I]
If you happened to grow up in Paris in the late ‘fifties, early ‘sixties—it feels that way again. There’s a tired feeling about the place these days, as if the buildings, which had been shiny cleaned in the mid-sixties, had started to revert. Upscale shops and better restaurants are nearly empty; the shopkeepers are bored, and the bosses nervous. A boss in a café tried to short-change me, that’s something I hadn’t experienced in a long, long time. A boss in a restaurant asked us to leave to make room for other customers. The boss was white; all of his employees (the cooks, the waiters, the articulate, experienced maitre d’) were African: More French than he could ever be.
2]
Joan Didion says somewhere that when you realize there are areas of your hometown where you wouldn’t dream of going any more, then it’s time to move. There are areas of Paris that always felt like that, but now it feels as if those areas have spread. These are places where you wouldn’t care to be out at night because there’s no reason to be out. During daytime it’s office techies out for a quick lunch, downtown Manhattan without the energy. Meanwhile the Marais feels like a threatened enclave, the West Bank of the Right Bank.
3]
An enclave for hanging. I remember all the hanging of the mid-sixties, punctuated by the pin-pon of police sirens. The main drag in the Marais, the rue Saint Antoine, is still packed, locals shopping and the rambunctious kids from Lycée Charlemagne. Periodically it’s blocked to traffic: City Hall is further down, and there are lots of demonstrations, and the cops block off the street. As in the mid-sixties there’s a feeling of being suspended in time, expectation without hope.
4]
The Constitutional Court has rejected less than one half of that hysterical, xenophobic act of Parlement that strips the façade, once and for all, from the pretense that the Republic is anything other than a decaying, inbred political enterprise, another colonial power in decline. That tells us nothing of the ways people in France continue to respond to this psychological and moral garotte. It used to be, I made a point of speaking French to French speakers, as a courtesy. Now, if I signal that I’d rather speak French to a person of color or a person with a foreign name or accent, I feel as if I’ve threatened them: as if I were suggesting that they don’t belong. As in Japan, bilingualism becomes a marker of social inferiority. As in New York, the simple act of mutual respect between people of different ethnicities becomes an act or resistance.
5]
For Americans, the satisfaction of being a customer comes from not having to interact with another human being. That feeling, too, is growing over Paris. I was asked to leave the restaurant because I was engaged in a lively discussion with other customers. It’s the reverse in the Marais: the pleasure isn’t getting stuff, it’s in the interaction. Salespeople and staff in France love to talk, in fact they’re splendidly articulate once you engage with them. These days there’s plenty of time for that.
6]
At the BHV, the midscale department store across from City Hall, we spent two days interacting with ten or more store workers in four separate departments on three separate floors—a tricky maneuver that involved buying material at one counter, getting a quote on a shipment at another, then arranging to have it shipped and finally arranging the customs forms on another floor so that the local sales tax could be deducted. Because there were so many steps and forms no single person on staff knew the exact procedure from start to finish. Mistakes were made, and some of the charming, competent staff had to step back at times. There was no shame or shaming, the kind of things you’d get from a boss if the boss was there; cooperation on all sides. Marx, when he first came to Paris, was struck by the articulateness and the emotional maturity of French workers, which he took for political sophistication. He was right.
6]
This articulateness is the inversion of the experience of learning French in a French lycée, an experience akin to learning martial arts from Pai Mei. It’s a psychological truism that trauma begets attachment, and Republican Education is designed to promote a deep attachment to France and the French language the way an abuser promotes loyalty and love among his victims, along with intense, almost ineradicable self-loathing. Language, too, is an emotional discipline.
7]
Barthes, again:
What’s left, if I may say so, is to cheat with language; to cheat language. This redemptive cheating, this elusion, this magnificent seduction that allows us to hear beyond the bounds of power, I call Literature.
Il ne reste, si je puis dire, qu'à tricher avec la langue ; qu'à tricher la langue. Cette tricherie salutaire, cette esquive, ce leurre magnifique qui permet d'entendre la langue hors-pouvoir, je la nomme littérature.1
Sorry, Dr. Murkin. There is no way you’ll grasp this if you haven’t gone through the Lycée.
8]
I’m certain I hear English better than French. But my grasp of Literature and Painting, in English or in French, is closer to Barthes’s: the libidinal, free-flowing pleasure of cheating language, above all the language of the State. That’s why my social skills are better adapted to France and the French language. I’m better at making jokes; I’m better at working things out with salespeople, which is a form of cheating the State; and I’m better at evading cops; but that of course depend on friends, the workers and the cops. There are too many cops in France right now, and too few friends. And the workers, as ever, will have to free themselves.
WOID XXIII-38
January 28, 2024
Roland Barthes, « Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France », 7 janvier 1977, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. V (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 433.
1/31/24
Meanwhile, the farmers besieging Paris are particularly active along the roads leading through Flins. Coincidence?