reopened in spectacular form five years after it was engulfed in flames. It was inaugurated by the archbishop of Paris with three knocks of a staff on its enormous wooden doors during a ceremony attended by President Emmanuel Macron and dignitaries from around the world, including Donald Trump. Its painstaking but relatively swift restoration may be one of the most visible positive legacies of Macron’s presidency, which effectively ended last June when he made the rash decision to call new parliamentary elections that left no party with a majority, sending France into unprecedented political chaos for the foreseeable future.

Enormous urban renewal plans are also underway. As part of the “Grand Paris” infrastructure project, sixty-eight new metro stops outside central Paris are expected to open by 2030, linking the center of the city to its surrounding banlieues and better connecting the banlieues to one another. It is the most ambitious redesign of the city since Baron Haussmann razed its old narrow streets to make way for wide boulevards in the nineteenth century. In time for the Olympics, Line 14 of the metro was extended south to Orly airport and north to Seine-Saint-Denis, connecting them to central Paris with shiny new cars.

Among the biggest changes to Paris in recent years is that fabulously wealthy luxury holding companies—chief among them Bernard Arnault’s Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy (LVMH) and François Pinault’s Kering—have become important participants in France’s previously state-dominated cultural scene. Arnault is one of the richest men in the world and one of the most powerful in France. LVMH contributed €200 million (and Kering €100 million) to the €900 million pledged for the restoration of Notre-Dame. In 2014 the Louis Vuitton Foundation opened its exhibition space designed by Frank Gehry in the Bois de Boulogne, where it can mount shows rivaling those of France’s great public museums. In 2021–2022 it displayed highlights from the Morozov collection, nationalized by the Soviets and now owned by the Russian state. To bring the Matisses and Cézannes and other works to Paris early in the pandemic required trilateral talks between Macron, Arnault, and Russian president Vladimir Putin—a last gasp of cultural diplomacy before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made that impossible.

Not to be outdone, in 2021 Pinault opened a private museum in the Bourse de Commerce, a former grain-trading floor in central Paris lovingly renovated by Tadao Ando, where it displays revolving selections from Pinault’s formidable contemporary art collection. Jean Nouvel is renovating a new space in the Palais Royale for the Cartier Foundation, which is slated to open in 2025. Nouvel also designed the foundation’s current home on the Left Bank, as well as the auditorium for the Philharmonie de Paris, which from the outside looks like a spaceship that landed on the edge of Parc de la Villette in the not-posh nineteenth arrondissement. Meanwhile the city turned to Renzo Piano for its airy new courthouse in the seventeenth arrondissement, replacing the historic one on the Île de la Cîté.

Everywhere you go in Paris, there seem to be ads and product placement for LVMH. Pharrell Williams, now the men’s creative director of Louis Vuitton, sang “Happy” with a swaying gospel choir in front of Notre-Dame for the reopening concert. An LVMH brand designed the Olympic medals, and in the opening ceremony a masked figure raced with the Olympic torch through a Louis Vuitton luggage workshop. The Netflix series Emily in Paris has become a running advertisement for French luxury. Emily (Lily Collins), the Gen Z social media marketing whiz kid from Chicago, swans around in wild couture, an ingenue in the city of world-weary elegance and sophistication embodied by her boss, Sylvie (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu), the epitome of old-school heteronormative French womanhood, who has mastered the art of using seduction to get ahead.

Emily has become such an important “brand ambassador” for Paris that Brigitte Macron, the president’s wife, who often wears suits by LVMH’s Christian Dior, made a cameo on the show. Macron himself recently said he thought it made no sense for Emily to move to Rome, as she does at the end of the most recent season in a subplot involving a brand reminiscent of LVMH’s Loro Piana. I have enjoyed every over-the-top episode, like bingeing on macarons, although I reluctantly had to retire my red beret, which I’d worn since long before Emily came on the scene in hers. All over town, tourists pose in front of landmarks wearing red berets à la Emily. The French tax authority now includes “influencer” as a self-employment category.

There is a tremendous amount of money in Paris these days, in part because of the policies of Macron. (Whether this prosperity will survive the current dramatic political instability is an open question.) In his new memoir, Impossible City, Simon Kuper, a columnist for the Financial Times, aptly describes Macron as “a spiritual Londoner”—a member of the global, not just national, elite who speaks English, embraces the open market, and was about to become a fellow at the London School of Economics when President François Hollande tapped him as economy minister in 2014. Macron instituted tax breaks to make France more attractive for businesses and changed labor law to make it easier to hire and fire workers, reducing the unemployment rate but also stirring up enormous popular dissent.

Paris’s tech scene hardly compares to Silicon Valley, but it is still significant. So is banking, which for years was a dirty word in France, where even the wealthy have a reluctant relationship to unbridled capitalism. France’s economy is far more diverse than Britain’s, which is heavily dependent on financial services. In 2019, after Brexit, the European Banking Authority moved to Paris from London. In 2021 JP Morgan moved one of its main European trading floors to Paris, employing around a thousand people. Bank of America, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley have also increased their presence here in recent years. In 2023 the Paris region surpassed London in new foreign investment, Kuper writes. I wonder whether this influx will eventually let some air into France’s hermetically sealed, self-perpetuating elite, another topic Kuper deftly addresses. “France may have the smallest ruling class of any big country: an elite as compact as the city intra muros itself,” he writes. “To join it, you have to attend the right educational institution, speak French, and probably be white and male—four criteria that together exclude almost everybody on earth.”

But what of the Paris that is not for Anglophones or the rich? The Paris far beyond the sight of Emily and her friends? Paris’s squares are, after all, locked at night to prevent the poor and the unhoused from sleeping there, the writer Éric Hazan notes in Paris in Turmoil, a series of lively sketches of the city and a kind of coda to his magisterial The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps (2010). Hazan, who died last June at eighty-seven, decries how working-class Paris has been eroded for decades. Even a short stroll elicits from him a flurry of observations and references. He laments the loss of so many Left Bank bookstores, some of them now luxury shops, and that Sartre has gone out of fashion.

Hazan says he wrote Paris in Turmoil to defend his beloved city, “which is so bad-mouthed today—a museum city, sluggish, gentrified, etc.”—not only by non-Parisians but also by people “whom Paris has sheltered, educated and cultivated, people who are basically indebted to it for what they have become.” His quick sketch of the Belleville neighborhood traces the history of the Vielleuse café, whose regulars include Arabs on market days, aging Tunisian Jews, and Chinese at all times, among them prostitutes:

The atmosphere in this café is noisy and harmonious: despite the diversity of population, I have never seen an argument here, I would even say never heard a cross word (I don’t know all the languages spoken here, but there is always a special tone for insults that can easily be spotted.)

For Hazan, Paris is a glorious work in progress. Under Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist mayor since 2014, Paris has spent €700 million to make the city more bikeable, including by installing new bike lanes. This is on balance a positive development, but it has made crossing the street an adventure. France is an orderly northern country that has bike lanes and also an unruly Mediterranean one where cyclists speed through red lights. Under Hidalgo the city has transformed long stretches of the quais on the right bank of the Seine from roads to pathways where joggers, rollerbladers, and cyclists pass children playing and people drinking rosé.

This fall the first four arrondissements were cordoned off into limited-traffic areas. Hidalgo also reduced the speed limit on the Périphérique, the ring road that encircles the twenty arrondissements of central Paris, to fifty kilometers an hour to cut pollution. This has infuriated drivers. Hazan notes that Hidalgo’s base is “bobos,” bourgeois bohemians—people of the left who shop at organic grocery stores and if they own cars, only use them to go on holiday. Hidalgo, a Spanish-born career politician and one of the last Socialists left standing after Macron subsumed many into his centrist political movement, is reviled in ways I fail to comprehend fully. A movement called Saccage Paris—“the Sack of Paris”—has a social media campaign pointing out every alleged sign of urban blight. Part of the anger at her may be unvarnished misogyny, but some Parisians are very attached to their cars, the ultimate expression of freedom of movement. Others are deeply attached to their neighborhoods, and any alteration to the urban landscape seems to unleash a torrent of vitriol, often at Hidalgo, who recently announced that she would not run for a third term.

Paris is an exquisite city full of exquisite complainers, forever beset by a pervasive sense that things are terrible or dirtier or somehow worse than they used to be, when things are not, in fact, terrible or dirtier or worse. Fear of change and decline is a powerful political force. If New York is fueled by manic anxiety, competition, and the belief that time is money, and London by offshore capital and suffused nostalgia for lost empire, Paris runs on pleasure, beauty, first-world discontent, and a long history of class war and popular uprisings.

In Paris Is Not Dead, Cole Stangler, an American journalist based in France and a contributor to The Nation, takes on a fundamental question: How can middle-class, let alone working-class, people afford to live in Paris? And what will become of them as rents and real estate prices keep rising? In central Paris, residential real estate now costs more than €10,000 per square meter. (Even more expensive are the sorts of luxury properties on view in another Netflix series, The Paris Agency: Exclusive Properties, which follows a family of real estate agents.) The average Paris rent is €1,200 per month, low compared with New York or London, but the average Paris apartment is fifty square meters and the average net monthly income €2,000.

According to a 2022 UBS report, a “skilled service worker” here would need fifteen years to save enough money to buy a sixty-square-meter apartment, placing Paris among the most expensive cities in the world. Paris—that is, its central twenty arrondissements—is also one of the densest cities in Europe, with 2.16 million inhabitants in an area twelve times smaller than the five boroughs of New York. In the multiethnic eighteenth arrondissement there are 32,000 inhabitants per square kilometer, on par with Mumbai and Karachi. A further 10 million live in the surrounding banlieues, the French urbanist Justinien Tribillon writes in The Zone.

And yet Paris does not have income inequality as extreme as New York’s. As Stangler points out, the solution to maintaining its economic diversity is social housing—public housing with below-market rents. (There is also an element of racial diversity here, but France, aspiring to its universalist ideals, does not keep statistics based on race.) In 2023 nearly a quarter of the population—some half a million people—inside the Périphérique lived in social housing, and more than 130,000 are on the waiting list. In 2022 a Parisian household with an income of €70,000, fairly high by French standards, could qualify for a rent-subsidized apartment, part of an effort to keep middle-class people inside the city. The bobos are also gentrifiers, of course. Hazan writes:

They often live in “popular” neighborhoods, i.e. ones with a mixed population, where Blacks and Arabs are well represented. But the neighborhood is pleasant: no way would a bobo live near a motorway junction.

Since 2001, when the Socialists took control of Paris’s municipal government, social housing inside the city limits has risen to 22 percent of the total from 13 percent, according to Stangler. Although managed on a local level, social housing is mandated by national law. Since 2000, urban areas with a certain population threshold have been required to meet social housing investment targets, with a goal of reaching 25 percent social housing by 2025. Paris aims to hit 30 percent by 2030.

This is a fairly recent effort. Paris was slow to create social housing after World War II, Tribillon notes in The Zone. This beautifully written, first-rate work of urban history, slim but packed with insights, explores the complex legacy of what is essentially now the Périphérique.

Conceived under Vichy, the Périph was built between 1956 and 1973 and marks a physical and psychological dividing line between Paris and its banlieues. It replaced a kind of no-man’s-land—the so-called zone—that had separated Paris from its surroundings, first rural villages and later working-class suburbs. For centuries the zone was controlled by the army and was an area of fortresses designed to stave off invaders and to tax goods coming in.

In The Zone, Tribillon maps out how urban planning and architecture contributed to the divide between Paris and the banlieues, which became, as he puts it, a space of “otherness”:

The Other might be an administrative status (immigrant), an ethno-racial identity (Jew, Roma, Maghrebi, African), an origin, a class, a political affiliation (Communist), a trade (ragpicker) or the conditions determined by one’s neighborhood or the state of one’s home: a Parisian slum or a bidonville.

In the postwar period, the working-class areas of greater Paris outside the zone reliably voted Communist or Socialist, while wealthier central areas were more conservative. In the 1960s and 1970s the state built public housing complexes that soon filled with immigrants from former French colonies. Many are still there several generations later, suspended between their former homelands and a France that has not entirely welcomed them.

The Grand Paris infrastructure project will further collapse the barriers between central and greater Paris. Immigration and urban dynamics are inextricably linked, nowhere more so than in the banlieues. Immigration laws passed under Macron placed more restrictions on family reunification. If France sets the barriers for legal immigration even higher, or if Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally comes to power in the next presidential elections, scheduled for 2027, and puts an end to dual nationality, as it has proposed, then the relationship between Paris and its surrounding areas will change yet again.

In recent years the gap between wealthy Paris and the rest of France has grown ever wider. The Yellow Vest movement that began in the fall of 2018 was largely a revolt of the provincial lower-middle class, not the multiethnic banlieues, although one of the instigators of the movement, Priscillia Ludosky, is of Martinican descent and lives in a banlieue outside Paris. The giant demonstrations in Paris and across France in 2023 against Macron’s pension reform, which sought to raise the retirement age, were driven by people’s sense that they were being deprived of their rights. This fall the government of Prime Minister Michel Barnier had proposed a grim austerity menu of spending cuts and tax increases to reduce the country’s enormous budget deficits and debt, but it lost a confidence vote over the budget bill and collapsed in early December, just days before the reopening of Notre-Dame. Macron appointed a new prime minister, François Bayrou, a longtime political ally and leader of the centrist MoDem party, but Bayrou faces the same challenge as his short-lived predecessor: no majority in parliament to pass legislation. In the meantime France’s economic woes are likely to cause social tensions to rise.

At regular intervals Paris erupts into the most dramatic of street demonstrations, then calms down again, usually for school holidays. Mavis Gallant archly observed that the 1968 student riots showed France as “either within a breath of armed revolution or merely involved in a vast group-therapy session.” During Macron’s first term, from 2017 to 2022, his main opposition was the street. And he placed the Junior Ministry for Urban Affairs under the Interior Ministry, which controls the police, Tribillon notes: “In Macron’s vision, urban policy has become an issue directly and openly pertaining to police and security, instead of economic development or spatial justice.”

Tribillon, Hazan, Kuper, and Stangler all engage with Paris’s socioeconomic dynamics, with the city beyond the tourist circuit. “Paris is a myth known the world over,” Tribillon writes.

That the actual Paris, the Paris I know, is a vile, dirty, stinky, feral, exhausting, pushy, aggressive city does not matter. That it is a city of immense energy and violence, that it spits on your face, kicks you in the butt, leaves you in the gutter—all of this does not matter. Because Paris is an idea, a dream, a desire. We rarely acknowledge that the banlieue of Paris is a mythical space too. It is more remote, allusive, less tangible than postcard Paris. It is made of an artistic blur, mostly negative, that usually includes high-rise modernist towers, the characters of [the movies] La Haine (1995) and Athena (2022), violence and cars on fire, or even the association of the “no-go-zones.”

“No-go zones” was what Fox News called some Paris banlieues in its breathless coverage in January 2015 of the terrorist attacks on the Charlie Hebdo satirical newspaper and a kosher supermarket, in which seventeen people died. One of the attackers turned out to be from Gennevilliers, a suburb north of Paris, and suddenly the banlieues emerged in the public imagination as the locus of everything broken in France—violence, crime, and the tendency among young men, many of them children or grandchildren of immigrants from the Maghreb, to swear allegiance to the Islamic State and embrace jihad. (Fox News later apologized for using the term.)

The January attacks began an annus horribilus that culminated on November 13, 2015, when terrorists opened fire with Kalashnikovs inside the Bataclan concert hall and cafés across the tenth and eleventh arrondissements, and three others detonated suicide vests outside the Stade de France, north of Paris in Saint-Denis. In all, 130 people lost their lives in the attacks, including ninety in the Bataclan, and more than four hundred were injured, nearly a hundred of them critically. I was in Paris that day, as I was in New York on September 11, and both days are forever seared in my memory.

France’s response to the terrorist attacks was multifold. Abroad, it began air strikes on ISIS strongholds in Syria. At home, it put in place a semipermanent state of emergency in which police have been allowed to carry out raids without the standards of evidence required for a judicial investigation, drawing criticism from civil liberties groups.

The government also further entangled questions of national identity and national security with a law, eventually called Bolstering Respect for Principles of the Republic that places restrictions on religious organizations, especially those funded from abroad. This is in the name of French laïcité, which effectively prohibits expressions of religious identity in the public sphere. (In the same spirit, women athletes were not allowed to compete for France in the Olympics wearing headscarves, although France allowed Muslim women from other countries to do so; the Dutch marathoner Sifan Hassan claimed her gold medal at the Olympics closing ceremony wearing one.)

But France also responded to the terrorist attacks with a forceful assertion of the rule of law: the largest and most complex trial in French history, in which there were twenty defendants and more than three hundred lawyers represented the around 1,800 people who signed on as plaintiffs, all of whom were given an opportunity to testify. The so-called Bataclan trial ran for ten months beginning in September 2021. Emmanuel Carrère, a master of literary nonfiction, attended almost every session and wrote weekly dispatches for L’Obs magazine. These became his extraordinary book V13.

As no existing courtroom was large enough, the trial was held in the enormous lobby of the historic courthouse on the Île de la Cité, where a windowless white plywood box able to hold six hundred people was constructed. Carrère likens it to a religious space.

If trials are windows into the soul of a country, the Bataclan trial revealed France at a nadir, in which some lost stoners embraced jihad and went on a murderous rampage in one of the most multiethnic and socially mixed areas of Paris. But the trial also revealed France at its most noble—a country that is known for the guillotine but abolished the death penalty in 1981 and where the best and brightest become public defenders. It was they who represented the Bataclan defendants, all of whom were accomplices, as the killers either blew themselves up or were shot by police during the attacks. The defendants were involved to varying degrees, and all were found guilty on all counts.

In V13, whose title comes from Friday (vendredi) the 13th—the date the November attacks took place—Carrère writes with compassion and curiosity. He does not excuse, moralize, or forgive but offers rich human sketches, culled from trial testimony by victims and defendants alike, and explores the ways in which their unlikely fates have become intertwined.

When Salah Abdeslam, a co-conspirator and brother of Brahim Abdeslam—who blew himself up with a suicide vest after opening fire on Paris cafés—finally speaks in court, his words haunt Carrère and become a leitmotif in the book. The entire trial, the reconstruction of what happened on November 13, doesn’t offer a complete picture, Abdeslam says: “It’s like reading the last page of a book: what you should do is read the book from the start.”

In short, to understand the attacks, one has to understand the jihadists. “What’s interesting about them, what interests me in any case, is not played out on the terrain of the individual but on the terrain of History,” Carrère writes. “What interests me is the long historical process that produced this pathological mutation of Islam.” Some of the terrorists came from solidly middle-class families and had parents who were shop owners. Radical Islam became a calling, a form of belonging. This is why, to Carrère’s mind, the vogue for “deradicalization” programs is bound to fail: “It’s as if the Roman Empire had launched de-Christianization programs in the first century: it would only have confirmed the candidates for martyrdom in their acts.”

Although the terrorists struck in France, the attacks were planned in Belgium, eight of the accused were Belgian, and they were tracked down and arrested in Belgium. The portrait of the Belgian investigators that emerged in the trial was not flattering. They didn’t show up in court and testified only via video link. They claimed their decision was for security reasons, although they had no problem showing their faces on Belgian TV. Their absence seems to have influenced the defendants, some of whom also opted not to show up in court for much of the trial, a choice that made the proceedings less dramatic and longer, since each morning the court needed to summon them and they then failed to appear.

When the court asked one of the Belgian investigators why they had not checked the cellar of the Brussels café where the attacks were planned, or why they released Brahim Abdeslam from custody when he was being questioned on suspicion of planning a terrorist attack although he had a booklet called “Parental Permission to Take Part in the Jihad” in his possession, the officer responded (via video link, with his face blurred) that there was nothing in his interrogation to suggest that Brahim had any terrorist intentions. “‘But,’ interjected the presiding judge in surprise, ‘on what basis did you conclude that?’ ‘Well, we asked him.’”

V13 is full of indelible portraits. Sonia and her family will live the rest of their lives in a witness protection program because she risked her life to report that her friend Hasna Aït Boulahcen had been helping a cousin who was one of the terrorists. “If Sonia isn’t a heroine, I don’t know who is,” Carrère writes. Hasna wore a niqab but mostly got drunk on Red Bull and vodka. Her cell phone in the days before her death registered that she had searched for “1) hash, 2) suits for Abaaoud and Akrouh to wear at La Défense business district, where they intend to blow themselves up at the weekend; 3) a hideout.” Hasna, Abaaoud, and Akrouh all died when police, on a tip from Sonia, raided their hideout in Seine-Saint-Denis.

The emotional heart of V13 is Nadia Mondeguer, the Cairo-born mother of Lamia, who was shot dead with her boyfriend in La Belle Équipe café on November 13, just steps from her family’s home on the boulevard Voltaire. Nadia is an Arabic teacher who worked for years helping immigrants from the Maghreb in shantytowns in Nanterre, which were eventually torn down to build social housing, as Tribillon writes in The Zone. Nadia cannot get over how the terrorists were from the same generation as her now-dead daughter. “They’d been taken by the hand on their way to school, just as she had taken Lamia by the hand,” Carrère writes, summarizing her testimony.

They were little children, taken by the hand. The silence in the room when she says this is as heavy as that of Lamia’s friends on the evening of the 14th in the living room on the Boulevard Voltaire. Finally she says: “Now, defense lawyers, do your job. Do it well. I mean it.”

When Carrère is chatting with Ali Oulkadi, a defendant later convicted of helping to drive the terrorists to safety, a plaintiff comes up to compliment his columns. She identifies herself by recalling how she had taken the stand with her grandchildren, Nino and Marius, but she doesn’t recognize Oulkadi:

As she walked away, a glimmer of pure joy flashed across Ali Oulkadi’s face, because someone had spoken to him like he was a normal person. “Nino and Marius,” he repeated softly, as if the names of these little boys whose father had been murdered at the Bataclan were those of his own children, and because he’d been granted, fleetingly, perhaps by mistake but that was already something, the right to grieve like everyone else.

V13 is gripping and unsentimental, and yet the passages that recount testimony by survivors and relatives of the dead are so raw that I found I could read the book only in daylight and in company, and even then I was often moved to tears. I vividly remember November 13, 2015, and the weeks and months that followed. We wondered if we would ever feel safe again, and sitting in a café felt like an act of defiance, an assertion of life. For some time after the attacks, the motto of Paris was everywhere: Fluctuat nec mergitur. It is tempest-tossed but does not sink.

The Bataclan is holding concerts again, but Paris is still scarred by the attacks. I think of them whenever I walk past the cafés where the terrorists struck. In November I attended the memorial service for Simon Fieschi, who had been the digital editor at Charlie Hebdo and who died in October at forty. He survived the attack but wrestled with its long psychic aftermath. He had spent months in reconstructive surgery and rehabilitation, along with a fellow journalist, Philippe Lançon, who wrote a remarkable account of his own recovery, Disturbance (2019).

At Fieschi’s memorial, videos were played in which he spoke about the many trials for the Charlie Hebdo attacks; he had rallied his strength to testify standing up, leaving his crutch aside. In one video, Fieschi said the victims of the attacks hated the word “resilience” because it gives comfort to other people but establishes an unhelpful hierarchy in which the resilient are seen as “good” survivors and the less resilient “bad” survivors: “It’s not something that helps the victims but it’s something that other people say about the victims to make themselves feel better.”

Paris’s scars have become part of its cityscape. Hazan, for one, is an optimist about the city’s capacity for transformation. He writes in Paris in Turmoil:

If capitalism continues to prosper, the process will end up emptying Paris of all its poor and extend to the first ring of the banlieues where they have migrated. But, if we are at the end of a cycle that began with Thermidor [the end of Robespierre’s Reign of Terror]—and there are many signs leading us to hope for this—then everything will become possible again, including the return of the excluded, the over-crowded, the despised. In the meantime, we must keep a grip on the city, know its history and its vagaries, so that when the time comes it can regain its colors and its glory.

We all keep our own grip on Paris, what Guy Debord called our psychogeographies, the way its spaces make us feel. I think of my own long walks through the city—its mushroom-colored stone and expanse of sky, its mix of foreground and background, the weight of its history leavened by a stirring sense of possibility.

As the final act of the Olympics opening ceremony, Céline Dion stood on a platform halfway up the Eiffel Tower in a pearl-studded floor-length dress (Dior, of course) and sang Édith Piaf’s “Hymne à l’amour,” whose lyrics—“For you, I would take down the moon, I would steal a fortune, if you asked me to. I would give up my country, I would give up my friends, if you asked me to”—are maybe also a hymn to French assimilation. I had always dismissed Dion as haute schmaltz, but as I watched her on my laptop far outside Paris—I, too, had left town—I found myself surprisingly moved. She, like Piaf, was singing from a place of defiance, as if she embodied Paris. Paris, city of revolutions past and perhaps future, city of rich and poor, city of attacks and survivors, had prevailed. Fluctuat nec mergitur.