IMPOSSIBLE CITY

Paris in the Twenty-First Century

SIMON KUPER
 To Pamela – forever my companion
on our Parisian journey.

And to Leila, Joey and Leo – our guides.

I wouldn’t have done it without you.

 Contents

Title Page
Dedication
The Real Paris

1. The Accidental Parisian

2. Losing to London: Paris versus the Anglosphere
3. Parisian Neighbours
4. The Kids Learn Parisian
5. The Real Parisian Traffic Code
6. The Code-breaking Charlatan
7. Neighbourhood Terrorism
8. The Refuge
9. Paris for Jews
10. The Day of the Three Cafés
11. The Tiniest Elite
12. Who’s for Dinner?
13. Macron: The Seducer Who Ate Paris
14. How to Become French
15. The Suburbs Win the World Cup
16. The Revolution Against Paris
17. A Sexual Reckoning with 1968
18. Paris by Bike
19. Luxury City?
20. Grand Paris: The Making of a New Metropolis

21. The Suburban Olympics

22. Death in Paris
Glossary
Notes
Acknowledgements
Also by Simon Kuper
Copyright
 The Real Paris

What follows is my personal view of Paris, complete with most of my blind spots. I’m a well-off white
man, a native English-speaker, writing from inside dinky Instagrammable Paris – the city of just over
two million people. I’m separated by the Périphérique ring road from the nearly ten million who live in
the suburbs, or banlieues.
Over my twenty-plus years in the city, I’ve encountered hundreds of Parisians and suburbanites of
all varieties. Even so, most of the people in these pages are men. A woman, or anyone else but me,
would have written a different book.
This is my view of Paris in the first quarter of this century. The past is always present here, but in
this book it features only as the population of ghosts who walk by the sides of us current Parisians, and
who passed on the city that we are briefly allowed to inhabit.
Impossible City is the story of a naïve explorer entering an alien society, gradually penetrating it
and getting to understand it, a little. I’ve experienced Paris as a journalist, but mostly as a human being.
I have grown middle-aged here, seen my wife through life-threatening cancer, schlepped my children to

innumerable football matches in the banlieues on freezing weekend mornings, and – within one ten-
month period – lived through two large-scale terrorist attacks on our neighbourhood. I’ve interviewed
politicians, writers, footballers and ordinary Parisians, and eaten thousands of restaurant lunches. I’ve
made lifelong friends and become a cantankerous Parisian myself, swearing at cars as I shoot through
red lights on my bicycle.
And I’ve watched Paris change. This century, it has globalised, gentrified, pedestrianised, and been
shocked into realising its role as the crucible of civilisational conflict: it’s the most ethnically mixed
city on the European continent. Sometimes it’s a multicultural paradise, and usually it isn’t. I’ve
watched the Parisian elite slowly realise that it, too, needs to change. I hope this book is relevant to
cities beyond Paris, because the issues I describe – from biking to house prices and segregation – are
global.
I’ve become a French citizen, and expect to be buried here (probably in the suburbs, since the posh
cemeteries in Paris are above my station). But I don’t pretend to have shed my Angloness like an
unfashionable suit and become effortlessly Parisian. In fact, I argue that for most Parisians, the
performance of Parisianness never becomes effortless.
This is the book of an outsider looking in on a city that is itself full of outsiders. There’s a common
belief that there’s an unchanging ‘real Paris’, and that if only you could wish away all the tourists and
foreigners here, you’d find it, probably in the form of a Gauloise-smoking cheesemonger who has had
the same market stall since 1978. That person does exist. But today’s ‘real Paris’ is surprisingly
international. During the pandemic, in periods when there were practically no visitors, I still heard

English, German, Italian and more on the streets every day. These ‘foreigners’ are Parisians too.
And many of their French neighbours banging on their walls complaining about noise are also
international people – often with parents who came from somewhere else entirely.
 This is the Paris that I’ve got to know, from croissants to terrorists. I think it’s real. I hope you enjoy

it. I have, most of the time.

 1
The Accidental Parisian

One day around the start of the century I was walking down a street in Paris, thinking, ‘I’d like to live
on this street’. Then a man on an upper storey threw open his front window and stepped out onto his
wrought-iron balcony. I thought, ‘He lives on this street!’ Then he called out to a friend on the
pavement, in English, in a British accent, and I thought, ‘I could live on this street’.
In those days I was living in London in a shared slum above an off-licence. When the new landlord
threatened to tear it down, I was faced with the great London question: do I spend a fortune I don’t have
on a grotty little flat in the suburbs and devote my life to paying off the mortgage?
Around that time, over a cheap Chinese meal, an old friend turned investment banker had let slip
that he earned ‘a seven-figure package’. I’d felt deflated for days: this was the kind of person I was
competing with to obtain my little bit of London. I was then about thirty, and one evening I went to a
dinner party with some Londoners who were about forty. They spent the evening talking about
renovating their kitchens. I’m as philistine as the next person, but I did leave thinking, ‘I don’t want to
become them’.

I wanted a bit more of the eternal in my life, and a bit less of the material. In fact, my ambitions
were simple: to have a nice flat in the centre of a great city and make my living writing. But I was
starting to accept that this was unrealistic.
Then a cousin mentioned that his holiday apartment in Paris had cost him about £30,000. ‘You’re
joking,’ I said. In London even in those days, £30,000 would just about get you a toilet.
I sensed the glimmerings of a plan. ‘But that was three years ago,’ he cautioned. ‘Now you’d pay
double.’ A couple of days later, I was on the Eurostar train to Gare du Nord station. I stayed in my
cousin’s flat on the then unfashionable eastern edge of Paris, near the Père-Lachaise cemetery where
Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison are buried. It was a nice neighbourhood, but the euro was then roughly
on a par with the Iraqi dinar, and I soon realised I could afford something more central. I strayed into
the 11th arrondissement, just east of the centre, then zeroed in on the Faubourg-St Antoine, the
neighbourhood of the artisans who in 1789 had trekked a mile down the road to storm the Bastille
prison.
Within days I had paid about £60,000 for a flat in one of those instantly recognisable Parisian
buildings. It was made of cream-coloured stone, with wrought-iron balconies and a slate-blue roof. My
flat was on the fourth floor of six – the building height settled on by the nineteenth-century town planner
Baron Haussmann as the ideal compromise between urban density and human scale. The little street
had a bakery, a butcher’s, and several cafés and restaurants.

Looking back, I had crept under the wire at the last moment before the great cities closed down to
us journalists. I had also performed a version of the Wellington Manoeuvre, named for the Duke of
Wellington, who in 1814, straight after Napoleon was exiled to Elba, arrived in Paris as British
ambassador and got a bargain on the emperor’s sister Pauline’s mansion. Wellington’s place is still the
British embassy today, and the flat I bought became my work-flat. It’s where I wrote this book. I now
live in a just-about family-sized apartment ten minutes away by bike, with my American wife and three
Parisian children, all of us now French nationals.
Living in Paris was never the plan. I had bought that work-flat as an investment, without any
intention of moving into it. At the time I spoke bad school French, and I was with Rick in Casablanca:
it wasn’t particularly my beloved Paris. On visits over the years I’d never got beyond tourist Paris,
which is a sort of large facade designed to punish people who transgress against local etiquette.
I arrived to take possession of my flat a few days after the 9/11 attacks in New York. When my
Eurostar pulled up, the Gare du Nord station was full of soldiers with machine guns. The people who
ran France had suddenly realised that Paris was the largest nominally Muslim, the largest nominally
Christian, and the largest Jewish city in Europe. Here was a whole new complexity to manage.
I planned to spend a few nice weekends in the flat, then rent it out. But my flatshare in London was
disintegrating, as housemates stumbled into adulthood, and in 2002 I decided I might as well spend the

spring in Paris. At the time I was writing a sports column for the Financial Times and didn’t tell my
editors I had moved, though I think they eventually found out.
I bought a mattress and a few plates, and moved in. After a while, I realised I had emigrated. It
didn’t seem a big deal. Having been born to South African parents in Uganda, then raised mostly in the
Netherlands, I felt comfortable being a foreigner. It was my natural state.
Paris at the start of the century offered a luxury even better than money: not having to think about
money. I gradually discovered that many of my new neighbours and their dogs had no visible means of
support. Their days seemed to consist of hanging around the building, and buying cheap vegetables at
the nearby market. They would have been doomed in London. With hindsight, I was the harbinger of
their gentrification. Around the time that I arrived, the city was also trying to clear the ageing
prostitutes out of the rue Saint-Denis.
My new building’s de facto ruler was an octogenarian lady, Madame Baguet, who revealed,
intriguingly, that she had moved into her flat in 1945. (Many years later, a small handwritten notice was
taped onto the courtyard door saying she had died: the end of a neighbourhood autocracy.) But there
was also an Ivorian clothing designer, a Japanese-Vietnamese-French couple, and, judging by the
chatter drifting through my kitchen window on summer nights, middle-class Britons somewhere close.
I had recently acquired a new girlfriend, an American, and I persuaded her to leave New York and
join me. She took an instant dislike to Paris – the grey skies, the incomprehensible language, the rude
people – but stayed anyway. Eventually we got married.

The Paris we got to know was the nineteenth-century city designed by Haussmann. The
preservation of his Paris even through the horrors of the twentieth century wasn’t an accident. Rather, it
had become almost the point of the whole French national enterprise. The most obvious expressions
were the law obliging Parisian residents to pay for the cleaning of their apartment facades every ten
years, the armies of park-keepers and nocturnal garbage collectors, and the shoving of cemeteries, bus
garages, municipal dumps and anything else unsightly into the netherworld of the suburbs.
But the French sacralisation of Paris went beyond all that. Just how far the country’s rulers would
go for this city dawned on Winston Churchill when he secretly flew across the Channel during the
German invasion of June 1940. He was vesting his hopes in the Battle for Paris. In conversations with
French officials, to whom he insisted on speaking his terrible French, he asked, ‘Will not the mass of
Paris and its inhabitants present an obstacle dividing and delaying the enemy?’ But Marshall Pétain,
who a few weeks later would become ruler of Vichy France and Hitler’s ally, was dismissive: ‘To
make Paris a city of ruins will not affect the issue.’ The French general Weygand added that ‘no attempt
at resistance would be made in [Paris] … he could not see it destroyed by German bombardment’.1
So I spent my days in what was visually, except for the cars, pretty much still the nineteenth century.
Even when the interior of a building had been demolished, the Haussmannian facade was usually
preserved. Every time you walked through the great stage set of Paris, you felt by your side, as Isaac

Bashevis Singer remarked after visiting, ‘the mute presence of generations of inhabitants who were
both dead and alive’. All over the city, these ghosts were preserved in plaques on facades: a musician
had lived in this building, a Resistant was gunned down there. Almost every street in Paris is what
historians call a ‘site of memory’. And the longer I spent here, the more ghosts I sensed.
The Paris I initially got to know was a relatively navigable, midsized town – the world’s most
compact great city. There were only a little over two million people packed on top of each other in
what’s called Paris intra muros (‘inside the walls’): the central city inside the Périphérique ring road.
Once I’d made friends, seeing them was easier than in London because they often lived just a walk
away – Paris life is oddly medieval. In those first few years I rarely found reasons to cross the
‘Périph’, or even to wonder much about the suburbs, the banlieues, that were said to lie beyond it. In
2005 I followed the suburban riots on CNN, but I saw no trace of them when I stepped outside. Only
years later would I grasp that twenty-first-century Paris intra muros was just a small splodge in the
middle of a vast metropolitan area.
Meanwhile I worked to raise my French to mediocrity. I had arrived aged thirty-two, just the stage
in life when language-learning capabilities take a nosedive. Happily, French didn’t have many words,
and after taking some refresher courses I realised that I’d learned the grammar several times over.
Facial expressions were a big help, too: the French really did use eyebrows, shrugs and pouts as much
as words, so you often got the message even before the other person began to speak. (In 1977, the

Harvard professor Laurence Wylie identified eight different French gestures that signified a lack of
interest or concern.)
But speech remained an obstacle. The French only pronounced the first couple of letters of most
words, leaving you to guess the rest. The most difficult thing was numbers: ‘quatre-vingt-dix-neuf’
(literally: ‘four twenty ten nine’) would never become an intuitive way of saying ‘ninety-nine’.
Language teachers recommended the so-called école horizontale – a romantic relationship with a
French person, ideally a language teacher – but I wasn’t sure my wife would approve. The moment I
had to speak French, my perceived IQ dropped 30 points. Negotiating daily life – plumbers,
electricians or bureaucrats – could be exhausting. What was the French for ‘fuse box’? On the upside,
the most quotidian task felt like an adventure. Just going out to get a chicken in Paris, you learned
something.
It took me years, but I eventually completed the ultimate French bureaucratic odyssey: enrolling in
the country’s social security and tax systems. It was as if Kafka’s Josef K. had finally found the right
bureaucrat in the Castle and got the stamps he needed. I then found I was paying about half my income
to the French state. On the one hand, this disincentivised me from doing extra paid work. On the other,
it was relaxing: since there was little point in maximising my earnings, I could devote my life to
something more interesting. I think that living in Paris did give me a few percentage points more
eternity than I would have had in London.
But in these first few years I barely interacted with the city. After a morning spent working on an

article about somewhere else entirely, I’d push open the heavy wooden front door of our building,
step onto the tiny pavement, and realise with surprise: ‘I’m in France!’ Back then I used Paris as a
base, and hung out mostly with other Anglophones.

In these early days, my main point of contact with the city was food. Every morning I’d hurry to my
favourite café, a place called A la Renaissance, aiming to arrive before the croissants ran out. The
coffee at Renaissance was terrible, like everywhere in Paris back then, but the point of it was to stop
time: while you were drinking it, you didn’t have to be anywhere else. The horseshoe-shaped bar was
perfectly lit, as if they were perennially about to film a perfume advert. It’s not that Renaissance was
uniquely wonderful. The point was that there were hundreds of other Parisian cafés like it. The density
of excellence was what made Paris special.
On the café wall hung a group portrait of the owner and customers a century earlier, posing in front
of it in their moustaches, bowler hats and flat caps. Fashion aside, if they had all been reincarnated in
the twenty-first century and walked into their old bar together, they would have felt at home. The café’s
name was the same, the canopy looked unchanged, even the interior had survived generations of
renovations almost intact, and croissants and bad coffee are eternal.
Since their day, climate change had lightened the Parisian winter. But even so, for five months of the
year, the city was almost perfectly grey: pavements, buildings, sky. Then, when spring arrived, it was
as if a giant hand had suddenly switched on the lights and the central heating. Paris is built for sunlight.

It’s like a Mediterranean city plonked down in the north: white and grey buildings, designed for the
play of shadows, with a population drawn largely from southern Europe and North Africa, living in tiny
apartments that they need to escape. When the terrasses appeared outside the cafés each spring, it was
as if the city’s capacity doubled in size overnight. The terrasses turned Paris into a stage set, where the
waiters, customers and pedestrians became the actors. That’s why the café chairs faced outward, so
that the diners could inspect the passers-by. Since everyone was a part of the decor, you were expected
to dress for your role.
With familiarity, I lost some of the ability to see Paris’s beauty. I’d rush across the bridge behind
Notre Dame at sunset sending a text message. But the almost constant sense of well-being I got from the
food didn’t wear off. Every day I ate here felt like a gift, even if was just a hunk of Comté cheese with
semi-salted butter on a baguette bought in a local market so beautiful that tourists would photograph me
buying it. When I bought avocados in the market, the stall-keeper would ask which day I planned to eat
them, then select the ones with the optimal level of ripeness. On the greyest day, I’d have glimpses of
perfection.
Lunch in Paris was a joy partly because of the contrast between the extreme urbanity and the ever-
fresh produce from farm and sea. The lamb on my lunchtime plate might be my only contact with nature
all day. In fact, looking back, I can say honestly, without being pretentious, that lunch may have been the
main reason I stayed. In London at lunchtime, I’d see colleagues sitting at their desks eating what

looked like plastic bags but turned out on closer inspection to be sandwiches. When I did manage
to get out for lunch in London, I’d sit in a sandwich shop called Harpers but known as ‘Toilet Harpers’,
it being a converted public toilet. In Paris there were about twenty very decent restaurants within a
short stagger of my flat.
Parisians still stuck to appointed mealtimes. A restaurant might be half-empty at 12.30 p.m., packed
at 1 p.m., and half-empty again by 1.45 p.m. As a foreigner, I learned to arbitrage by turning up then,
when space was opening up but before the kitchen closed at the ritual 2 p.m. I also learned always to
order the daily miracle of the menu du jour (or la formule): that day’s set menu, the best affordable
lunch on earth in two or three courses, made from whatever fresh ingredients the restaurant had had
delivered that morning by a double-parked van. (By contrast, the stuff on the à la carte menu was
generally reheated from frozen.)
Lunch in Paris at the start of the century was still a solemn ritual that took about ninety minutes. It
started with the waiter unfolding the wine list, and ended with his finally deigning to notice my
increasingly desperate requests for the bill. Back then, the experience cost little if you earned British
pounds, and nothing at all if, like most local office workers, you had ‘tickets restaurant’ coupons
supplied by the boss. Daily happiness for me became a table for one with my book. Boiling pasta at
home felt like missing the point.
The grandest restaurant on the street was owned by a big fat man who hung around the entrance like
a bouncer, glowering at potential customers, sending the message: ‘My food is too good for you.’ A

sign by the door conveyed the Parisian restaurateur’s ancient belief that he knew best: ‘The meat
dishes will be served blue, rare or undercooked.’ Yet the fact is Parisian restaurateurs did know best.
They had been serving sole meunière and crème brûlée for centuries, and over time they had worked
out how to make them. I read that French cooking was ‘stuck in a rut’ and in need of ‘bold new
flavours’. I didn’t care. Most of the everyday places I went to didn’t feature in international gourmet
guides, but eating standards were about as high as on any other ordinary street on earth. What makes
Parisian food so good is that almost all the customers are food critics. Having eaten the same stuff at
home since childhood, they know their onion soup. If it isn’t excellent, they’ll go to the place around the
corner.
The same standards applied to the growing variety of ethnic restaurants. One day I was eating in the
local hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese canteen when the woman who ran it told me she was going to turn it
into a Szechuan restaurant – the new fashion. To do this, she’d despatched her husband, the chef, to
Szechuan for a months-long cooking course. That’s what it took to survive in Paris.
I’d regularly drink affordable wine so good it was, in the French phrase, ‘like Jesus pissing in your
mouth’. In one restaurant a few doors from my flat, I ate a chestnut soup so perfect that it was almost
funny, yet for the kitchen it was routine, something it had done every autumn forever. A restaurant on the
same spot a century earlier had probably done it forever too. Here is the writer Marmontel describing a
meal he remembered eating down the road from me about 250 years ago: ‘An excellent soup, a side of

beef, a thigh of boiled chicken oozing with grease; a little dish of fried, marinated artichokes or of
spinach; really fine Cressane pears; fresh grapes, a bottle of old Burgundy and the best Moka coffee.’2
He didn’t eat it in a restaurant. He ate it (or so he wrote) in the Bastille prison.
On my rare ventures into tourist Paris, I was reminded why some foreigners hate the city. One day I
went to meet a visiting friend in a random café near Opéra. The black-waistcoated waiter sneered at us
in English, eventually brought us the world’s most expensive canned orange juices, and chucked in ice
cubes against our express request. He was ashamed to be serving tourists, he wanted to show that our
money couldn’t buy his subservience, and he didn’t care if the two of us ever came back. He knew he
could hang us upside down and flay us, and the café would still be packed with tourists next year.
I mostly stuck to my neighbourhood, where restaurateurs and shopkeepers had to treat the regulars
well. It would be a stretch to describe my street as warm and fuzzy like something out of an Edith Piaf
song, but within a few months I was granted the eternal ritual of neighbourhood initiation: you walk into
a restaurant and the proprietor strides over to shake your hand. It sounds like a cliché of la vieille
France, but it really did work like that. The joy of Paris – as of any good global city – is that you live
simultaneously in the great wide world and in your neighbourhood.

Meanwhile, even London’s more dismal suburbs were becoming unaffordable. Bit by bit, I shipped the
rest of my stuff over to Paris. Life there turned out to suit me. From Anglophone writers like
Hemingway I had absorbed the expat’s view of the city: a place almost devoid of French people
that serves only as a stage for the white Anglophone male hero.
While here, the hero leaves behind the encumbrances of daily existence: the need to earn a buck,
diets, sexual mores. Everything dissolves here except art, food and love. It’s the place where you can
satiate your appetites without consequences.
But for the Anglophone hero, Paris is meant to be only a holiday from materialism (ideally while the
exchange rate is favourable – the true magic of the city in Hemingway’s 1920s, and again in the early
2000s). Eventually, the foreigner is expected to return home to reality. Most nights just before falling
asleep, partly to reassure ourselves we wouldn’t spend our entire lives here, my wife and I would have
a ritual conversation that went: ‘Where could we move to?’ We never got around to leaving. Instead,
gradually, reality caught up with us in Paris.
 2
Losing to London: Paris versus the Anglosphere

In my early years in Paris, the city’s usually tacit rivalry with London broke out into a formal head-to-
head competition: the bid to host the 2012 Olympics. Since I was a sports columnist, I’d regularly
interview the Parisian bid’s chief executive, Philippe Baudillon, who was a one-man embodiment of
the French elite: a slender diplomat in pinstriped suits with open-necked shirts, a graduate of the Ecole
Nationale d’Administration, the ‘school of presidents’.
Baudillon had spent much of the previous two decades bidding unsuccessfully for various Olympic
Games. Paris’s most recent failed campaign, for the 2008 Games, had been too ‘technical and French’,
he admitted. The functionaries had poured all their brainpower into the bid, and presented the platonic
ideal of an Olympics, in French, without wasting much time asking International Olympic Committee
(IOC) members and other foreigners what they wanted. This time, Baudillon said, his team had ditched
the arrogance. ‘I’ll give you an example: we wrote the bid in English and in French at the same time.
We try to think in a language that is not our own, so as not to be confined.’

Paris became the bookmakers’ favourite to host in 2012. Whereas London had fallen victim to
its own success, grown too swollen and expensive to get around, Paris had its unrivalled compactness.
It planned to put the athletes’ village in one of the last undeveloped spaces inside the Périphérique ring
road: the disused railway yards at Batignolles, within ten minutes’ drive of most of the planned venues.
I attended a lunch where the French sports minister boasted that the Games would be located
‘practically in the centre of Paris’. Fans, athletes and dignitaries would only need to brave the
banlieues for events at the Olympic stadium, the Stade de France.
When the IOC gathered in Singapore in July 2005 to choose the host, Baudillon’s team flew in
feeling chirpy. Every IOC member had a copy of Paris’s enormous bid book, which proved the
superiority of its proposal. But then Britain’s prime minister Tony Blair spent three days going up and
down the Raffles Hotel, flattering IOC members with one-on-one meetings.
President Jacques Chirac dropped by only briefly, to address the meeting in French. He’d attended
summer school at Harvard as a young man, and spoke good English, but believed that French presidents
should always speak their own language, even if their listeners couldn’t understand it. The Paris team
began to realise, queasily, that few IOC members had bothered to read their bid book.
I was following events from my apartment. Just before the IOC announced the winner, I raced to the
town hall, the Hôtel de Ville, to watch the supreme moment on its big screen. I had thought the place

would be jam-packed with people wanting to celebrate Paris’s triumph. Instead, most of the city
was going about the serious business of finding lunch. There were only a few thousand curiosity-
seekers waiting outside the town hall. A couple of diehards managed to start a chant of ‘Paris!’, which
lasted about thirty seconds.
We stared at the screen. When the IOC’s president Jacques Rogge paused and pronounced,
‘London’, he seemed to be naming more than just the Olympic host. Paris had lost the battle of the cities
(even if it was said that one delegate had decided the outcome by accidentally pressing the wrong
voting button). London’s victory expressed what everyone, even the French, understood at the time: the
Anglophone world was the future and they were the past. Early in the new century, it felt as if Paris
was over.

The city had had its stint as the ‘Navel of the World’ – the centre of the universe, the place that taught
everybody else eating, romance, painting, manners, democracy and the ‘universal language’ of French.
Certainly until 1940, almost every would-be artist felt they ought to spend time here. Even the failed
Austrian painter Adolf Hitler claimed, on his one visit to the city, after his army had conquered it: ‘I
would have studied here if fate had not driven me into politics, for my aspirations before the First
World War were entirely artistic.’1 He could have become another harmless fantasist hawking
postcards in Montmartre.
Peter Lennon, in his memoir Foreign Correspondent: Paris in the Sixties, describes one of the final
nights of the city’s reign as the Navel. He and his friend Samuel Beckett walk into a Left Bank basement

café where they see sitting, at separate tables within a few square metres of each other, Eugene
Ionesco and Jean-Paul Sartre. Everyone nods politely at everyone else, then resumes his evening.
Where else on earth, wondered Lennon.
Slowly, Paris ceased to be the Navel. Saul Bellow in 1983 (I was still in the phase of learning
about Paris from Anglos) felt sorry for the city, ‘which had been a centre, still looked like a centre and
could not bring itself to concede that it was a centre no longer’.2
Nonetheless, into the 1990s, the people who ran France could maintain some claim to global
centrality. They had modernised a peasant country during the trente glorieuses, the ‘thirty glorious’
years of economic growth from the Liberation through to the 1970s. They had introduced Europe’s
fastest trains, the TGVs – the latest move in the centuries-old attempt to impose Parisian rule on the
recalcitrant provinces. They had co-created the world’s fastest passenger plane, Concorde; made
France an independent geopolitical actor, which regularly defied Washington; and they continued to
imagine that they spoke the universal language. In the 1980s, they still led the world in tech, launching a
sort of French-only ur-internet called ‘Minitel’, which seems to have been used mostly for reserving
tennis courts and having phone sex.
But then, around 1995, the internet arrived. The anglosaxon creation was indisputably better than
Minitel, and mostly in English. Pretty soon Minitel terminals were being wrapped in plastic bags and
stored in Parisian cellars, where many presumably sit to this day. The internet helped reduce French to

the status of kitchen language, or an accomplishment like Latin, taught in high-end foreign private
schools. Nobody used the phrase ‘Navel of the world’ any more, except ironically.
I came to Paris carrying with me the standard post-war Anglo evolutionary narrative about France,
which said that the French would eventually come to their senses and become like us. They would
work longer hours, slash state spending, let foreigners buy their big companies, and back the US in
wars. In short, they’d accept globalisation, or as we Anglos called it back then, ‘modernity’.
I arrived at the time when the Iraq war was brewing. The French were opposing the planned
American-British invasion. That prompted anglosaxon sneering about how the French hated American
culture, plus accusations that the ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ (copyright The Simpsons) were
backing Saddam Hussein because they hated Jews. I asked the British-American historian Tony Judt, a
specialist on France, how such a bizarre theory had taken hold. He explained that the only bits of
modern French history that most educated English-speakers knew were the Dreyfus affair, Vichy and
the Holocaust.
 In fact, the Parisian elite had come to a different view on Iraq largely because it informed itself
from different historical experiences than did its anglosaxon counterparts. Chirac had been a young
conscript in the French army trying to occupy an Arab country, Algeria, and that hadn’t worked out
brilliantly.
In February 2003, I watched on TV as the United Nations debated the coming invasion. Dominique
de Villepin, France’s foreign minister, Parisian to his impeccable cufflinks, argued against war, in

French of course. Most of the delegates listened to the translation on their headphones. It was a
metaphor for France’s modern role: De Villepin still expected to be heard by the world, but wasn’t
quite. Like most French thoughts, his got distorted, as if on a crackling radio frequency.
He finished, ‘This message comes to you today from an old country, France, from an old continent
like mine, Europe, that has known wars, occupation and barbarity …’. Jack Straw, Britain’s foreign
secretary, replied: ‘Mr President, I speak on behalf of a very old country – founded in 1066 by the
French.’ The delegates – almost all listening to him without headphones – guffawed. English wit had
pricked French pomposity. Again the anglosaxons had prevailed.
The French were realising that the new global conversation was dominated by Anglophones,
through English-language media and academic journals. ‘Anglosaxon’ journalists like me interpreted
France to the world, and so I’d get emails from French readers accusing me of ‘frenchbashing’, even
though I never learned to ‘frenchbash’ half as well as the French themselves.
The transmission problem for the French wasn’t merely that they spoke French. It was also that they
thought French. In general, they relied less than we did on data, and more on reasoning from first
principles. This was a country where philosophy remained a compulsory subject in the high-school
baccalauréat exams. Every serious enquiry in Paris was, in part, philosophical. Is man a Homo
economicus? What is his capacity to become a ‘subject’? I went to a conference where a French
historian praised a compatriot: ‘I heard in your Kant a little Rousseau.’ At the coffee break, a Dutch
economist grumbled: ‘I just think, “Who cares what Rousseau said?” I want facts.’

Those were thin on the ground in Paris. Reading the French press, I noticed even more factual
errors than in Anglo media. It was partly because most of their circulations were too small to pay for
subeditors. But more than that: facts in Paris were treated as boring, unimaginative, low-status things.
And maybe thinking in concepts rather than facts helped the French grapple with fundamental truths. It
all added up to a complete alternative model to the Anglo world. Sadly, almost nobody outside France
seemed to know or care. If the French had thought up the Enlightenment this century, foreigners might
never have noticed.
The Anglophone world was loud, monstrously vibrant, and moving ever closer. The first Eurostar
passenger train travelled from London’s Waterloo Station to Paris’s Gare du Nord on 14 November
1994. By the time of the Iraq debate, the trip took just two hours, thirty-five minutes. Later it shortened
by another twenty minutes. Never before had two great capitals in different countries been almost
within commuting distance.
As a Eurostar frequent traveller, I found I was living the dream of the young Mick Jagger. When he
studied finance and accounting at the London School of Economics in the early 1960s, he yearned to
become a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times, based ‘between Paris and London’. I did
often feel that I was based somewhere between the two. Some days, I’d have coffee at the Renaissance,
then stumble to Gare du Nord, and later that same morning have my second coffee with someone at
King’s Cross. After white and grey Paris, London’s colours seemed straight from a psychedelic 1970s
album cover: the bright red buses, the red-brown bricks, and the flowers in front gardens.
 I was always instinctively comparing the two cities, and on my Eurostar journeys I noticed the
pattern: Parisians tended to go to London for work, while Londoners came to Paris to play. Paris
hovers between two possible destinies: it is forever somewhere between being Rome and being
London. Early this century it was more like Rome: a dusty open-air museum with a food hall attached.
It felt like a suburb of global London.
‘We don’t think of ourselves as in competition with Paris,’ said John Ross, advisor to the mayor of
London, while the city prepared for its Games. ‘We’ve won that contest. We measure ourselves against
New York.’

In 2006 our first child, Leila, was born. Immediately we began the battle for a spot in a state-funded
crèche. Without any of the contacts that smooth Parisian life, we had only one weapon: English. We
discovered that there was a form letter that gets passed down from Anglo to Anglo, emailed across the
generations, written once upon a time by someone in beautiful French, explaining that the local crèche
would benefit from the presence of an English-speaker like one’s own child. It worked for us.
That was because Parisians – who always expect to live at the global cutting edge – now wanted
their children to learn the new global language. The jump to English wasn’t easy. I suspect Americans
and Britons would have had a bit of a shock if they had suddenly been told in adulthood, ‘Every time
you go abroad, or do business with foreigners, or enter the global conversation, you’ll have to do it in
French.’

But many Parisians made the transition, often with joy. I found little evidence for the canard
that they despised anglosaxon culture. One evening I went to a little jazz bar to see a ninety-one-year-
old American singer, Jon Hendricks. His voice had almost gone, and his daughters did most of the
singing while the smiling little bird-like man in a sailor’s cap swayed rhythmically alongside. Even
when he tried to sit out a number beside the stage, he couldn’t help it: he just kept tapping. And the
French audience loved him.
I saw crowds swoon for Andre Agassi at the French Open tennis tournament, and watched Parisian
intellos sit at the feet of the Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman, imbibing his wisdoms in English. The
queues for an Edward Hopper exhibition stretched two hours on freezing nights. Josephine Baker, the
American dancer who became a heroine of the French Resistance, was reburied in the Pantheon. Paris
has avenues named after Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. I wonder how
many British or American streets are named for Charles de Gaulle or Voltaire. The city had Anglo-run
restaurants, later ‘les food trucks’, and around the corner from us, ‘Le Festival Jerk Off (Queer and
Alternatives) – Danse, Théatre, Installation’. By the twenty-first century, any Parisian who mocked
les anglosaxons as primitives marked themselves as passé, or as locals had begun to say, ‘un
hasbeen’.
Many Parisians progressed only as far as ‘Globish’: the simplified, dull, idiom-free version of
English with a small vocabulary. That just about got them through transactional encounters, for business
or picking people up in bars. But Globish wasn’t enough for building relationships. I saw it when I

went to international conferences. During the day, everyone spent the sessions checking email.
Afterwards, the French would go for dinner together to speak French, while the Anglos ate with the
northern Europeans (often while bitching about the French). At 11 p.m. the Americans went to bed and
the Brits went off to the bar to build more trust.
The global language helped draw global talent to Anglophone cities. A French friend of mine had
moved to London shortly before I moved to Paris. Like most educated Europeans of our generation, he
spoke excellent English, and quickly fell in with Greeks, Costa Ricans and so on who spoke excellent
English too.
Since global talent rarely spoke French any more, it seldom came to work in Paris. Many ambitious
French people had responded by exporting themselves to London, New York or Silicon Valley. One
French architect in London told me that President Nicolas Sarkozy had invited him to the Elysée
Palace, interrogated him about everything that was going on in London, and then suggested he return to
Paris. ‘OK,’ the architect had said, ‘if you can give me an office with fourteen nationalities.’
And so, in those early years, I absorbed the idea that Paris had become a backwater. Still, it was a
liveable one, and my wife and I seemed to have decided to stay. In 2008, when she was pregnant with
twins, we needed a bigger apartment, and without much discussion we assumed we would buy in Paris.
But getting a mortgage was tricky. French banks wanted proof that we’d be able to keep paying no
matter what. We showed them some shares. Shares can fall, they scoffed. Then a bank sent me to a

cardiologist. He turned me inside out, and was already ushering me wordlessly out of the door
when I asked him what he’d found. ‘There’s nothing,’ he mumbled. He wasn’t working for me. He was
working for the bank, which wanted to know whether I’d live long enough to pay off a twenty-five-year
mortgage.
At the time, all this caution struck me as risible, an example of France’s fear of modern finance.
Then, about a month after we got our mortgage, the global financial crisis hit. Stock markets collapsed.
So did house prices – but not in France. The French didn’t give sub-prime mortgages and so they didn’t
have foreclosures.
That’s when I had what the French call a déclic, a clicking into place of a new realisation. I began
to see how often the French are right about the biggest issues. They had sat out the Iraq war, powered
their country on clean nuclear energy, established a crèche system that would allow us to raise our
children without going insane or broke, and achieved the world’s best work-life balance. Unbowed by
Paris’s defeat to London, they were even gearing up for another Olympic bid. Maybe the French were
smarter than I’d thought. Though few of them would ever admit it, their country seemed to be handling
modernity pretty well.
 3
Parisian Neighbours

The flat we bought was on a drab boulevard on the eastern edge of the trendy Marais neighbourhood.
Our building looked classically Haussmannian, though in fact it dated to about 1800, before the baron’s
time. It was buildings like ours that had given him his model for the new Paris. I was told that from
about 1850 until 1950 it had been the home of a single extended family, who had spread across various
apartments – a common phenomenon in Paris in the era. Gradually flats were sold to outsiders, and by
our day the original family had vanished as completely as the Knights Templar, who had run a fort in
our neighbourhood in medieval times.
Even before we moved in, the Marais had become the national epicentre for what the French call
(borrowing from the American journalist David Brooks) ‘bobos’: bourgeois people with bohemian
tastes such as cycling, coffee and bio food. In English, bobos would usually be called hipsters. Bobos
tended to work in semi-creative professions like journalism, design or the upmarket end of the food
industry. The Parisian-Moroccan novelist Leila Slimani, who lives among bobos and is fond of them,

captured them marvellously in this account of a dinner party: ‘They talk about their jobs,
terrorism, real estate. Patrick describes his plans for a Sri Lankan holiday.’1
By our day, the bobos had gentrified much of formerly proletarian eastern Paris, including the
Marais. The east of the city also had a subaltern class of (mostly) poorer people living in social
housing. The bobos’ rivals, bourgeois people with bourgeois tastes, who often had religious Catholic
affiliations, were clustered in western Paris. They were known as the BCBG – ‘bon chic, bon genre’,
or broadly ‘good style, good class’.
When we moved into our flat, we were too busy to join the city’s culture wars. We were in that life
stage when you expend most of your energy just getting your children dressed in the morning. In the
space of two and a half years, we had gone from a childless couple to a five-person family. We moved
in when Leila was three, and the twin boys, Joey and Leo, were babies. Like most Parisian apartments,
ours was too small for the number of people it contained. Now we found ourselves pitted against our
new neighbours in the oldest of Parisian conflicts: the battle for space.

When I was a child growing up in a house in a Dutch provincial town, we once visited a family in
Paris. I was shocked: how could so many people fit into a tiny, dark flat? Where was the garden? Then
I acquired their life.
Space isn’t everything in Paris, but it’s almost everything. Paris inside the Périphérique is by some
measures the most densely populated city in Europe, with about 20,000 inhabitants per square
kilometre; the 11th arrondissement, where I spent daytimes in my work-flat, has about double that. Only

the most thickly inhabited square kilometre of London, in the west of the city, can match the
average density of Paris. Even New Delhi and New York City are less crowded. I knew a
schoolteacher who with his wife raised their two sons in a cramped two-room flat – imagine that for
twenty years. Many couples leave the city as soon as the kids are born, meaning that there is a
perennially replenishing pool of young transit Parisians, out to enjoy their last gasp of urban freedom.
Every day in Paris you fight battles for space in which the fifty million or so visitors who descend
on the city each year tend to figure as unwitting combatants. The ones from roomier places, in
particular, often unintentionally steal other people’s space. Parisians do not easily forgive the dawdle
and turn, and, worst of all, the pose for a selfie on a pavement made for one. To quote the ultimate
Parisian, Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Hell is other people’.
Parisians protect the shreds of their privacy by maintaining expressionless faces in public. Over the
centuries they have developed elaborate workarounds to save little bits of space: the trapdoor in the
café floor that obviates the need for a staircase to the cellar; the sliding door on the bathroom because
there’s no space to open it. It’s partly because Parisian homes are tiny that the city’s public spaces are
matchless. Much of urban life here has to happen in cafés and parks.
Wealthier Parisians find respite in their country homes. The city’s posher western arrondissements
are one long outbound traffic jam every Friday evening, and inbound on Sunday nights. But even then,
the city is afflicted by permanent cabin fever. Parisians spend their lives trying to have private

conversations in cafés while sitting six inches from the next table, trying to keep their toilet visits
and orgasms silent, and managing the neighbours.
In Anglo societies, neighbours are potential friends, but in Paris mere geographic proximity is
considered too random a basis for friendship. Even lifelong neighbours here are just people who
happen to live in your building, and therefore sources of noise and hassle.
Friendship in Paris is doled out sparingly anyway. France is what sociologists call a ‘low-trust
society’. The French have the least trust in others of any western Europeans, according to surveys by
the European Commission. Consistently since 1981 in surveys for the separate European Values Study,
fewer than three in ten French respondents say most people can be trusted. That’s half the figure of
many northern European countries. Building trust with Parisians can take half a lifetime. The result is
that friendship, business and politics are conducted within tight groups, whose members have often
known each other since school.
Newcomers can be kept at arm’s length for years while Parisians try to place them in social, class
and geographical terms. Acquaintanceships here often start at the glacial and then warm by a degree or
so every few decades, much like the planet itself. If you miss the right moment to raise the temperature
with a ‘tu’, you might have to wait years for another. In our first years in the building, we got to ‘tu’
with only one of our neighbours. Their closed shades offered walls of deliberate blankness. Walking
past the windows of London homes, you might see a child’s drawing or an Arsenal FC scarf on display.
In Paris, individuality was hidden from outsiders.

Yet simultaneously, thanks to our building’s creaky nineteenth-century parquet floors, we all
shared an unwanted intimacy. Our days began at 6.45 a.m. when our next-door neighbour opened her
door, about two metres from our bed, to go to work. We’d then get up to do battle with the children. If
the boys fell over while trying to walk, or even just crawled too loudly, the lawyer who lived beneath
us would thump his ceiling in protest.
As bad luck would have it, we shared a landing with the building’s chief enforcers, an elderly
couple whom I’ll call Monsieur Vieux and Madame Vieille. They exemplified a peculiarly French type:
the overactive retiree. In France, the typical person stops working soon after reaching sixty, and then
lives about another twenty-five years – probably the longest average retirement in human history. The
result is millions of French pensioners seeking outlets for their energies. M. Vieux and Mme Vieille
found it in the domination of our building.
 They saw themselves as guardians of sacred Parisian codes that were so subtle as to be beyond the
comprehension of invading bobos, especially les bobos anglosaxons. Rule one of their codebook was
that children should neither be seen nor heard. We struggled to comply. Our building had the
quintessentially tiny Paris elevator, carved out of the original staircase. It was too small to take the
double pushchair we needed for our twins, and since we lived on the fourth floor, we used to park the
pram downstairs, by the door to the cellars.
The Vieux-Vieilles concluded that we were typical anglosaxons who treated our children as

‘enfants rois’, child kings. Another older man in the building ran an old-fashioned Marais
business out of the courtyard, made daily trips to the cellar, and got understandably irritated at
constantly having to squeeze past our pushchair. To him, the pram was antisocial blockage, whereas his
parked car in front of the building was a sort of natural phenomenon. One morning we came downstairs
to find that he had turned the pram upside down.
Our neighbours’ hostility made me miserable. So did the mice that haunt the pre-concrete-era walls
of Haussmannian apartments. We brought in a succession of ineffectual exterminators to deal with the
mice. The neighbours seemed to require a subtler approach. What to do? One day my wife brought
Monsieur Vieux a bottle of port. He accepted it magnanimously, as a surrender, as if she had handed
over Alsace-Lorraine. It didn’t get her anywhere.
I have a bad personality, so I took a different tack with the downstairs lawyer. On our daughter’s
fourth birthday we had made the mistake of buying a piñata – the kind of papier-mâché toy that the
guests take turns whacking until it bursts open, spilling out sweets. After a few whacks, we seemed to
hear an echo: someone was whacking on our front door. When I opened, the lawyer burst in shouting,
whereupon ten little girls raced eagerly to the door. Monsieur Vieux, on patrol as always, opened his
front door to chastise us, but the lawyer and I were so into our screaming match that we ignored him.
Eventually the lawyer retreated, and the birthday party resumed, more or less. I left an angry note in
his letterbox saying that he had ruined the party. Astonishingly, the next day he knocked on our door

with his own peace offering: a bottle of champagne. He never tried to bully us again. I had proved
myself to be a Parisian whose dignity was non-negotiable.
As it happened, the lawyer had small children of his own, and they sometimes cried so loudly that
we’d go and check on our own kids, thinking the sound was coming from them. His children and ours
gradually became friends, and sometimes played together in our flat or theirs. Then, blessedly, in a bid
for more space, their family moved to an outer arrondissement. They were replaced by an almost stone-
deaf octogenarian who never complained about noise. In return, we let her watch televised mass at top
volume every Sunday morning.
One of the oddities of Parisian cabin fever is that almost every apartment building in the city boasts
a large and attractive public space: the courtyard. But it is almost permanently empty. If anyone dared
linger in ours for the briefest neighbourly chat, the writer on the second floor, working on another novel
that no one would read, would mechanically open her window and tick off the wrongdoers.
I had begun reading about urbanism, and was excited by the idea of using neglected spaces. Other
cities were designating official ‘play streets’. What if the kids in our building were allowed to play in
the courtyard for, say, an hour every Saturday afternoon? It would give my wife and me the briefest
respite from the quasi-military planning involved in taking three toddlers on a ten-minute walk in
winter clothes to the nearest playground with disgusting toilets. If the kids in the building could play
together, they would get to know each other, and so would the parents. Surely more social connections
among neighbours had to be a good thing, even in Paris?
 Our 6.45 a.m. neighbour volunteered as an ally in our struggle. The opportunity to raise the
issue was the annual meeting of the building’s owners. Its agenda was rigidly choreographed by the
Vieux-Vieilles, like a session of the USSR’s Supreme Soviet, but my wife managed to make our
proposal from the floor. The older residents were horrified she’d even asked: ‘Pas possible!’ The
dentist who ran his practice out of the courtyard explained that he had raised his children without such
advantages, so why should we have any?
After our defeat, the building’s manager, a pawn of the Vieux-Vielles, explained to my wife,
sympathetically: ‘You are an American, so you do not understand, but what you want is unthinkable.’
He didn’t bother explaining why. To him it seemed a self-evident truth: Paris was for adults.
For years when I got home from work, I’d rush through the courtyard to our staircase, trying to avoid
running into any neighbour, feeling like an unwanted intruder in the place where I lived. Gradually I
realised that we were simply the latest combatants in the ancient history of Parisian neighbourly
squabbles. For instance, one reason Marcel Proust lived in the famous cork-lined room was to escape
his neighbours’ noises. Someone has even published a book of Proust’s elaborately polite letters of
complaint to his upstairs neighbours on the Boulevard Haussmann, a couple called the Williams. (The
husband was an American dentist, and the wife, unfortunately, played the harp.)
Proust left that building in 1919, only to move somewhere even more problematic. ‘The neighbours
from whom I am separated by a partition make love every second day with a frenzy of which I am

jealous’, he wrote to a friend, his landlady’s son, in a letter that would be auctioned in 2017 for
€28,336.

When I think that for me this sensation is weaker than that of drinking a glass of cold beer, I envy
those people who can cry out such that the first time I thought it was an assassination. But very
quickly the cry of the woman, taken up an octave lower by the man, reassured me about what
was happening. […] I would be sorry if your mother attributed all this racket to me …2

Angry notes pinned up for transgressors in the communal area by the letterboxes remain a Parisian
literary subgenre. The Chersvoisins.net website showcases some examples:

The person who allowed his cat, dog, pony, child or friend to defecate behind the communal
entrance …

To the bastard who allows his dog to shit in front of our garage every day without cleaning it
up, know that I have just found out that rat poison is toxic for dogs.

Unauthorised vehicles shall be beaten with a mace, turned upside down by a furious mob, and
set on fire.

By the greatest of chance, a tortoise has fallen onto my balcony!!

One section of the site is headed ‘Orgasmes’:

Hello,
For lovers of sex, it is very good to use condoms. But take the time to wrap them up and put
 them in the dustbin. Not out of the window.

To the serial screwer of the building: I beg you and your boyfriend to make a little less noise
during your moments of intimacy (or not, given that we participate in them too) …

Note, dear neighbours, that when you scream at each other, and you slam and re-slam your
FUCKING door, we hear you. If you could pass directly to the phase ‘screwing like rabbits to
make up’ (considerably less noisy and much quicker), it would suit us.

Message for the new arrival on the second floor of our building:
In little time, we have discovered, or rather heard, that you are:
A great football supporter
A fan of comedy series
A lover of sex
… We hear your partner congratulating you on your performance, and expressing her
pleasure, and noting your large genital parts, and expressing this forcefully enough to
benefit the entire northeastern wing of the residence.
… Could you, in future, just close your windows?

Tonight we are making love. P.S. Our apologies for the noise

Despite the noise, our children were finally learning to sleep at night, and falling over less often
when my wife, paradoxically, began to complain of tiredness. Then she started to lose weight – a
development that pleased her until it became unignorably worrying. Eventually she was diagnosed with
an aggressive cancer. ‘What are the chances?’ we asked the specialist. She did the calculations in front
of us. ‘About fifty-fifty,’ she concluded.
My wife and I walked out through the hospital’s medieval courtyard. ‘Do you think I’ll be OK?’ she
asked me. I took in her emaciated body, thought, ‘You’re definitely going to die,’ and mumbled some
lie. She asked, ‘What will you do if I die?’ I said I’d take the children back to London where I had a
support network and female relatives, but that of course she wasn’t going to die.
A doctor gave us sleeping pills. We instantly became dependent on them. Since we’d never taken
them before, they initially worked like chloroform: we’d have a brief chat about death before bedtime,
swallow our pills, and lapse into an eight-hour coma, oblivious even to the neighbour’s departure.
Then, at 7 a.m., the three kids would joyously rush into our room and jump on the bed, whereupon I’d
wake with a start and think, ‘You poor fuckers. Your mother’s going to die and you’re going to be
traumatised for the rest of your lives.’ I could no longer eat, and lost eight kilos in a month, so now we
were both emaciated.
Days after diagnosis, my wife started chemo at the local hospital. She held up well: after a session,
we’d go out to lunch in a restaurant near the hospital, then slowly walk the twenty minutes home, after

which she’d spend the afternoon sleeping. As her hair fell out, she began wearing hats.
M. Vieux noticed. One morning as I left the flat to go to work, I sensed him waiting for me behind
his door. He accosted me on the landing.
‘Is everything OK?’ he asked.
He meant well. His years of disciplining us hadn’t been personal. It was just the traditional Parisian
way of welcoming new neighbours, especially foreign ones who didn’t understand Parisian rules, to
teach them that the relationship would be strictly code-based, not a friendship. Now that we’d been
living five metres away from him for two years, he felt it was time to enter stage one of intimacy.
But I no longer wanted to. I had already written him off.
‘Everything’s OK,’ I said, and began pushing past.
‘Really?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I said, accelerating down the stairs.
Luckily, the chemo worked.
 4
The Kids Learn Parisian

Our kids entered the French system before we did. The state crèche around the corner seemed to have
decided that the other children would indeed benefit from Leila’s English skills, even if she didn’t
possess any when she started there, before her first birthday – a fairly standard age of entry into the
system.
She became our first French family member. When she was two, and I came to collect her one
afternoon, I told a childminder that I was worried about Leila’s spoken French, because she didn’t hear
the language at home. ‘She’s fine,’ the woman reassured me. ‘The other day we were talking about
cuillères [spoons] and she understood everything.’
Just then Leila toddled over from across the playroom. She had been listening in to our
conversation, so that if necessary she’d be able to interpret for Daddy with his high-school French.
‘Thpoons!’ she shouted at me in English.
I realised then that I was replicating my own immigrant childhood. I had found an article my late
mother wrote soon after our move to the Netherlands in the 1970s, in the now forgotten English-

language magazine Holland Life, headlined ‘Immigrant Mum’. My mother was good-looking,
educated, and, she writes, reasonably well-dressed. However, her eldest son was so ashamed of her,
largely because she couldn’t pronounce the rolling Dutch ‘r’, that he had ordered her to stop offering
his classmates lifts to school in our car. ‘Here is a whole new socialisation process at work,’ she
concluded, ‘with children taking care of parents, explaining to them how the society operates, etc.’
In fact, this is a common tragedy in immigrant families: the child surpasses the parents too early. In
Paris, I realised that once my children grew older, every time I spoke French they would find me as
embarrassing as I had found my poor mother.
When we first had kids, almost all our friends in Paris were fellow Anglos. Some of them were
reproducing too, and we’d meet for baby play dates. But from about age two, our children began
choosing their own friends. And these – first at crèche, later at the neighbourhood maternelle (nursery
school) and école primaire (primary school) – were, inevitably, French, with actual French parents.
There was an upside to nobody in the neighbourhood having a garden: every day after school, all the
kids and parents gathered at the local playground, in the Square du Temple, a gorgeous, landscaped
nineteenth-century minipark where we spent our family’s sandpit years.
In Paris, you’re always walking on history, and the square stands on the site of the tower where
King Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette and their surviving son and daughter were held for years after the

French Revolution. When the royals were allowed their midday family walk in the Temple garden,
their children bowled hoops and tossed balls, much like ours would. Eventually, first Louis and then
his wife were guillotined. Their son died of illness aged ten.
Two-and-a-bit centuries later, we parents sat watching our toddlers from benches beside the
playground. As the kids grew older, we’d half-watch from the café across the street, often over an
anaesthetising glass of wine. Add on all the birthday parties, and over our decade or so of communal
child-rearing we climbed the rungs of the long Parisian ladder towards emotional intimacy. A handful
of our kids’ friends’ parents became our actual friends.
From about age seven, the children graduated from the park to the adjoining street. The only
building on it was our arrondissement’s majestic town hall. It was something like the castle in Kafka,
the power centre of the neighbourhood, source of everything from school meals to passports. The street
was relatively quiet, since it didn’t have any homes or shops, and children had colonised it for their
games. The occasional car or motorbike would butt through regardless, honking to scatter the kids, but
eventually the town hall put up bollards and created an official play street – the first I saw in Paris, and
a fascinating case of urbanism from below. The play street and the park turned our kids’ nursery and
primary schools into a kind of all-day community, which operated from 8.30 a.m. to sunset.
That made the school experience better than we had feared. We’d been warned that French schools
were rigid, miserable and almost designed to make children feel stupid. Traditionally, schools

punished errors without mercy. If a seven-year-old made a mistake, the teacher would wordlessly
rip out the offending page (or, in the old days, administer a beating).
Certainly, when Leila imitated her nursery teachers, she’d shriek, ‘What nonsense is this? You have
your head on upside down!’ When my British nephew imitated his, it would be ‘Good try!’ One
morning during a visit to London, when I dropped my niece off late at her primary school, the
headmistress, stationed in front of the school gate wearing an electric smile, hugged her and said, ‘Run
on in then, Bea, my lovely!’, words that had never been spoken in the history of French schooling.
Schools in Paris treated parents as intruders, who were always trying to mess up the Republic’s
grand educational project. During Leila’s first year at primary school, we were granted only one
parent–teacher meeting. We walked in desperately curious. The teacher delivered her verdict: ‘There
are no problems.’ With that, she seemed to feel the conversation was over. Was there nothing else, we
asked. Actually, she said, there was one task Leila had struggled with – but other children had too. This
woman saw her job as pointing out shortcomings.
If an entire country experiences daily criticism from a tender age, that will leave a national mark. I
read the research that said schools bred a lasting negativity in French people. That could explain that
characteristic Parisian mode: the bureaucrat, shop assistant or neighbour who addresses you like a
teacher chastising a backward child. I found that France was a no-fault culture: people rarely fessed up
to mistakes, perhaps because they had learned at school that mistakes were shameful. There was

no French equivalent of the casual American apology, ‘My bad’.

School has probably also helped make the French the world champion of pessimism. In Gallup
International’s survey of expectations for 2012 in fifty-one countries, for instance, the French were the
most morose. ‘We’ve never recorded such a low score in 34 years of surveys’, marvelled one pollster.
Afghans and Iraqis were much more optimistic. French people seemed to think they were pessimistic
because the outlook was terrible. In fact, I came to think that the outlook seemed terrible to them
because they were pessimistic. They relentlessly criticised their own society because their schools had
taught them to criticise.
As far as we could gather from interrogating our kids, French schooling remained unimaginative,
with pupils sitting in rows as the teacher droned on, much as in my own childhood, or indeed in the
nineteenth century. We spent many dinners listening to the kids recite the poems they had to learn by
heart; within days they’d have forgotten them again.
But at least French teachers had become more human over the generations. The kids seemed
relatively cheerful when we dropped them off in the morning. The school food was so superior that
they’d often spend dinnertimes at home raving about lunch. And despite our neighbourhood’s
remorseless gentrification, their classes were quite mixed. That’s partly because about a fifth of all
homes in Paris proper were social housing, disproportionately inhabited by poor immigrants. I’m the
son of liberals who were raised in apartheid South Africa, so I always notice ethnic divides, but my

children grew up so drenched in what the French call mixité that for years they didn’t even seem
to see it.
School kyboshed our freedom to decamp to the US or UK at will. Instead, we began to absorb
Paris’s very pronounced seasonal rhythms. While school and work were in session, the pace would be
intense, because in your free moments you tried to benefit from everything that Paris had to offer. We
hadn’t bought a flat in the middle of a great city so as to sit at home in the evenings watching TV. Once
the kids went to bed at 8 p.m., one or both of us would often go out, for dinner with friends or a movie
or a football match. Everything was so near that you could regularly have a top-notch evening and still
be in bed by 11 p.m. Paris inside the Périphérique was a ‘fifteen-minute city’ long before the Parisian-
Colombian urbanist Carlos Moreno invented the phrase. That was absolutely not true of the suburbs
beyond the ring road where perhaps ten million more people lived, but at this stage I still hadn’t
discovered them.
After every six weeks of Parisian frenzy, there’d be a two-week school holiday. (As far as I can
work out, France has more frequent school vacations than any other developed country.) Many of the
neighbourhood parents would despatch the kids to grandparents in the countryside – another benefit of
twenty-five-year retirements. Other families decamped to their second homes. Living in a large country
with a mostly abandoned countryside, the French middle classes have acquired these in greater
abundance than almost anybody else except Scandinavians. Even if you didn’t have a holiday home

yourself, all you needed was an impressionable relative with one. We would get invited to stay
with friends in the Ardennes forest, a Provençal village or a Breton beach town.
Ideally, the second home would be in a French region that the Parisian owners could at least pretend
was their native land, or terroir – their real home. If a grandfather had spent a couple of years there as
a young man, or even vaguely mentioned it at some point, that could be enough. ‘I’m from Burgundy,’
said our 6.45 a.m. neighbour, who had spent her whole life in Paris. Her family owned a house in
Burgundy, and she and her daughter spent their holidays there pretending to be peasants.
Families everywhere use holidays to try to generate happy communal memories, captured on
photographs that can be produced decades later as proof that family life wasn’t all mutual sniping over
microwaved dinners. For many Parisians, those memories are built at the second home. We knew
children who spent every holiday at theirs, grew up believing it was their terroir, and would one day
presumably feed the delusion to their own children.
When school ended for the year in early July, our neighbourhood would be handed over to tourists.
During August, hardly a local remained. Everyone returned to Paris for the start of September,
sometimes having spent a bit too much time en famille, raring with energy for la rentrée, ‘the re-entry’.
That was one of the nice things about Paris: the annual fresh start, with the opportunity to pick up better
habits. But even as our neighbours turned the key in the locks of the cramped apartments where they
might spend ten months a year for their entire lives, they were already dreaming of ‘going home’ again
next summer.

While our children were being Frenchified at school, my own French remained a daily source of
stress and shame. The extra moment I took to process a sentence drained spontaneity from
conversations. When a French person made a joke, I panicked.
The doubt about whether you should address your interlocutor with the familiar ‘tu’ or the formal
‘vous’ introduced an additional layer of anxiety, one that the English scrapped centuries ago when they
ditched the familiar ‘thou’ and just called everybody ‘you’. A Swiss doctor at a Parisian hospital told
me she had worked out that if someone was no more than one hierarchical rung above you, you could
say ‘tu’. Any higher than that, and they were ‘vous’. The polite forms kept people at a distance.
After a decade in Paris, I could still only be about 80 per cent of myself in French. I sounded even
more stupid and boring than I did in English. In arguments, I could rarely come up with the instant
sardonic put-down. In short, I spoke the language to the level that I recognised in countless immigrant
shop staff, plumbers, taxi drivers and long-serving Anglos: my French was grammatically flawed, with
an impoverished vocabulary, but adequate to most everyday situations.
I had gone from speaking a high-status form of English to a low-status form of French. This gave me
a glimpse of what it must be like to be an immigrant or working-class person in Britain or the US: the
moment I opened my mouth in Paris, I was treated with condescension. Because of the way I spoke, it
was harder for me to insist on my rights or get a hearing; easier for bureaucrats and others to push me
aside.

Still, I was higher up the language totem pole than some. One day shortly before Christmas,
when I went out for lunch, the lady from Shanghai who ran the sushi joint had a request. Could I spray-
paint the words Joyeux Noël onto her restaurant’s window? I guessed that she couldn’t write Roman
script. I took the can and sprayed. She and I surveyed my work with pride. It looked like proper
French. But a younger Chinese waitress piped up: I’d forgotten the dots on Noël. I added them. Then
they gave me a free green tea.
My cultural understanding slowly advanced too. Leila had taught me that signing notes to teachers
with my first name only was inadmissibly intimate. I had learned that Parisians tended to speak quietly,
and rarely used superlatives, especially when it came to praise: ‘pas mal’ was enough. I grasped that
the length of time you were allowed to speak was a mark of status, especially for older men. I knew
that spoken French was meant to be a kind of song, in which the melody mattered more than what was
actually said.
By this time, I could follow almost any French adult conversation. It was over breakfasts with my
children that I encountered a higher level of the language that I feared I would never master. I’d sit at
the table, working on my first cup of coffee, wondering why I could barely catch a word they were
saying to each other when I had just cantered through a two-hour high-French lunch interviewing a
novelist.
Part of the problem was that the kids used verlan, the form of French slang that involves reversing

words. I was still stuck at beginners’ verlan: ‘femme’ becomes ‘meuf’, ‘bizarre’ becomes ‘zarbi’,
and ‘fou’ (mad) becomes ‘ouf’. The children were operating in advanced verlan. The police, for
instance, were ‘keufs’, an adaptation of ‘kerlifs’, which was the reverse of ‘flics’, cops. Cigarettes
were ‘garetci’. And verlan played with the Parisian ethnic mosaic. A Jew, ‘juif’, became a ‘feuj’. A
black man, a ‘noir’, became a ‘renoi’, though he could also be a ‘Black’, or ‘kebla’ (‘Black’ reversed).
The word ‘arabe’ had been verlan-ised generations ago to ‘beur’, but had later been reversed again, to
become ‘rebeu’.
But the kids’ Parisian transcended verlan. When my son Leo was old enough, he wrote down their
slang for me, and I realised how many words came from the city’s immigrant languages, above all
Arabic. French had been importing words from around Africa for over a century, but the process had
accelerated in my kids’ generation. The most omnipresent import was probably ‘wesh’, an interrogative
word from Algerian Arabic that had jumped to Parisian via French hip-hop. In Arabic, ‘Wesh kayn?’
meant roughly, ‘What’s going on?’ and ‘wesh rak?’ was ‘how are you doing?’ In French, ‘wesh’ had
been repurposed to mean ‘yo’, ‘hey’, or ‘wow’. But there was so much more, for instance:

zebi – fuck (Arabic)

wallah – ‘I swear in Allah’s name’ (Arabic), though generally used in Parisian without any
religious overtones
belek – careful (Arabic). E.g. ‘Belek, tu vas te faire écraser’ (‘Be careful, you’re about to get run
over’)

miskine – pejorative for poor person (Arabic), used in Parisian as a general-purpose insult
condés – police (from ‘condé’, the Portuguese word for count, and therefore in practice also for
governor of an African colony, as most governors were counts)

Then there were innumerable English words: cannabis, was, inevitably, ‘le shit’, pronounced
‘sheet’. Alternatively, it could be ‘teuch’ – which was ‘shit’ in reverse. Other words had more
mysterious origins. Why was Paris itself called ‘Paname’, Panama? (In fact, since there is no ‘p’ in
Arabic, it was often pronounced more like ‘Baname’.) Many of these words had originated in Paris or
its suburbs and then, thanks to the metropole’s enduring cultural dominance, gone national, reaching
almost every village in France.
The impenetrable verbal stew of my kids’ Parisian had a meaning in itself. It all added up to a new
cosmopolitan language for a new cosmopolitan city.
 5
The Real Parisian Traffic Code

Parisians have many qualities, but they should never have been allowed to drive. When our children
were small, we were more afraid of motorists than of terrorists.
The automobile had reached Paris relatively late. In pre-war Parisian photographs, the streets are
full of cyclists. But from 1950 to 1972 the number of cars in the city quintupled. In 1956, construction
began on the Périphérique ring road – the city’s great urban-planning blunder, which ended up slicing
off Paris from its suburbs. The Parisian architect Michel Mossessian told me: ‘Some philistine idiot
said, “Let’s make a ring so that traffic can circulate around Paris”. That put a difference between in and
out.’
Soon the automobile ruled Paris. Here’s a scene from Georges Simenon’s 1967 novel Le
déménagement: ‘Fleets of cars passed. Then, suddenly, when the light went red, the pavement emptied
and the pedestrians set off running.’1 The authorities plotted various versions of Le Corbusier’s 1920s
vision of razing the old city with its narrow side streets, then replacing it with skyscrapers and
motorways. The moment of greatest danger came in 1969, when the car-loving moderniser Georges

Pompidou became French president. He believed that the towers of Notre Dame were too short,
and said, ‘It is up to the city to adapt itself to the automobile, not the other way around’.2 Luckily, his
plot to disfigure Paris was interrupted in 1974 by his death in office, aged sixty-two. And so the city
was mostly preserved, but the car was shoehorned into it. Like almost everything in Paris, its modern
traffic would be conditioned by an ancient context.
Some time in the 2000s, in an early attempt to push back against the automobile, the city hall closed
a few streets to cars on Sundays. I was thrilled. One ‘car-free’ Sunday, I took two-year-old Leila
outside to play. A pole with a sign on it had been planted in the middle of our street to block any
renegade vehicles. We had just started playing when a car drove up, and the driver got out and pulled
out the pole. I shouted that he couldn’t do that. He asked, ‘What are you, a policeman?’ (a deadly sneer
in Paris) and drove off. Leila and I continued doggedly playing on the street, until, after two or three
repeats of the scene, I gave up. The next time I got her dressed to go out, she asked, ‘Are we going to
shout at cars again?’3
One dark winter’s morning a few years later, I was walking all three children to primary school
when we encountered an SUV parked on the pedestrian crossing opposite school. I waited for a gap in
the stream of oncoming cars, then rushed the children diagonally across the street while snarling at the
driver. He shrugged: he was only dropping off his kid, he said.
It was the morning we had to order class photographs, so I was allowed to spend a record time of

nearly ten minutes in the school lodge. When I came out, his SUV was still blocking the crossing.
By this point he was just hanging out, chatting to a friend. Here is the kind of person I am: I scratched
his car with my key, waved at him as he filmed me, then went off to meet my uber-Parisian friend
Florence for breakfast. She listened as I recounted my confrontation with a sociopath. Then she
explained: ‘He just thinks you’re an emmerdeur [a pain in the ass].’
A few mornings later the SUV chap ambushed me outside the school, and we shoved each other for
a bit until we both admitted to feeling bad about the original incident. I agreed to pay for his paintwork,
and he said he wouldn’t block the crossing again.
Other people did instead. Another morning at drop-off time, my kids and I watched a lorry rattle
past the school going down the wrong side of the road.
Every day on the streets, a very Parisian class struggle was being fought out for microscopic
portions of high-value space. It broke down more or less like this. The drivers of private cars were
lower-middle-class banlieusards. Taxi, Uber and delivery drivers were working-class men. Cyclists
were mostly bobos, bourgeois people with bohemian tastes. Pedestrians were disproportionately either
tourists or Parisian pensioners. Police cars and ambulances were agents of the Republic, and therefore
too grand to sit in traffic even when they had nothing much to do, so Paris resounded with sirens, which
added to the ambient stress.
Finally, there were the pigeons – the de facto municipal birds, who ought to be on the Parisian crest.
They had evolved to handle cars, but like many human Parisians, were traditionalists by nature and

confused by bikes. By any logic, all these groups couldn’t possibly coexist in such a tiny space,
especially not when a delivery driver began unloading his van in the middle of the road. That legendary
Parisian creature, the nineteenth-century flâneur who idled his way along the boulevards, wouldn’t
have lasted ten minutes in the automobile age
For years I insisted on walking the children on any journey that required crossing even a single
street. They were my prisoners, and I was theirs. Then, when my sons were ten, they came to me to
break the news: they had got too old to show up at the park with papa. They knew every street in our
neighbourhood, their elder sister already went around by herself, and I would just have to trust them out
alone. Anyway, they had passed the school traffic test. ‘OK,’ I eventually agreed, ‘but first let me tell
you how Parisian traffic really works. When the light turns red, the first car thinks, “Oh, I’d better
hurry”, so he’ll always accelerate through it.’
The boys nodded, thinking, ‘Even Daddy has figured it out’.
I went on laying out the real-life Parisian Traffic Code:

A zebra crossing is a parking space

If you toot your horn lengthily in a densely populated area, the traffic jam you are in will dissolve
There is no such thing as a one-way street
Never indicate when turning, as that makes it too easy for pedestrians

As I droned on, I realised that the boys were giving me the pitying look that immigrant children

reserve for their parents. That’s when I finally got it: the boys were born knowing all this. They
were as Parisian as pigeons.
To an uptight northern European like me, Parisian traffic looked like barbarism: each person for
themselves, and every stranger just an obstacle. But the boys understood that it was civilisation: a
mutually agreed system of complex informal codes.
French formal rules are generally strict. That applies to traffic, too. The national driving test is
demanding, and many candidates fail it. But in Paris, formal rules are always trumped by informal
codes. For instance, hardly any traffic user respected the formal rule that the vehicle coming from the
right has priority.
 There is a Parisian cavalier streak that sees obeying formal rules – even when they work in your
favour – as lame, bourgeois, unromantic. All the people I saw in traffic were operating on the
assumption that everyone else would also break the formal rules. These breaches were tolerated, even
counted on. What counted were the informal rules – the etiquette of traffic. Informally, for instance,
everyone accepted that priority belonged to any vehicle that didn’t go through a red light (usually,
anyway). Informally, a vehicle was entitled to sit on a pedestrian crossing if it left a tiny space for
pedestrians to squeeze past.
The anti-system worked, more or less. You might see a van driver, an old lady with a cane, and a
cyclist with his dog sprinting by his side all negotiate a zebra crossing simultaneously, often while
checking their phones. The collective gamble – which usually paid off – was that nobody had space to
gather up enough speed to kill anyone.

The boys soon mastered the neighbourhood. Once they mastered the metro, their horizons
widened again. One evening, Leo walked in to announce that he had just crossed town to stand gawking
outside the hotel where the FC Barcelona football team were staying. My instinctive response was
rage. Then I thought: I wish I could have done that when I was twelve. (Obviously, I didn’t tell him.)
The boys’ new-found autonomy became mine, too. Suddenly I had time to myself. My era of
intensive child-rearing had abruptly ended. For the first time in a dozen years, I’d wake up on Saturday
mornings and wonder, ‘What shall I do this weekend?’ It’s the blessing of parents and children who
live in a walkable city. I hardly ever set foot again in the Square du Temple. One downside was that we
lost touch with the neighbourhood parents. Now and then, at the bakery, I’d run into a companion of
innumerable playground hours, exchange fond greetings, and walk on.
This wasn’t a source of great sadness. We were becoming Parisians ourselves. Through traffic, I
began to understand the city’s codes of behaviour – or, as Parisians tended to think of them, civilisation
itself.
 6
The Code-breaking Charlatan

Even weekend visitors sense that the band of acceptable behaviour in Paris is narrower than in other
global cities. You can’t walk into a restaurant demanding dinner at 6 p.m. while wearing orange shorts
and an Ohio State sweatshirt, especially if you don’t start with ‘Bonjour’. There is a right way to do
everything in Paris, and it was probably decided before you were born. If you overlay an intellectual
capital on an artistic and fashion capital in a former royal capital, all of it in the country that invented
how to eat, the result is a civilisation so highly evolved as to require its own user manual. Paris
abounds in behavioural codes.
To paraphrase Marx, the codes of Paris inside the Périphérique ring road are the codes of its ruling
class. (The suburbs outside the Périph are a series of very different worlds, where different rules
apply.) Unlike London or New York, Paris still has a dominant culture, which is more or less that of the
French elite.
Nobody ever spelled out the city’s rules to me. I had to work them out for myself. There are
countless non-dits, things that go unsaid. If you have to ask – for instance, about the dress code for a
dinner – you are revealing yourself as an incorrigible plouc or beauf (broadly: peasant, yokel). Part of

the Parisian code is to pretend that there isn’t a code. But people always found ways to make it
clear when I broke it.
Anglos have been trying to crack Parisian codes for centuries. One insightful guide, ‘Instructions for
British Servicemen in France in 1944’, was issued by the British Foreign Office, and republished
decades later as a cult classic. Its anonymous author (in fact the journalist Herbert David Ziman) gave
the troops some advice that still held up in my day:

It is as well to drop any ideas about French women based on stories of Montmartre and nude
cabaret shows…. If you should happen to imagine that the first pretty French girl who smiles at
you intends to dance the can-can or take you to bed, you will risk stirring up a lot of trouble for
yourself – and for our relations with the French.1

Or here are some codes of French workplaces, divulged in a guidebook published by the French
Chamber of Commerce in Great Britain:

The French ‘sometimes disagree for the sake of discussion and to test conviction’
They make ‘greater use of … body expression in confrontational situations’
‘Raising one’s voice or losing one’s temper may be seen as a sign of leadership’
Performance appraisals ‘start as a “one way” process subsequently evolving into an emotional

dialogue’
French businesspeople ‘will potentially view humour as lack of seriousness’.
 As I got to know Paris, I came to realise that it wasn’t just foreigners like me who were trying to
crack Parisian codes. Many French Parisians were, too. They spent their lives going around the city
feeling that they were piling one etiquette breach upon another – and often they were. I began to see
Paris as a city of charlatans: millions of people disguised as Parisians, faking it until they made it (or
left, or died).
Only a small cadre of native elite Parisians were born into the city’s codes. My friend Florence, for
instance, raised in the HQ of haut bourgeois Paris, the 7th arrondissement (‘Throw your tits forward,
girl’, her grandmother taught her) feels entirely at home in the city, calls people ‘tu’ whenever she feels
like it, and sometimes even reveals valuable points of etiquette to me: ‘No need for an apology if less
than fifteen minutes late.’ She’ll serenely occupy two tables in a packed café, knowing she can quell the
waiter – most likely a charlatan himself – in any contestation.
But even some born Parisians feel like unworthy charlatans. One friend of ours, who has spent her
whole life in our neighbourhood, admits that she still doesn’t dare walk into our local too cool Café
Charlot.
Almost everyone else in Paris is a migrant, either from abroad, the French provinces or the Parisian
banlieues. The former prime minister Manuel Valls, for instance, and the Parisian mayor, Anne Hidalgo

(born Ana Hidalgo in San Fernando, Spain), both grew up in Spanish-speaking immigrant
families. Sacha Guitry, the actor born to French parents in St Petersburg, said it best: ‘Être parisien, ce
n’est pas être né à Paris, c’est y renaître.’ (‘To be Parisian isn’t to be born in Paris, it’s to be reborn
there.’)
For ambitious French provincials, ‘monter à Paris’, literally ‘to climb up to Paris’, has always
been to attain the highest French pinnacle. Getting there, wrote Annie Ernaux, a future winner of the
Nobel prize for literature who came here from Normandy, was ‘the ineluctable evolution of a
successful life, full accession to modernity … an individual promotion’. Yet the climbers would
continue to be mocked all their lives. There is ‘a constant game between a form of provincial ambition
and an atmosphere of Parisian irony’, writes Jérôme Batout in La revanche de la province.
Most provincials come to Paris with at least some traces of the ancient French prejudice against the
snooty capital. In the highest-grossing French film ever, the 2008 comedy Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis, a
postmaster is told that as a punishment for a transgression he is to be transferred from his idyllic
Provençal town to a terrible place.
The postmaster buries his head in his hands and moans, ‘Paris!’
His boss shakes his head sorrowfully: ‘Worse than Paris.’
The postmaster looks up, incredulous: ‘Worse than Paris?’ (In fact, he’s being banished to the
frozen French north near Calais.)
All through history, freshly arrived provincials in Paris relied on networks from their old homeland.
Bistros and bars tabac were always said to be in the hands of Auvergnats, though in fact most

proprietors came from Aveyron, an area just south of the Auvergne. New arrivals from the old
pays could generally find starter jobs with them. Now the Wenzhou Chinese who have taken over those
businesses (and replaced North African Jews in Paris’s wholesale clothes industry) recruit their own
countrymen.
The newcomers brought their provincial ways with them. Simenon, whose Inspector Maigret stories
are among the best descriptions of everyday Paris, has a scene from my neighbourhood in the 1950s: on
warm days, the inhabitants bring chairs out of their flats and sit chatting in the sun, just as they used to
in the village.
The journey from peasant to Parisian is a long one. Some provincials forever remember the first
time they stepped into a Parisian metro carriage and greeted their fellow passengers, as they would
have on a village bus: ‘Bonjour!’ They only ever did it once.
The most adept Parisian charlatans manage to erase almost all traces of their origins and accents. I
once interviewed an MP, a trilingual Parisian former banker whose every button was in the right place.
Only after an hour and a half of conversation did he reveal that underneath, he was secretly a provincial
bumpkin, the son of a factory worker from eastern France. He felt he couldn’t have conquered Paris as
himself.
True, Parisian codes have softened since I first arrived. Globalisation eats away at all national
peculiarities, and Parisians now permit a wider range of behaviour. But still the codes persist.
There is only one caveat. If you are of impossibly high status, or a multigenerational Parisian

insider, or are exceptionally good-looking, charming or stylish – someone who ‘a du chien’, ‘has
dog’, in the French phrase – you can break rules with impunity. For everyone else, let me divulge the
bits of the Parisian codebook that I’ve managed to decipher. Admittedly, I rarely manage to put it into
practice, but as they say, the coach doesn’t play, so here goes:

The Parisian eye

One evening in a beautiful café, I watched a waiter bend over the candle at an empty table and fiddle
with it. Then he toured the room, repeating the ritual at each table. Finally, I realised what he was
doing: he was aligning the candles into a perfect line, just as the nearby Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel
was perfectly aligned with the Arc de Triomphe.
Beauty in Paris is not reserved for special occasions or places (a Saturday night out, an art museum)
but is sought in the seemingly banal decor of everyday life. Parisians are trained from about age three
to develop an eye that can alight on the tiniest blemish in a space: a woman wearing excessive make-
up, an inelegant arrangement of food on a plate, a foreigner talking too loudly. An imaginary red alert
flashes on the blemish. In Paris, the undersides of things can be filthy, but surfaces must shine.
The task of restoring perfection often falls on waiters, who, although mostly charlatans themselves,
are the guardians of the city’s main public spaces. One day I was eating in a perfect hotel restaurant,
and without thinking put my ugly backpack on the floor beside me. A waiter rushed over: ‘Would
monsieur like to leave the backpack in the cloakroom?’ No, I said, irritated. It being an expensive

hotel, he had been trained in sometimes letting off clueless foreigners, so for the rest of the meal
he watched me unhappily from across the flawless room. In Paris, you often feel, usually correctly, that
the only blot on the landscape is you.

Clothes
The Parisian beauty ideal isn’t about display of the body. Few Parisians work out, the typical male
form is droopy, and for a woman to reel in the crowds with a show of cleavage would be considered
primitive. You display yourself in Paris through your clothes.
There isn’t a strong concept here of ‘dressing up’. Rather, in any situation – whether a night out or
dropping your kids at school – you should look elegant, or at least ‘correct’, meaning that it’s never OK
to queue at the baker’s in sweaty jogging gear. Sports clothing here is considered a marker of the
banlieues – in other words, of barbarism. As Monsieur Vieux asked me ironically, on the hot summer
night I stepped out of our flat wearing frankly rather stylish shorts: ‘Are you going to the beach?’
Clothing in Paris isn’t a form of self-expression. It’s a way to take your place in society. Dressing
dowdy is acceptable, but dressing eccentric is not. Both in the bobo and the bourgeois halves of the
city, the well-chosen scarf completes any outfit.
When we’d stay at my dad’s house in London, where to the Paris-trained eye half the population
looks like punks or bag ladies, the lack of codes flummoxed my kids. One morning, as I was about to

take out Leila, then seven, she scrutinised me critically and observed: ‘You’re not dressed.’ She
was wrong. I looked adorable in my sneakers, shorts and Barcelona football shirt.
The French actor Omar Sy, a child of the Parisian banlieues, experienced similar culture shock
when he moved to Los Angeles and saw a Jesus lookalike in a white toga walking barefoot in the road.
Eventually Sy realised he was the only person staring. In Paris, everybody stares.

Conversation
Parisians rarely initiate conversation with strangers or distant acquaintances. There’s no obvious
etiquette for doing so (except when bantering with a shopkeeper) and no generally agreed small talk.
Remarking on the weather or the football result just identifies you as a bore.
This makes Parisian parties where you don’t know anyone a trial. I have spent much of my life here
being ignored. I’ve learned to appreciate the indifference. James Baldwin said he was always grateful
to Paris for ‘leaving me completely alone’.2
If you do get into a conversation here it’s fine to interrupt your interlocutors. It livens things up and
is a way of playing together rather than alone. You’re also free to disagree. In fact, since Paris is a
society that values thought, disagreement is admired more than clichés, expressions of insecurity or
attempts to mirror the other person’s emotions (‘Oh, I’m exactly the same!’).
Don’t talk much about yourself, your life path, your CV, your work, your dreams, your triumphs.

Parisian life is not conceived of as a hero’s journey – a series of encounters with dragons that you
must slay. Stick to politics, the arts, holidays and sexual gossip.

Touching
The French anthropologist Raymonde Carroll, who taught for decades in the US, identified a general
difference between the two nations: whereas the French only have conversations with people with
whom they are already intimate, Americans only touch people with whom they are already intimate.
Carroll noted that Americans can hug friends of the opposite sex, but during this hug only shoulders
touch, and the participants end by rubbing each others’ backs as proof that the hug was non-sexual.
In Paris, you only hug someone on a special occasion, such as a funeral, or if they’ve just been
released from jail. But there are other greetings here that will seem invasive to low-touch Anglos. In a
small-scale social setting, it’s normal to greet members of the opposite sex with a kiss on each cheek,
even if you’re meeting for the first time. La bise, the kiss of greeting, is best delivered as a gentle brush
rather than a smacker. It typically has no sexual connotations, but deliciously, between the right people,
it can.
Male Parisian friends (especially bobos) will often kiss each other. But when to kiss anyone, of
either sex, is a matter of situational judgement, and is easy to get wrong. I still remember the time I
delivered my son Joey for a play date at the tower-block apartment of a Franco-Chinese family. I’d met
the mother only once before. When she opened the door, I unthinkingly began to kiss her on both

cheeks, then instantly read in her face that I was making a faux pas. We didn’t see the family again.

Flirtation
Sex, or romance, can be hinted at in almost any Parisian interaction – even in workplaces in the
#MeToo era, or at parties when your partner is present.
This bit of the codebook was first explained to me by a Parisian I roomed with at university in the
United States. The night I arrived in the country, he took me for a drink, and said: ‘Look, I’ve been here
a year already. Let me explain what I’ve learned about American women so far.’ He was giving me a
peek into the American codebook he’d been compiling.
He had been puzzled at first, he said, that American women didn’t flirt with him. In Paris, he
explained, you always flirted whether you fancied someone or not. The flirting meant nothing. Only
after longer acquaintance would you discover whether the woman actually liked you. But he’d found
that Americans operated the other way round. They never flirted. Then, after longer acquaintance, you
might suddenly realise that an American woman you hadn’t been flirting with actually liked you.
He had discovered an American code: Americans try not to sexualise social encounters. They
typically cordon off the sexual in zones like the bedroom or the Tinder app. The Frenchwoman who
stripped to protest against annoying security at an Indiana airport in 2002 knew exactly what she was

doing: the way to discomfit Americans is to sexualise situations. She was arrested.

The individual versus the couple

In Paris you are usually expected to present in social life as yourself, rather than in your persona as
either partner or parent. Don’t always say ‘We’, don’t go on about your children’s schools, and don’t
always bring your spouse along when meeting people – including attractive members of your preferred
gender. Generally, men and women mingle in most situations. There aren’t many Parisian girls’ (or
boys’) nights out.

Money
Don’t talk about it. It’s a taboo topic. Mercifully, this cuts down on house-price conversations, though
Parisians get their secret fixes from so-called ‘news’ magazines that stick property reports on their
covers. When financial matters do come up, then far from boasting of their wealth, Parisians will
typically claim to be poorer than they are.

Elegance versus transparency

Here is an enormous overgeneralisation: in northern countries, people tend to value transparency. You
are encouraged to speak plainly, to be authentic, to bare your soul at times. But in Paris, transparency
isn’t valued at all. It just makes you seem a peasant, or a bore. What’s valued is elegance – and that
requires a certain opacity about oneself. Don’t get confessional, or neurotic or lose self-control when

drunk. Make everything you do seem effortless. Never show the legs kicking beneath the surface.

The producer is king

There’s a reason why Uber was invented on a street corner in Paris. As the story is told, late one
snowy night in 2008, the tech entrepreneurs Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp, in the city for a
conference, couldn’t get a taxi. What, they thought, if you could request a ride from your phone? Camp
fantasised: ‘Push a button and get a ride.’
A few years later, when the Uber app hit Paris, it made the city’s taxi drivers even angrier than they
already were. They were outraged that the newcomers employed crafty tricks like coming to where the
customers were, and being nice to them. In the Parisian tradition, the taxis considered themselves a
guild who deserved a monopoly. Their demonstrations against Uber in 2014 echoed the late fifteenth-
century Parisian Scribes Guild who, according to Israeli economist Oded Galor, ‘managed to bar the
entry of the city’s first printing press for nearly twenty years’. In fact, the taxi protests backfired: they
alerted Parisian consumers to the app’s existence and Uber’s rides soared.
The moral of the story: Parisian taxi drivers are dreadful. They are such an unhelpful and aggressive
breed that for years the people running the city considered them a leading obstacle to local economic
growth. To this day, if a Parisian chooses to allow you into his cab, you serve at his pleasure.
Extreme though taxi drivers are, they aren’t a total outlier among the city’s producer classes. In a
Parisian restaurant or shop, too, anyone who walks through the door is a supplicant, or an intruder. A
common belief among French producers is that the system of production is perfect until the customers
arrive and mess it up.

In any interaction, the producer’s rules apply. For instance, if the restaurant kitchen closes at
10 p.m. and the customer arrives at 9.50 p.m., but the producer isn’t in the mood, then tough titty. When
the producer is rude (perhaps through the time-old device of opening the interaction with ‘Oui?’ instead
of ‘Bonjour’) he is sending a message: ‘You have come to me for my expertise, in cooking beef or
making tombstones or whatever, not for my willingness to abase myself before you.’ What Anglos call
‘customer service’ is here considered submission. In fact, if the producer is friendly, the suspicion
arises that this must be a confidence trick meant to distract you from their lack of expertise.
There’s a particularly strong inbuilt tension in the relationship between customer and Parisian
waiter. The French word for waiter, serveur, has the same root as ‘servant’, and customers often
instinctively ignore the waiter when he brings the food. Waiters can therefore feel impelled to insist on
their dignity: ‘Look at me, respect me, I am your equal.’
It’s a message that is semaphored daily in countless Parisian interactions. One day an American
friend who was staying with us returned to our flat irked. He’d been standing in front of a newspaper
stand, calling out to catch the owner’s attention but, crucially, without using the magic code word
‘Bonjour’. The owner ignored him, and continued rearranging his wares until our friend left without
buying a paper. When we explained that the owner wanted his dignity, our friend asked, sardonically:
‘What does he want more: his dignity or my money?’ That was an easy one to answer.

The codes help make Paris perfect. But they are exhausting to live under. No other Western city
enforces such rigid standards of behaviour. Every moment of their lives, even at family breakfast or in
bed, Parisians must obey the rules. There is no intimate Paris where you can slob out in old underpants.
Big Brother (often in the form of one’s spouse, or even oneself) is always trying to catch you in a faux
pas. Break a rule and you will be punished. Nothing will be said, but points will be subtracted from
your status.
Paris at its worst is a nightmare of sophistication. Watch one of the definitive Parisian films, Le
dîner de cons (‘The Dinner of Fools’, 1998): a Parisian so high-status that he lives in a duplex literally
in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower hosts a regular dinner to which his friends each invite an unknowing
con, ‘a fool’. Afterwards, the friends snigger together about their cons’ looks, ignorance, jackets, etc.
After all, the best way to show that you know the codes is to mock people who don’t.
The con who becomes the hero of the movie is a fat dishevelled provincial who smiles at strangers
and, in the ultimate plouc act, has built a replica of the Eiffel Tower from matchsticks. Parisian life is
like a dîner de cons except that nobody would ever really invite the poor con to dinner.
Add the codebook to cabin fever – Parisians spend their lives in tiny spaces assailed by badly
dressed ploucs – and you see why this can be such an angry city. And as I’d learned from our lawyer
neighbour, showing your anger here is absolutely fine.
When we took a break from the inferno to spend a year in conflict-averse Madrid, where every

potential disagreement is smoothed over with a ‘no pasa nada’ (‘nothing is happening’), we
almost never returned to Paris. (Sun, space and low prices helped too. In fact, now that I think about it,
almost everything was better in Madrid.) If even Scarlett Johansson during her years on the Left Bank
found Parisians ‘terribly rude’, imagine the treatment mere humans get. Hence the universal phrase, ‘I
love Paris. I just hate Parisians.’
Johansson found herself ‘getting really aggressive with people’. Same: although I tried not to take
Paris personally, the longer I stayed here, the older, ruder and more cantankerous I became. I suppose I
was integrating.
 7
Neighbourhood Terrorism

During the World Cup of 2014 my children discovered football. Now they wanted to join a club. But
how to find one in Paris? Luckily, Leila’s best friend from nursery school was a football-mad French-
Senegalese boy. I rang his dad, Abdoulaye, and my kids signed up for the friend’s club.
It turned out to be the most mixed Parisian institution I’d encountered, with children and coaches
whose backgrounds ranged from Arab to Christian to pagan to Jew. On the parents’ WhatsApp group, I
saw I wasn’t the only immigrant who wrote subpar French.
The club had just one (artificial) field, backing onto the Périphérique ring road on the south-eastern
edge of town. On Wednesday afternoons, Abdoulaye and I would stand on the touchline watching
training. He and the coach, Mehdi – who judging by his name was presumably a Muslim, or of Muslim
origin – helped my daughter in her (often literal) battle for acceptance in a boys’ team. I’d tell these
stories to American friends and relatives when they forwarded me chain emails about how Paris had
supposedly been placed under sharia law.

Chérif and Saïd Kouachi had also once dreamed of becoming footballers, but the brothers
ended up choosing another glamour profession: terrorism. When Charlie Hebdo magazine published a
series of scatological caricatures of the Prophet, many French Muslims were upset. On 7 January 2015,
the Kouachis broke into Charlie’s building, on a quiet side street ten minutes’ walk from our apartment.
They eventually found the magazine’s offices, and gunned down twelve people. When they then
hijacked a man’s Renault Clio as their getaway car, he insisted, in a very Parisian gesture, on first
taking his dog out of the back seat. That same day, an accomplice of the Kouachis took hostages in a
kosher supermarket – the start of a two-day siege that would end with the killings of five more people.
As I look back now, these attacks were the first of a long series of shocks to our lives in Paris.
When I read about the massacre that morning, I walked to the magazine’s offices, which had already
been sealed off by police. In the streets around the murder site, the Parisian lunch ritual continued
unperturbed. People were packing out the cafés, or queuing in bakeries for galettes des rois – the cakes
eaten for the Epiphany festival, a Christian tradition adopted by many French Jews and Muslims too.
How do you tell your kids that afternoon football practice is cancelled because a dozen people who
work in the same profession as you have been gunned down around the corner from your apartment?
When I tried to break the news gently to eight-year-old Leila, she burst into tears. That afternoon, she
and her brothers were granted unlimited screen time.
After they went to bed, I walked to the Place de la République, where tens of thousands of Parisians

had gathered around the statue of Marianne, symbol of France, who holds in her hands a tablet
engraved with the declaration of human rights. People had lit candles and were chanting, softly, ‘Nous
sommes Charlie’, and ‘Liberté d’expression’ – only in Paris, an abstract chant against terrorism. Some
people cheered for Charlie, and some just mourned in silence. One of the weird effects of terrorism is
that it builds community: for the first time in thirteen years in the city, I loved Parisians, and I felt like
one.
That Sunday afternoon, my wife, Leila and I went on the ‘March for the Republic’, our first ever
French demo. I didn’t know how to behave: here was a whole new set of Parisian codes to transgress.
Still, there were plenty of other newbies around us. The march was the largest gathering in modern
French history, with over 1.5 million people, so we advanced a step at a time, or just stood in the
human traffic jam. Years later, I spoke to an American Parisian who had also been on the march. Up to
that point he had lived in Paris for decades on his US passport. That afternoon, singing the Marseillaise
over again and again in the endless line of marchers, with his American wife sometimes getting the
crowd going with the opening bars, he finally decided he had to become a French citizen.
It soon became clear that not everybody was feeling more French. The demonstrations for Charlie
were very white. After the massacre, there were reprisal attacks by French racists on mosques, and on
Muslims in the street. After a few days, it finally dawned on me that I needed to send Abdoulaye a text:
‘We’re with you.’
‘I know,’ he wrote back.

When football training resumed the next Wednesday, I stood on the touchline listening to his
laments: ‘These terrorists surf the net for a few hours and think they understand Islam. I spent twelve
years at a madrasah in Senegal, I learned to read the Koran in Arabic. I know the Koran. This isn’t in
it.’ Then we watched kids of all three Abrahamic religions play football as if it were the most
important thing in the world. If I’d told them, ‘You are a living tableau of the multicultural city’, they
wouldn’t have understood. All they were trying to do was win the five-a-side game.

A few months later, on the evening of 13 November 2015, I was sitting in the press stand of the Stade
de France, three miles north of the city, watching the France–Germany football match, when I heard the
first explosion. It was extremely loud and incredibly close, as if it had come from just outside the
stadium. Most of the crowd ignored it, or cheered: football fans enjoy firecrackers and smoke bombs.
But a few minutes later, a second explosion shook the concrete beneath my feet. These weren’t smoke
bombs. I gave up on the game, opened my laptop and began trawling the internet for news.
Finally, after nearly half an hour, the first reports came in: there had been a shooting in this café in
Paris, on that street. It was a gorgeous Friday evening, rare for November, and the terrasses had been
full of young people. There was also some kind of siege unfolding at the Bataclan music hall. Much of
the slaughter was happening within walking distance of our flat, where my children were asleep. I
phoned the babysitter. She said she had double-locked the door.

My wife was having dinner at a friend’s place. We talked on the phone, trying to stay calm, so
that we could make the right decisions. Should we rush home to the children? We came to the
conclusion that if one of us were gunned down in a hail of bullets outside our building that wouldn’t be
a good outcome.
As I struggled to take it all in, I was wrestling with cognitive dissonance: in front of my eyes,
France were winning a football match against the world champions, and the 80,000 spectators were
cheering the French goals. At one point they even did the Mexican wave. I heard later that the security
forces had disabled the phone connection in the stadium, to avoid panic and to make it easier to track
the terrorists. (I was following developments through the press stand’s Wi-Fi.) Not even the TV
commentators were told what was going on, and they continued merrily broadcasting the game.
Practically the only spectator at the ground to be informed was President François Hollande, who
discreetly left his seat and was driven back to Paris.
When the final whistle went, the crowd suddenly seemed to get the news. Hardly anybody left the
stadium. Thousands of spectators climbed down onto the field, where they milled around quietly.
I spent the next few hours in the stadium’s press room writing articles. In these situations, being a
journalist is good, because the adrenaline distracts you from fear. The sequence of events would
gradually become clear. The explosions I’d heard had been attempted suicide attacks – the overture to
the night of terror. The bombers had meant to blow themselves up in the stands, killing thousands of
spectators on prime-time TV, and probably prompting deadly stampedes. That would have drawn

the security forces northward out of Paris towards the stadium, leaving the city undefended once
the café shootings began. But two stewards (both of whom happened to be Muslims) had ruined the
plan. They had body-searched the terrorists (one of whom hadn’t been organised enough to procure a
ticket to the sold-out game) and found the explosive vests. That’s when the terrorists had blown
themselves up outside the ground. The first explosion I’d heard had killed a sixty-three-year-old
Portuguese-French bus driver, Manuel Dias.
At 2.30 a.m., two colleagues and I caught a taxi into a silent city. When we reached my street, it was
packed with police cars and ambulances. By 5 a.m. my adrenaline had dipped enough for me to fall
asleep.
Three hours later I was woken by the kids rushing into my room. The babysitter had told them that
their school sports had been cancelled. I didn’t know what to say to them. They loved Paris, and
considered themselves Parisians. Whenever my wife or I broached the subject of moving somewhere
else, they told us we weren’t allowed to. I mumbled that there had been shootings but that the attacks
were over. I didn’t mention that 130 people had been slaughtered, including ninety around the corner at
the Bataclan, a place we walked past a couple of times a week. The kids took the news apparently
calmly.
Meanwhile, I was thinking: can we keep raising children in Paris? I didn’t think the attacks were a
clash of civilisations. They were a clash of a couple of thousand jihadis with a great city. But it only
takes a small group of people with guns to make a place unliveable. What if Paris became like Beirut in

the 1970s, with an attack every few days? That, after all, was why so many Lebanese had come to
Paris. And the attacks we were living through were just a magnified version of the various Palestinian,
Algerian and Islamist attacks here in the 1980s and 1990s.
Like most Parisians, we spent the day after the Bataclan locked up at home. But the whole point of
living in a cramped apartment in Paris is to use the city. There are almost no back gardens here where
you can have a barbecue or lie in a hammock and shut yourself off from the world. You live in Paris to
go out, to listen to music at the Bataclan, to sit on café terraces or go to France–Germany football
matches. No city has better public spaces. When those spaces become no-go areas, Paris disappears.
Late that afternoon, Leila and I braved a journey to the supermarket across the road. Inside, a
customer was shouting at nobody in particular about a friend who had been murdered. Leila, though,
was calm. ‘We’re sort of used to this now,’ she explained. She was coming to think of neighbourhood
terrorism as part of life. We were all losing our innocence together.
That night, hundreds of people came to hang out around the Bataclan. I witnessed the almost
miraculous spectacle of Parisians falling into conversation with other Parisians they didn’t know. A
group of Orthodox Jewish men in skullcaps was chatting with two bearded Muslims about kosher food
and chapters in the Koran. One Jew joked, ‘We Jews don’t even agree with each other,’ and a Muslim
replied: ‘It’s good that there’s variety.’ Everyone was on their best behaviour, desperate to make their
city work. They understood that Paris had no other choice than multiculturalism.

On the Monday morning I had breakfast with a visiting American friend. When he asked how I
was, I finally burst into tears.
At the kids’ school, some show-offs in the playground were claiming to have heard shots from their
homes. Maybe they had. The French don’t spend much time shielding children from reality, and soon
mine were able to explain to me on the morning walk to school that jihadi suicide bombers thought they
were going to heaven. Leila prepared a class talk on terrorism, drawing her information from the
children’s newspaper Le Petit Quotidien, which was running blanket coverage of the attacks. Looking
back on all this now that our children are teenagers, I don’t think the attacks left them with lasting
traumas.
I joined the industry of people who make money out of terrorist attacks, signing a fat contract to
spend a fortnight commenting for CNN. For the first few days, I trooped back and forth to the network’s
set at République, playing the role of Paris Area Man expressing the neighbourhood’s pain in English.
It was an uncomfortable feeling. Versions of what had happened to Paris happen around the world,
from Turkey to Nigeria. But attacks in poor countries don’t get much international attention, which is
one reason why ISIS had gone to such trouble to hit a name-brand city. President Obama visited our
neighbourhood to lay flowers. For a fortnight or so, Paris led global news bulletins. Even some of the
refugees who were fleeing Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan told journalists they were scared to come here.
It emerged that the attacks had been carried out by a terrorist group centred in Brussels.

Newspapers reported that the surviving group members had – correctly – identified our part of
eastern Paris as heavily Jewish, and were plotting to attack local schools. To ISIS, our neighbourhood
was a ‘zone grise’, where gentiles, Jews and Muslims rubbed along together. The terrorists wanted to
put a stop to that.
Just in case we weren’t worried enough, the remnants of Charlie Hebdo – the most obvious terrorist
target in Paris – moved into an office a few doors down from our school. Every morning the street was
packed with machine-gun-toting soldiers, who alleviated their boredom by eyeing up the mums. I’d
drop the kids off each day, glance at the easily scalable wire fence around the playground, then go and
have my wake-up coffee at home. Nobody dared go to cafés any more.
My wife asked the school if it had CCTV cameras. It didn’t. She offered to pay for some. The
school said, ‘But what about the school around the corner, which doesn’t have cameras? That wouldn’t
be fair.’ Liberté, égalité, fraternité.
I listened to pundits around the world opine about Paris, unhindered by any apparent empathy or
knowledge. Donald Trump explained that the attacks were all the fault of strict French gun laws.
The reality of Paris felt more complicated than the torrents of grand theory being unleashed upon us.
The consensus was that terrorism in France was the outcome of the French failure to integrate their so-
called ‘Muslim community’. I didn’t quite buy this. True, many French Muslims lived in poor housing

estates in grim banlieues. But then London, with its stronger economy and better ethnic
integration, also produced jihadi terrorists. So did the Islamic oil kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Even if
France somehow achieved economic nirvana it would probably continue to produce terrorists. After
all, Norway did.
I listened to both right and left simplify Paris’s ethnic situation. The right depicted a jihadi hellhole,
and the left a multicultural paradise. In fact Paris was both those things, at different times in different
neighbourhoods. It was also a city full of poor alienated people of Muslim origin who wouldn’t dream
of shooting anyone. They just dreamed of better jobs. After the Charlie attacks, I had helped my
newspaper, the Financial Times, put together a package of interviews with ordinary French Muslims
(many of whom weren’t even religious). Of course we asked our interviewees about the attacks. But
what they talked about most was their daily life. They were working or looking for work, raising
families, paying off their mortgages, trying to have fun sometimes. In the evening they’d have dinner
with friends or collapse in front of the TV. ‘Métro, boulot, dodo’ (the French phrase for subway, job,
sleep) didn’t leave much leisure time to think of fighting wars of religion. Their general sentiment:
being a Muslim in France was hard enough as it was, employers wouldn’t look at your CV if it said
‘Mohammed’ or ‘Fatima’, the TV news was always going on about hijabs or halal food, and now those
idiot terrorists had gone and made it harder.
Depictions of a ‘Paris intifada’ that united all Muslims couldn’t survive ten minutes’ contact with
local reality. Just ask Grégory Reibenberg, Jewish father of a girl who had been at my daughter’s

crèche. His Muslim wife, Djamila Houd, was machine-gunned with colleagues on the terrace of
his own café, the Belle Equipe, where I sometimes had lunch on workdays.
I calculated that even in this deadliest of years in Greater Paris, the annual murder rate would end
up lower than in America’s ‘safest big city’, New York. But when I recited my findings to a friend, he
said, ‘Tell that to your brain’. He was right: terrorism is a kind of violent branch of the advertising
industry, which excels at creating unforgettable images. Then we journalists disseminate the images. At
times I felt I had joined ISIS’s public relations wing.
Happily, within about a week, CNN got bored of Paris, and its producers began packing up and
flying home. Now I was being paid for doing nothing. Every time I passed République, there were
fewer TV producers drinking takeaway coffee in the cold.
As foreign media lost interest, the story became that Parisians were ‘resilient heroes’ who had
moved on. More accurately, we were only just starting to process the horror. My doctor, whose office
is around the corner from the Bataclan, told me that on the Monday after the attacks she had expected to
see many patients complaining of stress or depression. It hadn’t happened. But, she added, after the
Charlie attacks it had taken weeks before people cracked. At first, adrenaline and communal support
had sustained them. Even after that, most people tried forgetting rather than therapy.
One day Leila marvelled, ‘I’m only nine and I’ve already lived through two terrorist attacks in my
neighbourhood. I can’t imagine how many you’ve been through at your age.’

‘Two as well,’ I said. In the small Dutch town where I grew up, stuff like this didn’t happen
much.

For months after the attacks, one of my children’s friends had daytime visions of men with machine
guns opening fire on the street. The little neighbourhood post office employed a security guard to search
everybody’s bags. The Bataclan became a pit stop on the tourist route, where people took selfies in
front of the bullet holes in the wall.1 But for most Parisians, most of the time, ordinary life resumed.
Every day there were fewer street stampedes prompted by rumours of shooting. Within weeks I felt
able to sit in a café again, even if I had developed the new Parisian instinct: as you walked through the
door, you’d ask yourself, ‘Where will I hide if guys with guns come in?’
As I fretted about murder, I came to see that it had always been part of life in our neighbourhood. In
the Middle Ages, the Knights Templar roamed and killed passers-by and grew vegetables here. In
1835, on our little stretch of boulevard, a Corsican named Fieschi had tried to assassinate King Louis-
Philippe with ‘an infernal machine’ made up of twenty-five aligned gun barrels. (Louis-Philippe, who
was always surviving assassination attempts, suffered only a grazed forehead. Eighteen people were
killed.) In the hall of my children’s primary school was a list of names of former pupils killed in the
First World War. On the outside wall hangs a black plaque, commemorating the Jewish pupils deported
during Vichy.
Post-war, the 11th arrondissement became quite criminal. Inspector Maigret, Georges Simenon’s
fictional detective, lived on Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, where the Kouachi brothers, fresh from
the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, gunned down the policeman Ahmed Merabet while he begged them for
mercy. Murder was the neighbourhood’s historical norm. We would have to deal with it.
My boys moved on, running a successful campaign to get their gang of school friends to join their
football club. Only their beloved classmate Adama didn’t. When the other children lobbied him, he’d
mumble, ‘I don’t feel like it, I think’. Adama, the son of a West African garbage collector, lived on a
rare island of social housing in our neighbourhood, a cramped flat in a beautiful art nouveau building
behind the school. He was always kicking a ball on the local play street, but his parents didn’t let him
do anything that cost money. My sons and their friends invited Adama to all their birthdays, but he
never came.
None of the other parents had ever met his. I asked another dad I was getting to know, Julien, how
we could get Adama into the football club. Julien made a discovery: Adama’s mother was illiterate.
That was why she never replied to text messages.
In France, kids from poor families can join sports clubs for free. All they have to do is climb the
standard French bureaucratic mountain. Mustapha, my sons’ coach and hero, a giant black man of
Buddha-esque composure, helped Adama assemble the documents. Julien arranged for Adama’s older
brother to take him to the doctor for the medical check-up, and finally the boy joined the club.
Julien also found out that Adama had been told by his parents: ‘You can’t go to your friends’ parties,
because we can’t buy them presents.’ Somehow Julien managed to have a discreet word. At my sons’

next birthday, we all gathered outside our building to go and play indoor football, and when
Adama came sprinting up ten minutes late, the group of bourgeois boys broke into cheers.
Football became my bridge to the banlieues. In my first decade or so in Paris I had hardly ever
strayed beyond the Périph ring road, but after my kids joined the football club, my typical Saturday
morning would go like this: I’d wake up much too early, and walk with Leo and Joey to the bakery just
off République. Julien would be waiting there with his son and Adama. We’d kiss each other’s cheeks,
Julien would distribute a bag of chouquette pastries, and we’d cram into his borrowed car and head to
the banlieues.
Julien grew up in a banlieue, where his mother ran a café, and in chic Paris he secretly felt like an
intruder. Only on these Saturday outings would he wear the folk costume of his native culture: the
tracksuit. (In Parisian slang, this made him a ‘Lacoste TN’.)
In just twenty minutes, Google Maps would take us across the Périph to another world. The divide
between Paris and the banlieues always reminds me of the one between the rich white Johannesburg of
the apartheid era, where my grandparents lived, and Soweto. Only one activity brings together the
suburbs and Paris literally on a level playing field: football. My kids’ Parisian teams visited the
banlieues – usually the poorer eastern ones – because that was where most of the state-subsidised
sports complexes were.
This Saturday morning, we’re headed for the banlieue of Villejuif – literally, ‘Jew City’. The
origins of the name are unclear, but the place may have been founded in medieval times as a ghetto for

Jews. Villejuif today looks as if somebody has plonked a 1970s Soviet town on top of an ancient
French village. We pass fast-food restaurants and decaying apartment blocks, and deposit the kids at the
Stade Karl Marx, opposite the Karl Marx nursery school, on the rue Youri Gagarine, named after the
Soviet cosmonaut. (After the war, communists ruled many banlieues for about as long as they ruled
Poland, before dying out in the Paris region even more thoroughly than their rival faith, Catholicism.)
High in the top twenty of favourite French complaints is the assertion that the country has become a
neoliberal wasteland. But on every weekend journey to the banlieues, I’m struck by how present the
state is here, compared with poor, neglected British neighbourhoods that I’ve visited as a journalist.
The banlieues have health centres and administrative offices, and they probably overinvest in sports
fields: in some suburbs, the local government’s sports budget practically is the youth budget. The result
is a plethora of spartan but well-kept sports complexes like the Karl Marx, with new-generation
artificial grass, certified coaches and warm changing rooms. Or as the writer Sylvain Tesson said:
‘France is a paradise inhabited by people who think they’re in hell.’
While the kids change into their bright-orange kit, some of us dads go off to tank up on caffeine. We
find a café with torn wallpaper where a Chinese family is serving beer and taste-free coffee. The
customers – black, brown and white men – watch the horse racing on a betting channel on the big
screen.
I ask Julien why all the banlieue cafés we visit are bad. He says, ‘Because being good is a waste of

time. My mother’s café was rubbish too. The customers didn’t care. Half of them were alcoholics,
and they aren’t demanding as long as it’s cheap. A café in the banlieues, as long as there’s no other café
near you, is a licence to print money. Why make an effort?’
The banlieues are colder than Paris, because the buildings are less densely packed, but I always try
to have a walk around the suburb before kick-off. Somewhere along the high street there’ll usually be a
billboard that says, ‘We are preparing the metro site’. Sixty-eight stations are being built in the
banlieues as part of Grand Paris Express, Europe’s largest infrastructure project.
Back at the Stade Marx for kick-off, I greet the other mums and dads. I try to give Leo some brilliant
tactical advice before kick-off, but he won’t let me speak English to him in front of his teammates, and
pulls me aside and implores me to whisper. I sometimes tell him, ‘Do you think your friends and their
parents all grew up speaking French at home? You think they’re real Parisians but they’re just as
immigrant as we are.’ Of course, it doesn’t help.
When I explain Leo’s shame to a couple of the other parents, Abdoulaye tells me to keep talking to
my kids in English. He says, ‘I’m ashamed that I haven’t taught my children my own language.’ And a
white mum says, ‘My son won’t let his father come to the games because he’s black and everyone will
see.’

When I close my eyes now and think back to those years when the kids were small, it’s a gorgeous

Saturday morning in late spring, and the two teams on the field are a mix of brown, black and
white. (I’ve never seen a banlieue that’s either monolithically white or non-white.) The opposition
coach is a young woman in tracksuit and hijab.
Signs around the field say ‘Fairplay’. (In French, it’s one word.) Julien and Abdoulaye and I are
standing on the touchline. One kid’s Moroccan mum, a darling (very unlike her ex-husband) brings us
three cups of coffee, and we dads spend the match chatting about football and children. On the
adjoining field, a bunch of fat men are having a kickabout in some non-European language.
We try to keep track of the kids’ score ourselves, because no final result is announced – deliberate
policy by the national federation, which is aiming to cool down children’s football. At the final whistle,
everybody shakes hands, and the kids are given a goûter, or snack. Then Abdoulaye drives us home.
The boys are larking about on the back seat in their Paris Saint-Germain ‘Fly Emirates’ replica shirts.
In the traffic jam on the Périph, Abdoulaye says to me, ‘What I don’t understand about the French’ (he
sees me as a fellow foreigner, and therefore an ally), ‘is that they don’t want to talk about real things.’
‘What do you mean?’ I ask.
‘Everyone is friendly to me. But at work people don’t listen as much to a black man. And nobody
wants to talk about my faith.’
I say that I understand, but that I find it quite touching that a pious Muslim, a secular Jew and a
lapsed Christian can spend an afternoon communing on a touchline without having to talk about real
things. That’s friendship too, I say.

Abdoulaye says he’s worried about his sons. They are starting to understand what it means to
be black: that they are treated differently from white children. He hopes that skin colour won’t impede
them as much in their lives and careers as it has him.
‘Maybe it will be different in their generation,’ I say. ‘Our kids have lived with mixité since their
first day at crèche. Maybe they’ll grow up less racist, maybe they’ll think living with people of
different origins is normal.’
‘Maybe,’ says Abdoulaye politely.
 8
The Refuge

I usually walk past homeless people without a glance, my mind busy with all the daily nonsense. But
after the terrorist attacks of November 2015 I was feeling uncharacteristically humane, and when I saw
a thirty-something Indian-looking man sitting on the pavement near our flat late one night, I went over
and tried to hand him a couple of coins. He looked at me and said, in English: ‘I did not ask you for
money.’ That’s how I got to know Krishna.
Over the course of that winter I heard his story, which I think was mostly true. He had come from the
countryside of Guyana, at the top of South America, or as he told it: ‘First you have the capital. Then
there is the bush. Then there is nothing. Then more nothing. Then even more nothing. [Pause.] Then you
have my village.’ After his parents died in a climbing accident, he had been raised by a shaman, who
was a student of all religions.
Krishna had acquired a wife, Tiquita – ‘not Chiquita, that’s a banana’ – and a teenage son. At some
point Krishna began visiting the capital, Georgetown, and fell in with gangsters. I suspect he got hired
as a drugs mule. Things went wrong and, he said, two friends were killed in front of his eyes. Needing

to get out of town fast, he stowed away on a ship to Marseille. There he struggled to survive, and
when he went to the police, they advised him to jump a train to Paris and beg. That’s how he had ended
up on my street, living with his shopping trolley next to a public toilet.
On the evening of the Bataclan attacks, he said, he had turned a corner and stumbled on men in black
gunning down ‘children’ – his word for the beautiful young people in the cafés. He had hidden under a
car, terrified that a terrorist had spotted him. Since then he had been thinking about the attacks, asking
himself, ‘With what perception must I perceive this?’ He mused, ‘I come from the jungle and, for the
first time, I am in civilisation. But what is civilisation? Civil. Is this civil?’

This was winter 2015–2016, a time when millions of people – overwhelmingly men – were walking
from collapsing countries like Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria into Europe. A few found their way to Paris.
I met a lankily handsome Syrian named Muhammad, who had landed in a dead-end warehouse job in
the banlieues, where he spent most of his days smoking pot. In his leisure time, he had undergone a
kind of Parisian brainwashing. In Syria, he said, he couldn’t have imagined marrying a woman who
wasn’t a virgin. In Paris he had been taken along on feminist marches, had converted to feminism, and
now couldn’t imagine marrying a virgin. He had shacked up with a Sephardi Jewish woman, to the
dismay of her grandfather, who, like many French Jews of his generation, had been expelled in his
youth from his own Arab homeland.

Muhammad was the sort of liberal political dissident that France plucked out of refugee camps.
The French said they did this because they were ‘the country of human rights’, but an ancillary benefit
was that the dissidents tended to be highly educated. One night I had pasta in the Marais with Shahm
Maskoun, an impeccably courteous young Syrian from Aleppo. After some of his friends there were
killed, he had peregrinated through Qatar, Sudan, Dubai and Turkey until a French diplomat in Istanbul
sat him down, listened to his story, and gave him and his brother visas. Shahm arrived in France with
nothing. ‘I felt like a child, having to make my life again,’ he said.
He had started off stacking supermarket shelves in the small town of Besançon, then sold ice creams
on Montpellier beaches. He had learned French from scratch – from TV, YouTube and chatting to
strangers. By the time I met him, he spoke it unaccented. Many people refused to believe he was Syrian.
Along the way he had met only about three French racists, applied to universities, made friends, and
graduated top of his class. He had earned two French master’s degrees, worked as a project engineer in
Paris, voluntarily tutored French students in maths and physics, and become a proud Frenchman. He
pulled out his wallet and showed me his official carte d’identité, headed ‘République Française’.
‘This country – which is my country now – received me when I was broken, when all the world
rejected me.’
He lived outside Paris in Marne-la-Vallée near Euro Disney, with his parents and three siblings,
who had all survived. ‘We were so lucky, thank God. I was tortured, but it’s OK, I have recovered. I

have friends who lost family members. I have a friend who saw his sister raped in front of him.’
Shahm’s youngest brother Amr, who left Syria aged fourteen, had become a bioengineering student and
a YouTube comedian. In his sketches about a Syrian family, he played every family member. Writing
this, years after meeting Shahm, I just googled Amr Maskoun, and saw that he had nearly five million
Instagram followers.
Most of the people arriving in France wanted to work their backsides off in exchange for the sort of
barely passable life that the laziest natives regarded as a birthright. A Frenchwoman in Lille, who
taught French in high school for forty years, told me she’d never encountered such driven students as
her refugee pupils. Another Lillois, Gaston, said he had lodged about a hundred refugees in his house
over the years. He had kicked out one Afghan peasant who couldn’t adapt to Western life and wouldn’t
shake Gaston’s daughter’s hand. All the others had worked out.
Those were the lucky ones. Colonies of migrants lived under the bridge at Stalingrad in northern
Paris. Most had no desire to stay in France, with its impenetrable language and bureaucracy. They were
dreaming of Britain, where they spoke the language. One day in autumn 2015 I took the train from Paris
to ‘The Jungle’, the muddy migrants’ camp in Calais that was the last staging post on the road to
Britain.
Almost everyone in the camp was male. Most of them spent quiet days sleeping, cooking and
washing clothes, and their nights trying to jump onto a truck or train heading for England. You saw
people wading through the Jungle’s mud on crutches after failed attempts. The unlucky ones had been
electrocuted or drowned.

The Jungle was a self-organised place, with neighbourhoods of tents for each of the world’s
most cursed nationalities: principally Eritreans, Syrians, Afghans and Sudanese. Apart from some
attempts by Eritreans and Sudanese to burn down each other’s tents, the different ethnicities rubbed
along reasonably well. They had followed the human instinct and built a city together. All groups met in
what the inhabitants called the ‘Centre’: a little downtown of shops in kiosks, a shack wrapped in black
plastic that served as a school, restaurants, and bars and discos – these run by the Eritreans, who, as
about the only Christians in the camp, handled alcohol. The tallest construction in the Jungle was the
Eritrean church: a white canvas tent, adorned with a skilled painting of a saint, with a Winnie-the-Pooh
welcome mat out front. I listened to a priest preach through a loud microphone, while his compatriots
built a fence around the tent.
Nearby, the Afghans were expanding their mosque, where many of their new arrivals slept. Other
refugees were building kiosks. Most only stayed a few weeks in the Jungle, then bequeathed their
businesses to newcomers.
In the Jungle’s library, children were playing with toys donated by charities. A man from Darfur was
showing two Eritrean children a toy truck. ‘You hide here inside,’ he explained, ‘you cross the border.’
‘Why?’ a kid asked.
‘Why are you here?!’ replied the Darfuri man. ‘To smuggle inside, and get to England.’
‘England!’ exclaimed the boy.
When I told an Afghan restaurateur that British newspapers were saying the refugees wanted to

come in and scrounge off state benefits, he was incredulous: he mimed how he had picked charity-
supplied potatoes off the ground to start his restaurant. Now it supported the families of four staff
members. Imagine, he said, how many people he could employ as a restaurateur in a British city. ‘I
don’t go to England as a tourist,’ he scoffed.
The Jungle’s ‘travel agency’ was a hut where a charity dispensed advice on how to get asylum. Men
stood around it, copying out a handwritten billboard with tips for dealing with the British authorities.
The last line said, ‘Remember: The Home Office Is Not Your Friend.’
It was there that I met a twenty-something Iraqi Kurd, who asked me, in near-perfect American-
accented English, ‘How do you spell, ‘LEGAL’?’ He was writing his own billboard, whose message
was: if we can’t come legally, we’ll come illegally. His mission was to get to his cousin in Bristol.
What did he hope for in Britain? He reflected. ‘Live like a human,’ he said. ‘Pay my taxes. Live without
fear. Study. Maybe I’m going to serve this country.’ Above all, he wanted to send money to his mother
in Mosul.
He took me for tea in an Afghan ‘restaurant’ in a hand-built kiosk. ‘Minus two stars,’ he joked, but
we sat on cushions, the service was impeccable and he could smoke (no tobacco bans in Jungle
restaurants.)
The previous night, he told me, he had snuck into a truck hoping to reach England. But when he had
seen on his GPS that the truck was heading for Germany, he banged on the partition. The driver opened
the back doors to see where the noise was coming from, and asked him, ‘Are you a ghost?’ The Kurd
had walked thirty-five kilometres back to The Jungle. Now he was resting before having another go.

He was jealous of the Syrians. The recent viral photograph of the dead toddler lying on the
beach had eased their passage – a plot by Western media, he explained – whereas westerners had
grown bored of Iraqi suffering. ‘Mosul is the worst place in the world,’ he said. ‘You cannot wear
jeans, you cannot hug your wife, she cannot walk with you. Is this a life? I cannot tell you all my story,
but if you have a girlfriend, and her family kills her, just because she is with me …’ If he went home, he
added, he would be killed as his brother had been.
He said many Iraqis believed that the destruction of their country was a cunning American plot.
Maybe it was, he shrugged, but even then he couldn’t blame America because Iraqis had made the plot
work. ‘Sunni and Shiite people are trying to kill each other because they have a different way to pray.
This is the stupidest thing I’ve heard in my life.’
In Iraq he had studied engineering. On Canada’s online ‘Immigration Points Test’ he’d scored 86 per
cent, he said, easily enough for a visa. His lawyer told him he would have one the next day. But that
very day, a mentally ill convert to Islam had attacked the Canadian parliament. Suddenly Canada
stopped giving visas to Iraqis.
So he had come to Europe. On the walk from Turkey to Bulgaria, a diabetic friend had died. They
had been too tired to move his body. ‘We told the Bulgarian police. He said, “This is not my fucking
problem.”’ The policeman had locked him up for twenty days and taken his phone and money.
 I asked the Kurd if he had encountered any kindness in Europe. He thought hard, blowing out smoke.

‘No,’ he said. ‘In Germany I was asking people in English, “What time is the train?” They wasn’t
helping me. “Humanity” is just a name.’ Look around The Jungle, he said: Europeans couldn’t even get
the refugees a single clean toilet. It was true: the row of Portaloos was so filthy that I would have
become constipated rather than use them.
Every few minutes he’d warble ‘Sweet dreams are made of this’, the refrain of the Eurythmics song.
Perhaps it consoled him. He asked if I’d read Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. ‘He is talking about the
situation I have. Life is really bullshit. Walk a thousand miles to Europe, and there is nothing to do in
Europe. I don’t think the UK government is going to be so stupid as to open the border, because they
don’t want more refugees.’ He mused about suicide. In the Jungle, he said, ‘you cannot talk to anybody,
because everybody has got his shit, no one is listening’.
He understood why Europeans were afraid of letting in layabouts and murderers. He’d been jailed
in Bulgaria with a sniper for the Syrian army. ‘Maybe two persons in one hundred inside the refugees
are dangerous,’ he said. But everyone else was fleeing murder and religious fanatics. All he wanted
was legal asylum. He suspected he could get it by posing as a Yazidi, a member of the tiny group of
Kurdish-speakers with their own monotheistic religion who were being exterminated and used as sex
slaves by ISIS. He could mimic their dialect, he said. ‘But I won’t because I would maybe be taking the
place of one Yazidi guy who deserves this.’ In Iraq he had once seen two Yazidi parents cradling their
dead son. ‘But,’ he added bitterly, ‘there was no picture.’

I pleaded with him not to risk death jumping on a train to Britain. I urged him to go to Germany.
Its border with France was open at that point, while a million refugees poured into the country. He
hadn’t heard about that: he was a bright guy lost in a continent about which he knew nothing, as helpless
as I would have been in Iraq. I offered to meet him in Germany and help with the administration. He
said he’d think about it. Then he fought me to pay for the tea.

Of all the wretched of the earth, the one I got to know best was Krishna on my street. The bizarre thing
about him, the fact that I struggled to reconcile with his status, was that he was an intellectual. Every
night, exhausted after putting the kids to bed, I’d bring him our leftover dinner (additionally spiced at
his request), and he’d try to engage me in debates about Aztecan religion or Hanukkah or mathematics. I
soon realised he didn’t need our food. Krishna was born charismatic, and I’d often see neighbours
bringing him exquisite Parisian meals, or books. He soon had more friends in Paris than I did. One day,
he told me that two policemen had come over to bully him, and a local Jewish shopkeeper had sprinted
across the boulevard to leap to his defence. My wife, initially Krishna-sceptic after I had given him our
handmade baby blankets without asking her, ended up bringing him his morning coffee every day. Once
or twice I gave him money, but one evening he pushed €20 into my hand and made me keep it.
I learned from Krishna that living rough was harder than any job. His dream was a hot shower. But
how to get one? Homeless people have to guard their belongings day and night. Even when he just

wanted to nip to the public toilet opposite his perch, he had to find someone to watch his stuff. So
one day I walked him to a public swimming pool, and sat with his trolley while he washed. He came
out declaring himself ‘reborn’. Then we got coffee together, and pretty soon the whole café was
crowding round, talking to him in Parisian English, offering him advice.
He hated it when Parisians passed him on the street without a glance. Were they civil? It also
bothered him that they assumed, because he was homeless, that he was stupid. Krishna was an
intellectual snob. When other homeless people came over for a chat, he’d treat them with courtesy, but
privately he pitied them as drunks or drug addicts. That’s why he wouldn’t sleep in shared shelters
even in midwinter. He was about my height, and we dressed him head to toe in my old clothes, but on
the coldest nights, I’d lie in my warm bed worrying about him freezing outside. He’d sit awake all
night, because it was too cold to sleep, then fall asleep at daybreak. Life expectancy for homeless
people in France is estimated at forty-nine.
Still, I never once suggested he kip on my sofa. As a friend of mine pointed out: ‘Why would he
ever leave?’ And Krishna once told me that in Guyana he had killed a man who had raped an eight-
year-old girl. My children stopped to chat with him when they passed his spot, but I didn’t exactly want
to invite him into the family.
His life and mine couldn’t have been more different. One morning I walked past with my rolling
suitcase, and told him I was off to catch a train to London. That blew his mind. First, he thought I must

be making a mistake: ‘But there is water between!’ I told him that the train went under the water.
When he stopped guffawing, he exclaimed, ‘That is amazing! Well, it is all in Archimedes, but it is
amazing that they built it.’
It’s hard to help another person. Over the months that I knew Krishna, I watched him decline. Some
days he stank of alcohol, after partying with homeless friends or a local alcoholic couple who had
become his friends. I told him that if he became a drunk, he would never get out of this situation. He
knew, but he explained that life on the street was unbearable without drink or drugs. He was sinking
into addiction like the people he used to pity.
He eventually decided that he had to leave Paris, or go under. The problem was that he didn’t have
a passport. He’d never had one. He disdained them. He came, he said, ‘from the aurora borealis. The
stars. They don’t even understand the maritime law, the civil law, the common law.’
He couldn’t get a passport in Paris because Guyana didn’t have an embassy there. He acted out a
scene of him somehow getting to the embassy in London, and when challenged to prove his origins,
asking the diplomat in Guyanese patois: ‘You tink I’m not G’anese, bai?’
Finally, he decided to go to Amsterdam, to look for his Dutch friend Richard (surname forgotten).
He planned to stay there until the Georgetown gangsters had forgotten him, then stow away on a ship
home from Rotterdam. I bought his train ticket to Amsterdam. At the Gare du Nord, he ceremonially
shook hands with me and his alcoholic Romanian friend, presented me with two books from his

travelling library (I still have the battered memoir of a female Mossad agent), and boarded the
train. Since he had never owned a phone, I didn’t think I would ever hear from him again. I hope he’s
back with Tiquita.
 9
Paris for Jews

During the time of terrorism in Paris, one thing gave me additional pause: being Jewish. The plaques
for deported children on the local school walls weren’t simply history. The city still wasn’t safe for
Jews.
My arrival in Paris in early 2002 had coincided with a wave of anti-Semitic attacks. The immediate
prompts seem to have been a resurgence of Israeli–Palestinian violence, which was screened nightly on
French TV, plus the Western–Arab tensions that followed 9/11. In my first weeks in France, in Greater
Paris alone, a Jewish crèche was desecrated and smeared with anti-Semitic graffiti; Jewish graves
were damaged; a Jewish school bus was burned to a crisp; Jews wearing yarmulkes were attacked on
the street; young Jews from a Maccabi sports team were beaten with baseball bats in the suburb of
Bondy; a girl at high school in the suburb of Trappes was insulted and hit by other girls ‘because she
was Jewish’; a rabbi was insulted and sprayed in his face with tear gas, and so on. Most of the
perpetrators were young men of North African origin.1
Jews and Muslims had long lived together in Parisian suburbs, but it was an uneasy peace.

Members of both groups still nursed bitter memories from Algeria, where the colonial caste
system had placed Jews one rung above Arabs; both were below French gentiles. Then, after Algeria
gained independence in 1962, Jews had to flee the homes where their families had lived for
generations. Forty years later, when the stored-up bitterness resurfaced in France, many Jews fled again
– this time to new Jewish havens like the 17th arrondissement, or to Israel. Soon, there were almost
none left in heavily Arab suburbs like Trappes.
In the early 2000s, these attacks – at the time, none of them fatal – mostly passed me by. I was a
secular Jew, didn’t feel a member of any ‘community’, still thought I was only passing through France,
and barely followed French news.
The subject only really came up on our visits to friends and my wife’s family in the US. One day
soon after Leila was born, an American relative asked me how we liked living in Paris. I bored on for
a while about how it was a good place to raise children. He leaned forward, put on a meaningful voice,
and asked, ‘But is it a good place to raise Jewish children?’
He must have absorbed his anxiety from hyperbolic American media. ‘This new anti-Semitism is a
witches’ brew of Muslim rage and classic European hatred fed by a new anti-Israel anti-Semitism’,
wrote the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in 2004. ‘In Europe it is not very safe to be a
Jew’, added Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post. His colleague George Will explained that
resurgent anti-Semitism among Europeans and Arabs had ‘become the second – and final? – phase of
the struggle for a “final solution to the Jewish question”’.

I often found myself trying to explain to Americans that France had changed a bit since
Vichy. One day in Atlanta in 2004, I told a friend about the Jewish old-age canteen on the street where
we were then living, in the 11th arrondissement, and how on summer evenings you’d see elderly Jews
sitting on the stoop, amiably ignored by passing Chinese, Arabs, gentiles, etc.
So it was a bit of a shock, a couple of weeks later, when my wife and I came out of our flat one
Sunday morning to see that someone had burned down the Jewish canteen. On the pavement, an array of
TV cameras was filming a fridge with swastikas drawn on it. As we say in my industry: ‘Jews are
news.’
My wife burst into tears. An old man in a yarmulke told her, ‘Don’t cry. We are Jews, we are
strong.’ Still, he added, it might be best to emigrate. In the throng on the street we met an old lady who
lived in the flat her grandparents had moved into when they arrived in the 1920s with other Jewish
refugees from the collapsing Ottoman Empire. The canteen had once been their synagogue, flanked by
cafés called L’Istanbul, Le Bosphore and L’Athènes. She pointed out a man who had had his bar
mitzvah in the then synagogue in 1943, during the Occupation, when there were only women in the
congregation.
Another neighbour joined the conversation. He taught in a lycée where the pupils were always
telling him that 9/11 was a Mossad plot. I said, ‘I know most French people aren’t anti-Semitic, but this
arson is a disgrace to France.’ He sighed: ‘It’s true. I feel ashamed to be French.’ He gestured at the
cameras. ‘This is a production. The vandals set the fire knowing that the press will show up. Then the

police wheel out the fridge with the swastikas, for everyone to photograph.’
And, he might have added, the locals turn up to watch the show. Neighbours stood chatting in the
sun, tut-tutting but also debating which was the best local bakery. Not the one on the corner, someone
said, even though there was a queue outside it. After a while, my wife and I decided we might as well
go and get brunch.
The next day, the fridge was splashed across newspapers around the world. They reported that the
canteen’s burned-out walls had been covered with semi-literate anti-Semitic graffiti. The culprits had
spelled Hitler ‘Itler’, and had drawn the swastikas back to front. There you are, an attention-seeking
teenage copycat with a spelling problem, and by torching an empty building at 3 a.m. you become
world news.
France’s prime minister and the mayor of Paris visited the street and said their pieces about anti-
Semitism being bad. The prime minister threatened the culprits with twenty years in jail. As usual,
however, the police had no idea who the culprits were. Since they had scrawled both ‘Vive l’islames’
and ‘La France aux francais’, it was unclear whether they were Islamists or white neo-Nazis. An
unknown group calling itself Ansar al-Jihad al-Islamiya had claimed responsibility on the internet, but
this could have been a thirteen-year-old on a PC in his bedroom.
The ‘production’, as our neighbour had called it, ran for days. Our street hosted a small protest
against anti-Semitism, during which a woman poked her head out of her doorway to shout: ‘They

burned it down for the insurance!’ (To be fair, that had been known to happen on this street.) A
local rabbi addressed the gathering, only to say he had no more words: he was tired of expressing
indignation. The morning after the protest, Israel’s foreign minister dropped by the canteen, then went
off to tell French politicians that it was their criticisms of the Israeli government that incited these
arsons.
A week or so later, the police arrested a suspect: a Jewish man in his fifties with learning
difficulties who had worked in the canteen as an unpaid handyman. There had been an internal quarrel.
It seemed that on the Saturday night he had let himself in with his key, written the graffiti and set the
fire. Among the many clues were the misspellings (the simplest Muslim ought to have been able to spell
‘islam’) and the absence of any break-in.
 But genuine anti-Semitic attacks continued in France, and the 11th arrondissement – where I spent
my days in my work-flat – remained the epicentre.2 One day in January 2006, in a mobile-phone store
on the Boulevard Voltaire around the corner from my office, a twenty-two-year-old Jewish sales clerk
named Ilan Halimi was chatted up by a pretty seventeen-year-old girl. They arranged to go on a date. It
turned out to be a honey-trap. Halimi was kidnapped by a gang of youths led by a charismatic called
Youssouf Fofana. They held Halimi wrapped in tape for three weeks, and tortured him while they
waited for his family to pay a ransom of €450,000. The gang assumed that any Jewish family would
have that kind of money.
After twenty-four days, when it turned out the family didn’t, Halimi was released. He was found
walking along the tracks of a train line in the southern banlieues, naked, handcuffed, exhausted, and

with stab wounds and burns across two-thirds of his body. He died hours later.
In 2017, also in the 11th arrondissement, a drug addict named Kobili Traoré climbed a balcony and
found himself in the apartment of sixty-five-year-old Sarah Halimi (no relation to Ilan). Traoré knew
her; they were neighbours. When he spotted the mezuzah in her door frame, he realised she was a Jew,
and immediately connected her with the devil. He cried ‘Allahu akbar’, recited Koranic verses, beat
her, and threw her out of the window to her death. Then he resumed his prayers. A court ruled that he
didn’t have to stand trial for murder, because constant cannabis use had ‘abolished’ his ‘discernment’.
Around this time, the anti-Semitic ‘comedian’ Dieudonné was finally expelled from the theatre in the
11th where he had performed for nearly two decades.
In 2018, again in the 11th, Mireille Knoll, an eighty-five-year-old who had survived the round-up of
Parisian Jews in the ‘Vél’ d’Hiv’ in 1942, was stabbed eleven times by a young neighbour, Yacine
Mihoub. Knoll had looked after him since he was a child; they had spent the day of her murder drinking
port together. He called her ‘the grandmother I never had’. But he was fresh out of jail, and upset by the
supposed wealth of Jews.
As I read more about French anti-Semitism, I got a sense of how to place these attacks. Twenty-
first-century France really wasn’t Vichy. Anti-Semitism was never going to go to zero anywhere, but
surveys showed that it had waned to the lowest levels ever measured in the country. The French state
opposed anti-Semitism, though it was sometimes lax in fighting it. Even the far-right Front National had

moved on from Holocaust denial to bashing Muslims, who had replaced Jews as the designated
national scapegoat. The danger to Jews now came from just about the most marginalised group in
France: a subset of young Muslim men, many of them petty criminals.
I didn’t live in fear as a Jew, but then I benefited from invisibility. I’m not religious, don’t wear a
kippah, and don’t have an unmistakably Jewish name. On the rare occasions when my family went near
a synagogue, the layers of security jolted me into realising what visible Parisian Jews went through
every day.
Other ethnic groups had their own fears. Young black and Arab-origin men were afraid of the
police, who stopped them for identity checks six or seven times more often than white people. One of
several French George Floyds was Adama Traoré, who died in unexplained circumstances in a police
station north of Paris in 2016. But other people’s fears didn’t make life easier for Jews. The exodus
from the Parisian banlieues continued.
All this was the backdrop to my twin sons’ bar mitzvah. We celebrated it at a little synagogue in the
11th, which, unusually, brought together Sephardic Jews (whose roots were in Arabic countries) with
Ashkenazim (of eastern European origin). One of the regulars was an old man who came for every
service except high holidays, when he preferred a local Sephardic synagogue because the tunes took
him back to his Moroccan childhood.
 My sons’ guests were all non-Jews. Lined up in the back row wearing their kippahs, they sat
patiently through the Hebrew, rooting for their two mates in the prayer shawls. Julien sat through it even

though he has no time for any religion. Our French-Senegalese friend Abdoulaye and his family
watched from home on video, Abdoulaye studying the similarities between Jewish and Muslim prayers.
Late in the ceremony, three Catholic mothers from my sons’ friendship circle slipped out unprompted to
the reception room, where they prepared thirty plates of hummus and salmon. Perhaps they just wanted
to escape the tedium, but I was moved. Afterwards we got sweet WhatsApps from members of all three
Abrahamic religions.
The anti-Semitic attacks were real (or most of them, anyway), and so, sometimes, was the Parisian
multicultural paradise.
 10
The Day of the Three Cafés

Over many freezing hours of taking our kids to football matches together, Julien and I got talking –
about fatherhood and his faltering attempts to start a business, and about where we each came from.
Within a few years, I could report to one of our neighbourhood Canadians that I had made a French
friend. The Canadian, the bilingual son of a French mother, was impressed. ‘Most Anglos here have
zero,’ he said. Even he wasn’t sure he had any. He thought the French sense of humour might just be too
different.
Julien was the unofficial mayor of our neighbourhood. He’s a smiling, handsome, hairy, chatty guy
who seemed to know everyone he passed on the street. In his swarthy features you can see his Greek
father, an orphan who was raised by the Red Cross and ended up in Paris. Julien was a fixture at
Charlot, our beautiful neighbourhood café. But he was also one of the countless Parisian charlatans: a
banlieusard, a suburbanite, who was spending his life painstakingly absorbing the city’s codes. He had
noticed that, in the Marais, even the jokes are different. Humour was about power, he told me: who are
you allowed to make fun of? Who laughs at whose jokes?

He estimated that it had taken him twenty years to travel the twenty miles from his banlieue
to Paris. He offered to take me on the return trip, back to his suburban origins. The journey would be
longer, in spirit, than the Eurostar to London. One 14 July, Bastille Day, he rented a car – the only way
to visit his banlieue – and we set off on the tour of the three cafés that had marked his life.

The French authorities have been pushing the poor out of Paris for centuries. The French word for
suburb, ‘banlieue’, is revealing: a ‘lieu’ (place) of ‘ban’ (banishment). Even the nineteenth-century
workers who constructed Haussmann’s Paris had to commute in from the wastelands outside town. The
baron saw no place for them in his city. ‘The metropole of the civilised world,’ he wrote to his boss,
Napoleon III, ‘has no need to contain factories and workshops.’1
But until the twentieth century, the suburbs remained an afterthought, overshadowed by the much
larger capital city proper. Only by the time Hitler invaded in 1940 had the suburbs more or less caught
up with Paris’s population: nearly three million inhabitants, about the same as the city.
After the war, the banlieues took off. The French had largely skipped the industrial revolution,
staying on their farms long after other Europeans. Even in 1944 about half of them were still villagers,
whose lives would have been recognisable to their ancestors of a millennium before. From the 1950s,
in a great whoosh, they left the farm. At the same time, immigrant workers arrived in the Paris region –

North Africans, French Caribbeans, southern Europeans, and later sub-Saharan Africans. The
workers’ families followed. Each ethnicity tended to club together, in its own neighbourhood, square or
apartment building.
Timeless French villages in the endless plain outside Paris were transformed into concrete suburbs.
The new places seemed built without rules, on the anything-goes principle of American exurbs, with
oodles of wasted space, the opposite of Paris’s over-planned Haussmannian aesthetic.2 There was no
point prettifying the banlieues when the people who ran France would never have to see them. Some
shantytowns, or bidonvilles, arose of the type you might see today on the outskirts of Lagos or Dhaka.
Eventually they were torn down.
When the first tower blocks sprang up in the 1960s and 1970s, write Raphaëlle Bacqué and Ariane
Chemin in La communauté, the warm new flats with indoor toilets and infinite parking seemed like
miracles of modernity.3 The first inhabitants, who had moved from Parisian slums sticky with centuries
of odours, were startled: the new buildings had no smell. On the downside, the newcomers had to
navigate family life with hardly any private space. Four kids to a bedroom wasn’t unusual. Many
parents dreamed of returning to the ancestral village in Algeria or Portugal once they’d earned enough
money. Few ever did.
One cut above them were lower-middle-class suburbanites who bought pavillons, little modern
houses with gardens. A cut above the pavillon-dwellers were doctors, notaries and business owners,
who lived in houses made of stone. Poor suburbs were segregated from neighbouring rich ones, just as
almost all of them were segregated from Paris. If the mayor of one commune was feuding with the

mayor of the next one, he might create one-way streets around the boundaries of his territory to
stop the neighbours driving in.
Into the twenty-first century, many new banlieues had no particular identity. ‘No man’s land’, noted
the Normandy-born writer Annie Ernaux, who migrated in the 1970s to the Parisian satellite town of
Cergy-Pontoise. ‘I’ve been living in the New Town for twelve years and I don’t know what it
resembles. I can’t describe it either, not knowing where it starts or ends, since I always cross it by
car.’4 The plain outside Paris had no natural barriers, such as mountains or big rivers, so the suburbs
just kept on sprawling. The most distant banlieues didn’t feel attached to Paris at all. They were more
like villages, or country towns, where people complained about the lack of bus services but also
cherished their space and greenery.
The virgin lands outside Paris had no history or landmarks, or sometimes even churches or
cemeteries. Nobody had written novels or made films about them. Most inhabitants had come from
somewhere else, and they struggled to get to know each other. Asked where they lived, they would
often reply, ‘near Paris’. Even the social codes of these places had to be established afresh. When you
passed somebody on a banlieue street, did you greet them, like in a village, or not, like in Paris?
In most banlieues, the car became king. It was practically the only way to get around the suburban
sprawl, but more than that: during France’s trente glorieuses, the three decades of post-war economic
growth, the automobile became the emblem of prosperity. Washing it in front of one’s house became a

suburban ritual. Christiane Rochefort’s stunning 1960 novella of banlieue life, Les petits
enfants du siècle, devotes six pages to a bunch of dads on a family holiday (itself a product of the
trente glorieuses) sitting around exchanging car talk. The equivalent emblem for teenagers was the
motorbike. Rochefort writes: ‘Even a girl on one felt like a man, so what must a man feel – even a
dishcloth must imagine that he “had it”, that explained a lot.’5

It’s Bastille Day, France’s national day to commemorate the revolution of 1789, but as Julien and I
drive out of Paris we hardly see a tricolore flag hanging from a window. Nowadays, 14 July is just a
day off work, and, for the young, an evening at the traditional firemen’s ball, where in the time before
dating apps, some unfathomable proportion of French people met their future spouses. From Bastille
Day, Paris begins to empty for the long summer holidays.
 We drive half an hour south-west on motorways before reaching the exit for Les Ulis. Julien lived in
this banlieue from age eleven to twenty, when his mother ran a local café after his parents divorced.
Les Ulis was a brand-new town then. It sits in the département of Essonne, a formerly rural area whose
population grew 126 per cent from 1962 to 1990 – faster than anywhere else in France.
Turning off the motorway, Julien remembers a long-ago night on this same bend: he and a teenaged
mate had persuaded three girls to come with them to a nightclub in Paris. When Julien’s cousin decided
to tag along too, there was no space in the car with the girls, so Julien had to get in the car behind them.

That saved him when his mate in the front car, showing off to the girls, took the bend too fast.
Julien watched as his friend staggered out of the wrecked car, followed by one girl, then another. The
third girl didn’t get out. She had flown out of the window into the bushes, alive, but with everything
broken.
We drive past little pavillons, all built at the same time, probably by the same developer. When you
visited the neighbours, Julien remembers, you always knew where the toilet was because each house
was identical. Only their names are grand: ‘Résidence de l’Ermitage’, says one. We pass a clutch of
middle-class homes, built in stone, with little cars parked in front. It’s a mini-version of the motorised
American suburban dream. Even today, Les Ulis doesn’t have a station. If you want a train, you have to
take the bus to Orsay, the wealthy suburb down the road.
There are still a few farmers’ fields – a glimpse of what this place must have been like fifty years
ago. Across the road from them, the Windsor shopping mall, with its giant car park, looks as though it’s
been transplanted here from Atlanta. Malls are the centres of banlieue social life. When Julien was
twelve, the height of happiness was going with friends to a movie and then to ‘McDo’s’. (McDonald’s
is the biggest restaurant chain in France, though not in Paris.) There’s a sense of power in consuming
something you can afford, he explains.
We pull up in front of his mum’s old café. Julien’s uncle finally sold it after it had been repeatedly
robbed and had achieved the rare feat for a banlieue café of losing money. This morning, the café is
obscured by a four-by-four parked on the pavement outside. The car’s owner is showing off his prized

possession to the other customers, decodes Julien. ‘In the banlieues,’ he explains, ‘you say who
you are through your car.’ Your vehicle is your second home, sometimes literally: if all else goes
wrong, you know you can always live in it. It’s the opposite of bobo Paris, where the chic thing is not
to own a car.
Julien points up to his adolescent bedroom on the second floor. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘c’est l’horreur
absolu.’ We walk into the café – about twenty men, many of North African origin, one woman – and get
our coffees standing at the counter. Customers have dropped their torn sugar packets on the floor by
their feet, like in a Parisian café of twenty years before. An elderly black man, a look of intense
concentration on his face, is filling in his betting slips. I count seven betting screens in the room. Julien,
who used to serve behind the bar here, reverts instantly to type: he jokes with the customers, fondles
somebody’s dog. He shows me the jerry-built glassed terrace, installed during his uncle’s reign.
It’s noon, and the customer standing beside us orders a Ricard pastis. The young barman pours it
from a bottle automatically set to dispense a single shot. Behind the bar are long rows of cigarette
packets. The mood is tranquil. Julien reminisces about the bagarres (‘fights’) here in his childhood.
One customer tried to fight him when he was twelve years old. In the banlieues at the time, there were
skinhead attacks on people of colour, gang wars over drugs, and frequent café break-ins. One day, when
two guys tried to rob Julien’s sister’s café in another suburb, she pulled a plastic gun from behind the
counter and fired a plastic bullet. It hit one of the robbers, so they ran away and robbed a nearby tabac
instead.
 We fall into conversation with the barman. He says he’s pleased that his parents bought the
café from Julien’s uncle. Now the place is clean, and well-kept. The banlieues generally have become
safer. The murder rate in the Paris region dropped by around three-quarters between 1994 and 2022, to
1.2 homicides per 100,000 people. That’s about the same rate as London’s. New York City’s rate in
2022 was 5.2.
After a while, Julien whispers to me in relief: ‘I don’t feel depressed.’ We even take a selfie at the
bar. When we pay for our coffee and lemonade, I leave a 50-cent tip on the counter. Julien is
embarrassed: it’s too much, I’m flashing my cash.
Back in the car, he tells me it’s a tragedy whenever you see the son or daughter of a café owner start
working in the bar. That youngster will probably never get out, he says. You stand there, snacking and
drinking while you serve customers, and you grow a ‘belly of sugar’. Perhaps you become an
alcoholic. The café is a cash machine, so you stop thinking.
Julien’s mother, a chain-smoker, eventually made enough from the café to buy a flat in a nicer
banlieue nearby. The Friday after she’d been given the keys to the new place, she went out with her
friends, then spent one last night in her bed in Les Ulis. She never woke up. ‘Banlieusards are
programmed for une mort violente,’ says Julien. He’s using ‘violent’ in the French sense, to mean
shocking, hard, painful.
After the mother’s death, Julien’s uncle ran the café. He had studied in Paris, then run a restaurant in
the chicest bit of the city, the Ile Saint-Louis. He had Marx and Lenin on his bookshelves. But he had let

himself go to pot, and finished in the banlieue. Julien recently visited him in the dirty suburban
flat where he lay dying, in debt, all the money from the café sale gone.
We drive out of Les Ulis. Ask French people for their ‘certaine idée de la France’, and most will
still say it’s the stone village with the church steeple. But today that village is dying out: the only
inhabitants are pensioners and German second-homers, the village doctor has retired, and maybe even
the bakery has closed. If there’s a ‘real France’ today, it’s a banlieue pavillonaire like Les Ulis. Paris
inside the Périph has 2.15 million inhabitants. Its suburbs have nearly five times as many. Even
excluding Paris itself, they are the largest metropolitan area in the European Union, and the fastest
growing bit of France.
You can find evidence for every social theory you like in the banlieues, and in some places there’s
growing ethnic segregation. After the communists who governed many poorer suburbs melted away in
the 1990s, some were replaced by fundamentalist Muslim groups. These organised to stop girls from
going to gym class, and barred women from using public pools at the same time as men.6 But even the
bearded suburban Salafist in sandals and djellaba, who looks like he’s straight out of an Algerian
village, has probably spent his whole life in his Parisian banlieue.
In most banlieues, people of different backgrounds get to know each other – at school, at work, in
the café or the tower block. Many end up drinking together, sharing the babysitting, intermarrying,
converting to each others’ faiths, or creating a new religious potpourri. Olivier Roy, the scholar of
Islam who lives in the poor suburb of Dreux, has identified a new kind of French Muslim wedding: it

takes place in the mosque, but with the couple hand in hand, and the bride dressed in white and
holding flowers, like in a French church.
Over time each suburb acquires a history, an identity. More and more, the inhabitants feel that the
banlieue where they live is their home town, the place where one day they will be buried. Many
banlieusards today, if asked where they are from, name either their banlieue, or the administrative
number of their département: ‘I’m from the 93.’
On the motorway back to Paris the cars flash past. Julien tut-tuts: banlieusards drive much faster
than Parisians. After all, they are accustomed to the open road. Some of them – especially people of
colour afraid of police harassment – literally never visit Paris. Those who do make the journey tend to
stick to the bits of town where they are accepted: McDo, the cinemas of the Champs-Elysées, or the
downmarket shopping centre at Les Halles where the suburban trains arrive. They think that’s Paris.
They never go into an actual neighbourhood. Julien says, ‘Lots of banlieusards reject Paris, from a
sense of inferiority.’
He himself only got to know the city as an adolescent, after his parents’ divorce, when he was
failing at school and moved into his schoolteacher father’s terrible apartment in what was then the run-
down Marais. His dad had studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, played instruments and spoke five
languages, but he ended up an alcoholic ranting against the bourgeoisie. When Julien was an ado, each
time he turned the key in the front door, he’d cock his ear to gauge the level of drunkenness. He never
felt that his father’s talents were his inheritance. ‘I inherited shame from my dad. And I still feel
shame.’

At least he had a connection with Paris. Living with his dad, he was suddenly at school with
kids whose families had been Parisian for generations. They went on skiing holidays and assumed they
would go to university. For the first time, he understood that he came from the wrong side of the Périph.
He says it was like leaving Plato’s cave and seeing the light. He realised how limited his horizons had
been in the banlieue. He hadn’t even been able to imagine a better life.
Shuttling between his mother and father, Julien lived in two worlds. He started a degree in
philosophy, but at university he felt like an imposter pretending to be a Parisian. He was ashamed of
living above a café full of violent alcoholics. But when he brought Parisian friends back to Les Ulis,
they thought it was cool. At night, after closing time, they’d take over the empty café, fetching drinks
behind the bar and raiding the kitchen for ham sandwiches. At 6 a.m. he’d reopen the café, then drive to
Paris to attend a lecture on Heidegger. He’d sit in the auditorium dreaming that his professor would
adopt him as his intellectual foster child. Eventually he dropped out. His father died in much the same
way as his mother: just after paying the final instalment of his mortgage on the terrible apartment.
We reach Boulogne, the suburb that borders Paris. ‘Here it’s OK, you are saved,’ says Julien. ‘It’s
not Paris but there is a metro.’ We purr past the ‘Paris’ signpost, along the banks of the Seine, which are
lined with €3 million flats. ‘Every time I passed here, for years, it was an intense joy,’ says Julien.
Then we cross the river south, heading for our second café of the day, in the 15th arrondissement.

When Julien lived in the 15th at the turn of the century, the area was still lower middle class.
Its epicentre is ugly Montparnasse station, where the trains from Brittany arrive. In those days there
was still a neighbourhood diaspora of freshly arrived Bretons, who had found their first room in the
adjoining streets. One pretty Bretonne, the daughter of a successful small-town businessman, became
Julien’s wife. He had married into the stability of the French bourgeoisie.
It’s Bastille Day, so we can park practically beside the café where he met her. Julien greets the
proprietor like a fellow guild member. He still feels most at ease with café staff.
It’s already 2.30 p.m., but he hadn’t wanted to have lunch in Les Ulis, so we’ve waited for Paris
where we can eat well. This is a Basque place, with a horseshoe-shaped bar, flattering lighting,
inviting wine bottles behind the counter, and 1930s advertisements on the walls. It still hasn’t
particularly gentrified, it’s on a big boulevard in the 15th, and there’s a TV on showing the tennis. Still,
a family apartment around here now costs over €1 million.
Over Basque sausages, we regain the familiar Parisian sense of well-being from a stomach full of
good food. Julien is talking about our fellow neighbourhood football dad Tomás, who grew up in an
eastern banlieue, the son of working-class Portuguese parents. He and Julien are making the same
journey from charlatan to Parisian.
According to Tomás’s family legend, his grandparents and father walked into France barefoot.
Tomás had a happy childhood in the banlieue. He went to university, where the middle-class students

scared him, but he met an intello girl from the Marais, and moved into the neighbourhood just as
it was gentrifying. Julien tells me he has been teaching Tomás to spend money, to go to a good
restaurant, to take his wife for a weekend in a hotel, though they still don’t dare go to a chic one.
Sometimes Tomás will even splash €15 on a bottle of wine. He has retained the virility of the
banlieues, says Julien, but has learned to wear it ironically. Now he’ll sometimes joke about his
homoerotic tension with Julien.
One night at our flat, when all the kids were playing in the back, and we parents were taking turns
telling the others where we came from, Tomás had said: ‘Look at the French elite. You won’t find a
single Portuguese.’ But over time he has grown confident enough to advertise rather than hide his
Portugueseness. When he’s in the mood, he’ll ad-lib whole comedy skits in mournful French-
Portuguese accents. He does it with love and ownership.
Julien and I finish our espressos. ‘Shall we return to our country?’ he asks, and we drive back to
Café Charlot. We are replicating the journey Julien made with his wife twenty years earlier: from their
Parisian base camp in the 15th to the summit of the Marais. They bought a flat in the neighbourhood
when it was still affordable, and had three children. He started a tech company, and is always fretting
about it – it hasn’t flourished yet. ‘I’m as frightened of succeeding as of not succeeding,’ he says. He
feels he was condemned to failure at birth, and has no right to cheat his sentence. Banlieusards, he
explains, expect to hit a glass ceiling. ‘They even respect it.’ The French elite has offered them a deal:
we’ll set a decent minimum wage, and keep taxes high, to support you from cradle to grave. But stay
out of Paris.

Back in Café Charlot, on our terrace in our little paradise, we clink wine glasses. I ask
Julien whether our road trip today has made him feel he has succeeded in life. ‘Frankly, yes,’ he says.
‘At least I didn’t live in just one world. I’m not broken – I’m just damaged. I think you are cured when
you can look your past in the eye and you aren’t affected by it. I wasn’t affected today.’
He looks around the café at the early evening fashionistas. ‘When I first got to the Marais,’ Julien
says, ‘I thought everyone in Charlot was so branché [broadly: cool] that I didn’t dare go in. Now I
know that when people walk past Charlot and see me, they think, “Look at that branché Parisian, I
don’t dare go in.”’
 11
The Tiniest Elite

When I was forty, and had almost resigned myself to spending the rest of my career covering sport, the
Financial Times suddenly gave me the dream journalistic job: writing a weekly column about anything
I wanted.
Naturally I gravitated to French subjects – society, politics, everyday Parisian life – and began
interviewing members of the French elite. Few of them read the FT (partly because it didn’t write much
about the French elite), but they had a vague sense that it was a high-status paper, and a little of that
status rubbed off on me. I started getting invitations to conferences, dinners, even to the age-old
Parisian institution of political salons.
For a while, I attended a salon that met in the exquisite house – yes, actual house – of a film
producer, hidden away in a courtyard in the 11th arrondissement. It was a leftist gathering, with links to
the Parti Socialiste, and one evening before the 2012 elections, the Socialist candidate François
Hollande dropped in to submit himself to a wonkish interrogation (arriving, obviously, two hours late).
Another evening I was sitting in the salon, trying not to eat all the nibbles, listening to a political

argument. One of the combatants was a man who monologued at length whenever he spotted an
opening. Every time he finished speaking, he’d pull out his BlackBerry and check his messages,
ignoring whoever was responding to him.
At first I couldn’t understand why everyone kept engaging with the rude bloke. Finally, it dawned on
me: he must have status in Paris. I googled him afterwards, and found that he was a rising young
politician. (Update years later: at fifty, he’s just an anonymous MP.) I had lived in blissful ignorance of
his existence. I realised then that, as a foreigner, I was liberated from two blights that afflict people
who live in big cities in their own countries: the Media Bubble and the Status Dance.
In London, I’d been a victim of both. As a journalist, I am a media junkie, and so I always knew
who was up and who was down in each day’s British news cycle. I knew the back-stories of the main
ministers, and what their scandals were. Living in the media bubble left me with a constant ringing
sound in my ears, like having tinnitus.
If you are in the media bubble, the status dance follows automatically. Much of what media do is
tracking people’s rising or falling status. When you meet an elite member in your own country you don’t
just see the person. You see their status. They wear it like a hat. I became such a connoisseur of the
British elite that I wrote a book about it.
Living in Paris, I freed myself from the media bubble. My tinnitus cleared up. As Elias Canetti
wrote, ‘The most peaceful place on earth is among strangers’. The Parisian status dance never stopped
seeming absurd to me. As a foreigner, I was ineligible to join in, but I could sit in the audience enjoying
the show.

And what a show it was. In the twenty-first century, even more than ever before, Paris was
becoming an elite island, populated by the power brokers of politics, the civil service, business and the
arts, who had progressively unplugged themselves from the rest of France. The political scientist
Jérôme Fourquet quantifies their conquest of the city: the proportion of executives and members of
intellectual professions in the Parisian working population had jumped from 25 per cent in 1982 to 46
per cent by 2013. Elite members were especially thick on the ground in Paris’s beaux quartiers – the
beautiful central neighbourhoods near the river – and in the suburb just west of Paris, Neuilly-sur-
Seine.
In fact, France may have the smallest ruling class of any big country: an elite as compact as the city
intra muros itself. 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. To
understand how this elite bestrides the land of supposed égalité and fraternité, I’ll focus on one little-
known man who embodies the caste, and who knows almost everyone in it: a notary’s son from
Normandy, a senior civil servant (and much more), Jean-Pierre Jouyet.

The man who knows everybody

On the cover of his memoir, L’envers du décor (‘Behind the Scenes’), the tall, elegant, grey-haired
Jouyet is holding an umbrella over his ‘best friend’, an ‘exceptional being’, the then president François

Hollande, who is checking his phone. By all accounts, Jouyet is the warmest of men, a famed
gripper of arms. The senior Parisian elite member Alain Minc calls him ‘one of the rare people to have
built his career partly on niceness’.
More precisely, Jouyet built it on Parisian friendships. His book (which he published aged sixty-six,
in 2020) is a revealing document thanks to its naïveté.1 Jouyet shows none of the sociological acuity
that you might expect from someone who aced the French educational system. He wastes few words
worrying about the privilege of the overwhelmingly white and male national elite that he describes.
Reading Jouyet, you see the French elite as it sees itself.
The French system is rule by the cleverest, selected through exams. Jouyet owns up to being a
partial exception: in his final high-school exams in Normandy, he scored four out of twenty for maths,
the highest-status subject in French education.
Nonetheless, he did well enough overall to ‘climb up to Paris’. He started at Sciences Po, one of the
French grandes écoles or ‘great schools’, where as a provincial he felt unwelcome. Any student there
caught reading a newspaper from their home region might have it pulled from their hands and ripped up
by Parisian peers.
But Jouyet’s conservative Catholic father had a higher ambition for him than Sciences Po: to get into
the Ecole Nationale d’Administration. ‘ENA’ was the grande école founded by General de Gaulle after
the Liberation, with the aim of creating a new French ruling class. De Gaulle had called ENA’s students
‘an elite in every respect, an intellectual elite, a moral elite’. By the late 1970s, when the young Jouyet

was swotting for the entry exams, France had its first énarque president, Valéry Giscard
d’Estaing. Giscard would start a tradition: three of the next five presidents were énarques – not bad for
a school from which little more than 150 students a year graduated in the 1970s (and about eighty by the
2020s).
Jouyet remembers only two questions from his oral exams for ENA. He gave a good answer on the
role of the ‘left brain’ in reasoning, and a bad one to what sounds like the pub-quiz question about
which French prefect wrote the lyrics for the singer Gilbert Bécaud. The day the list of happy entrants
was hung up on ENA’s gates (then still on the Left Bank), Jouyet’s name was on it. He now owned a
lifetime platinum membership card for the French elite.
One Sunday in January 1977, the male members of Jouyet’s incoming ENA class – and almost all of
them were male – were put on a train to report for military service in Brittany. It was on the train that
Jouyet first met a fellow Normandy boy, Hollande, a doctor’s son ‘who entertained us for the whole
journey with a festival of good jokes’, as well as the Parisian engineer’s son Michel Sapin, who thirty-
seven years later would become Hollande’s economics minister. Other classmates in their promotion,
or year, were Dominique de Villepin, the industrialist’s son who as foreign minister in 2003 would
warn against the Iraq war, and Ségolène Royal, daughter of a naval lieutenant-colonel, who would have
four children with Hollande before beating him to the leadership of the Parti Socialiste. It was just as
the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu had warned: the French elite had begun to reproduce itself. (And

nobody mastered elite self-reproduction better than Bourdieu himself. All three of his sons
followed him to the most intellectual grande école, the Ecole Normale Supérieure, or ‘Normale Sup’,
which trains many of France’s leading academics.)
Being an énarque is much more, even, than a lifelong career status. It’s a permanent identity. Anglos
say, ‘She went to Cambridge’, or ‘He went to Harvard’, but the French say, ‘il est énarque’, in the
present tense.
Going through a grande école tends to impregnate French elite members with permanent solidarity
for their companions on their heroic journey. Together they won the system, and most of them feel they
deserve it. Haven’t they proven themselves brainier and more hard-working than all other French
people? A key word of praise among elite members is brillant. ‘Brilliance’ is seen as an innate quality,
and more important than, say, integrity or the ability to work with others. Jouyet found Hollande
‘intelligentissime’ and was fascinated by ‘his exceptional rapidity of execution, his natural authority,
his originality’.
Jouyet’s classmates from his promotion at ENA became his lifelong friends and the pillars of his
réseau, or net-work.2 ‘We worked a lot but laughed enormously,’ he recalls.
There’s a tradition of énarques making rhetorical gestures against their own privilege. Hollande
founded and Jouyet joined an action committee that agitated against special treatment for their own
caste, such as direct access to top civil service jobs. Still, when the time came, the young men accepted
the perks. After two years, their graduating class was ranked in order of its final exam results.
Hollande and Jouyet were near the top but, crucially, Hollande was one spot above Jouyet. That gave

Hollande the right to join the highest status corps in the French state: the Inspection Générale
des Finances, which checks whether public money is legitimately spent, from the highest ministries to
the smallest village. Giscard d’Estaing had been an inspecteur des finances.
But Hollande decided that joining a different auditing institution, the Cour des Comptes, would sit
better with his planned political career. Hollande’s ticket for the Inspection went to an overjoyed
Jouyet. Though only in his mid-twenties, he was done: he had won the race, and there was no need to
compete with the defeated 99.99 per cent of the population or to expand his mind ever again. His
énarque status would accompany him through life. That’s how elite Paris works. Often in the memoir,
when Jouyet mentions a senior civil servant or minister, he’ll add, sometimes in a footnote, that
person’s promotion of ENA, and, when appropriate, that they graduated as the ‘major’, i.e. top of the
class.
In this as in almost everything, Jouyet is typical of his caste. Since French elite members base their
status on totally objective brilliance, they are quick to tell you that they are elite members. It’s not
abnormal for a sixty-something Parisian to introduce himself as, say, ‘Jean-Marc Dupont, X, 1985’.
You’re meant to know that ‘X’ is the nickname for the Ecole Polytechnique, and that 1985 was the year
of his promotion. If he refers to someone else as a ‘cher camarade’, you know that that person, too,
went to X. One day, even the briefest death notice published in Le Monde by his grieving family might
mention the key fact of his life: ‘… at the age of 93. Former pupil of …’ (Happily, Oxbridge graduates

in Britain have no need to be so gauche because they convey all relevant information through
their speech patterns.)
Jouyet proudly calls the Inspection Générale des Finances ‘the only grand corps that gives each of
its members a knowledge of the provinces’. New members are traditionally sent on tours of France’s
most isolated hilltop hamlets. Jouyet started his public career counting notes and coins in a village of
3,000 souls, checking that the accounts added up. But after four years travelling la France profonde
like a district commissioner in colonial times, he was summoned to the imperial capital: Paris.
The Inspection consists mostly of ENA graduates, who get to know each other – if they didn’t
already – over closed-circuit lunches. The country’s most powerful old boys’ network looks after its
members throughout their careers. The tradition is that fresh graduates pay visits to older inspectors,
who help them ascend to the top jobs in the French state, or in state-influenced corporations like Air
France, Orange (formerly France Télécom) and the utility company EDF. Jouyet writes: ‘Impossible to
deny it: everything is done so that each person finds a nice post, so as to preserve the prestige of the
whole corps. “One for all, all for one,” as the musketeers said.’3 Should an inspecteur fail in a
particular job, he can always come home to Mummy, and senior corps members will sort him out.
Decades into Jouyet’s civil service career, his second wife, Brigitte Taittinger, heiress of the
champagne house, remarked: ‘My husband often says that without the Inspection, he would have been
nothing.’
Most French elite members spend their entire adult lives in central Paris, ideally on the Left Bank,

surrounded by chums from grandes écoles, and sometimes also shacked up with one, like
Hollande and Royal. That makes the Parisian elite more inbred than its New York and London
equivalents: because those cities function in the global language of English, they are more permeable
for foreigners. In elite Paris, where almost everyone has the same background, groupthink becomes
inevitable.
People in a low-trust society build close working relationships only with friends – or at least
pretend friends, or frenemies. ‘Pôtes’, or ‘copains’ (‘mates’) are key elite words that are used to
present business relationships as strictly personal ones. Bernard-Henri Lévy, a Normale Sup graduate
who has become that very Parisian thing, a TV philosopher – acting out for the French masses the idea
of a Parisian intellectual as created by Emile Zola and Jean-Paul Sartre – phrases the elite pretence
best: ‘I don’t have a network, I only have friends.’ Networking remains such a foreign concept that the
French verb for it is networker.
A rare outside entrant into the French elite is the telecoms billionaire Xavier Niel. He grew up in an
unlovely Parisian banlieue, went into business in the 1980s as a teenager operating sex chat sites on
Minitel, and didn’t attend a grande école. He decrypted the standard elite networks for me: ‘You went
to the same school. Your parents knew each other. On all these paths, you’ve been among yourselves.
And among yourselves, nobody wants to upset anyone. If you get on well together, you’re not going to
break the price of mobile phones. Why lower your margins? You’re not going to quarrel among
yourselves.’ (I should add that Niel has by now attained full elite membership. A major shareholder in

Le Monde, he lives with Delphine Arnault, daughter and right-hand woman of Bernard Arnault,
head of the luxury group LVMH, who in 2022 was ranked the world’s richest man by Forbes
magazine.)
Elite Parisians solidify their networks over dinners (more of which in the next chapter), gallery
openings, Alain Minc’s birthday parties, and joint holidays – in Jouyet’s case, usually with pôtes from
his ENA promotion, arranged around Hollande’s August birthday. Friends introduce Jouyet to other
friends. A recurrent phrase in his memoir, each time a Parisian power broker pops up, is ‘I have known
so-and-so a long time’. In fact Jouyet seems to know le Tout-Paris, and hardly anybody outside it. If he
has an ideology, it is – to borrow a phrase of his – ‘le parisianisme’.
Elite members make new contacts in personal rather than work settings: at their regular corner café,
summer village or ski resort. Jouyet explains that whenever, for work reasons, he needs to contact a
senior politician, ‘I always go through friends or mutual acquaintances. It’s a question of delicacy.’ He
fondly recalls a Paris Saint-Germain football match, in the early 2000s, during which he and Hollande
got to know Nicolas Sarkozy. Jouyet writes: ‘This evening remains in my memory as an exchange of
pleasantries animated by the humour and spirit of these two men who would go on to become president,
one after the other.’
No matter that Sarkozy was on the right and Hollande the left: shared elite membership overrides
ideology. Similarly, after the far-right political rabble-rouser Eric Zemmour was convicted multiple

times for hate speech, the far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon said: ‘I know Zemmour. Zemmour
isn’t a racist, he’s a brilliant intellectual.’ The last two words conferred a peculiarly Parisian
absolution. Personal acquaintance of a fellow elite member trumps their actual actions. (Incidentally,
Zemmour’s journey into anti-elitism may have something to do with his two rejections by ENA.)

One subject barely mentioned in Jouyet’s memoir is money. Even before his second marriage to
Taittinger, who had sufficient means to take care of him, he doesn’t seem to have worried about it.
When he was starting out, a senior civil servant’s salary was enough to buy a strategically located
home in elite Paris. Anyway, in a high-tax country, most elite members aren’t obsessed with wealth.
They focus more on using their réseaux to get power, cachet and perks – a chauffeured car or, best of
all, the use of a high-status Parisian space. Since these are often allocated outside the workings of the
market, money isn’t even that useful.
One man who understood this was the first énarque president whom Jouyet served: Jacques Chirac.
As mayor of Paris from 1977 to 1995, Chirac had rewarded his associates with city-owned grace-and-
favour apartments – known as ‘golden HLMs’, after the French acronym for social housing. The former
minister Jean-Pierre Chevènement lived for decades in a five-room duplex on the Left Bank near the
Panthéon, paying a rent that was one-third of the market rate. Chirac’s right-hand man Alain Juppé (who
had completed the grande école hat trick of ENA, Normale Sup and Sciences Po) was fortunate enough

to get a cut-price 189-square-metre apartment with terrace on the rue Jacob on the Left Bank.
Juppé also arranged a rent reduction for his son, who happened to have a municipal apartment on the
same street. The city even paid for renovations to both flats. Other Juppés received apartments
elsewhere. The story came out just after freshly elected President Chirac appointed Juppé his prime
minister.
Chirac spent much of his twelve years in the Elysée pursuing a goal that didn’t exactly seem central
to French interests: cajoling Lebanon’s creditors to forgive the country’s debts. ‘Whatever the
circumstances,’ recalls Jouyet, who was director of Chirac’s Treasury, ‘he would speak to me of
Lebanon. Even during European Councils, dedicated, after all, to other matters.’ From 2002 to 2007,
Jouyet organised four international conferences devoted to Lebanon’s debts, ‘under the demanding eye
of Jacques Chirac’. On Sunday afternoons Jouyet would sometimes be summoned to the Elysée, where
Chirac, accompanied by the Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri, would pack him off to Ottawa,
Riyadh or Washington, to lobby Lebanon’s creditors for debt forgiveness. Chirac eventually managed to
wipe out almost all of Lebanon’s then debts.
‘This obsession,’ writes Jouyet, ‘is explained by his immense friendship for Hariri, assassinated in
2005, but also by his strategic vision of the Middle East.’ I’m not sure about the ‘strategic vision’, but
the ‘friendship’ definitely mattered. When Chirac’s sojourn in the presidential Elysée Palace ended in
2007, Hariri’s family lent him a 396-square-metre apartment on the Quai Voltaire. Chirac said that he’d
only stay until he’d found his own place. He ended up living there for eight years. This arrangement,

admits Jouyet, ‘may surprise’ outsiders who didn’t know Chirac’s circumstances. After Chirac
became too ill to remain chez Hariri, he ended his days in a mansion in the 6th arrondissement, thanks
to the kindness of its owner, French billionaire François Pinault (also a chum of Jouyet and Hollande).
But a seemingly more modest Parisian space can be equally high-status. The city’s most beautiful
tennis courts are the ones that belong to the Senate, in the Jardin du Luxembourg, the Left Bank’s
Sunday afternoon HQ, a short walk from Chirac’s final home. Senators have first dibs on the courts, but
anybody who owns a Paris tennis pass can book unused ones for a few euros an hour. However, the
courts are snapped up the instant they are made available online, which is precisely sixty-three hours
before match time. Only insiders endowed with ‘space status’ know the moment of release. The man
who runs the Luxembourg’s tennis hut won’t reveal it to ploucs.

Jouyet rose to be head of the Inspection Générale des Finances. There he furthered the careers of
younger inspectors, earning the nickname – which he cites twice in his memoir, with apparent pride –
‘Director of Human Resources of the Republic’. He became, he claims, ‘the mentor’ of a young
inspector named Emmanuel Macron. Jouyet believed Macron to be a ‘normalien’, i.e. a graduate of the
‘Normale Sup’. Macron did nothing to dispel the misapprehension, perhaps because he had in fact done
his best to become a normalien, but had been rejected twice before settling for ENA.
There was a family feel to the high civil service. Some of Jouyet’s high-flying young fonctionnaires,

like the énarque Florence Parly (a future defence minister) were the offspring of high-flying
older civil servants. More and more of the chosen few were white Parisian-born children of the book-
owning high bourgeoisie, who travelled together from Left Bank nursery school through Left Bank
rallye (a kind of elite teenagers’ weekend club) to Left Bank école préparatoire (‘prépa’) where they
crammed for exams for the grandes écoles before acquiring their own Left Bank apartment. What had
always been the national elite, speckled with provincials – from Descartes and Napoleon through to
Hollande and Jouyet – was morphing into the Parisian elite. Paris was moving beyond its centuries-old
reliance on provincial talent.
While Jouyet was Chirac’s treasury director, he became chummy with the economics minister,
Sarkozy. Meetings with ministers from other countries tended to be in English, a language that Sarkozy
didn’t speak at the time, so Jouyet helped him out.
But Jouyet wasn’t wedded to the civil service. A Parisian elite member can spend his career
jumping from government to academia and business, often wearing various hats simultaneously. If he
ever feels like writing a silly book on a topic he knows almost nothing about, another elite member will
publish it, chums will give it rave reviews, and it may even win a literary prize. Elite members justify
these conflicts of interest in the name of friendship: ‘Mais c’est un pôte.’ Only the po-faced call it
corruption.
Jouyet has written books on everything from politics to history to songs, solidifying his claim to
cultural standing – which trumps wealth in the French elite. He has also moonlighted as a political
power broker. In 2006, on holiday in Corsica, he and Hollande lobbied Royal to step aside and
let Hollande be the Socialist candidate for the presidency. If she agreed, Hollande promised, their
troubled family life would return to normal. Royal refused.
She won the Socialist candidacy, but lost the presidential elections of 2007 to Jouyet’s new buddy
Sarkozy. He promptly appointed Jouyet secretary of state for European affairs. Hollande, furious at his
pôte for signing up with the right, initially wouldn’t speak to him. Hollande’s outraged mother
exclaimed, ‘And François left him his spot, when they finished ENA!’ The two men eventually made
peace in traditional Parisian fashion, meeting for dinner at a restaurant located equidistant from their
homes.
By this time Jouyet had married Taittinger, in a ceremony presided over by her uncle, a former
minister of Giscard’s. She had started out in the family business before working in the fundraising
department at Sciences Po. Like Jouyet, she had conservative catholic origins, and they had ten children
between them. (Horribly, one of Jouyet’s sons died by suicide.)
In the Parisian elite, one spouse’s network irrigates the other’s. The couple’s vast apartment in the
16th hosted dinners that could last into the early morning, and brought together le Tout-Paris from old
Pinault to young Macron. After Hollande separated from Royal, he got a bed chez Jouyet. ‘At the
Jouyets,’ wrote Le Monde, ‘on election nights, whether the right or the left wins, one can always find
half the guests to celebrate the victory with pink Taittinger champagne.’4
Finally, in 2012, came the election night that Jouyet had been anticipating since 1977: Hollande won

the presidency. That was the cue for jobs for the pôtes. Sapin became minister of finance.
Jouyet got secretary general of the Elysée (in effect, presidential chief of staff). Jean-Marc Janaillac,
Hollande’s former classmate at both ENA and the business school HEC, was made head of partly state-
owned Air France.
Unfortunately, Hollande’s presidency wasn’t a brilliant success. Running a country turned out not to
be his thing. The three grandes écoles he attended hadn’t trained him to succeed in the world; they had
trained him to succeed in central Paris. He discovered the world only as president. His first state visit
to China was the first time he had ever set foot there. His English was about as good as Sarkozy’s – not
optimal for influencing fellow leaders in the coffee breaks of international summits, or for charming
foreign investors. The French economy refused to grow, and his approval ratings eventually fell to 4
per cent (not a typo). The French technocrats’ nightmare of waking up one morning and finding that
France had become Italy seemed closer than ever.
Only Parisian insiders continued to fawn over Hollande, at least in person. One evening, when he
was setting records for presidential unpopularity, I saw him arrive at a function in some fabulous
mansion. He was instantly besieged by flatterers, like an eighteenth-century king swarmed by courtiers.
As Jouyet remarks in his book, the modern French presidency functions much like the old French
royal court, only with fewer wigs. Paris today retains the splendour of Bourbon times. Some civil

servants spend their working lives in de facto palaces, from the Elysée to the foreign ministry’s
nineteenth-century mansion on the Quai d’Orsay. A senior functionary might spend much of her work
week lobbying the Mobilier national (‘The National Furniture’) to commandeer for the minister’s
office a Louis XVI clock that currently adorns a rival department.
The modern court of Paris is shielded from the French hordes by the latest version of the city’s
medieval wall: the Périphérique ring road. For courtiers, the world beyond the Périph is a dim rumour;
only what happens at court truly matters. Inside it, they prove their status through world-class name-
dropping. They will let every interlocutor know that they know the minister, the minister’s wife, and
(ultimate proof of insiderdom) the minister’s secret gay lover.
Senior journalists have an honoured place at court. They generally studied with the ministers at
Sciences Po, live in the same neighbourhoods, eat together and sometimes sleep together. In a country
where ministers’ wives have anchored the TV news, and where Valérie Trierweiler, Hollande’s post-
Royal girlfriend (until he kicked her out of the Elysée with a ‘Merci pour ce moment’) was a
journalist, there is no need for metaphors about being in bed with power.5
French newspapers (which are really Parisian newspapers) often read like the Versailles palace
gazette circa 1788, tallying who’s up and who’s down at court. But the best gossip is the stuff too secret
to make it into Le Monde: ‘The politician is a sex criminal but don’t tell anyone.’

Even many very successful French people have no entrée into the Parisian court – or don’t want one.

Over the years, I came to realise that the most interesting and outward-looking French
achievers were almost defined by not living in the beaux quartiers of central Paris. These people
weren’t spending their lives nurturing their elite reseaux, ‘networks’. Instead, they were trying to do
their best work. There was the economist Jean Tirole, who had chosen to return from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology to set up the Toulouse School of Economics, in a town so provincial that it
didn’t even have a TGV station. He ended up winning the Nobel Prize.
There was Tirole’s colleague Thomas Piketty, a multimillionaire from book sales, who every
weekday at about 7.30 a.m. walked from his rented flat near the Gare du Nord to the metro station.
He’d take line 4 south, passing beneath the Left Bank to a brutalist building near the Péripherique,
where he sat working in his pokey office at the Paris School of Economics until 7.30 p.m. In 2024
another French Nobel laureate for economics, Esther Duflo, left Harvard to become the school’s
president.
Or there was the novelist Michel Houellebecq, who lived in one of the only tower blocks in Paris
intra muros, near the hideous Place d’Italie. When I scheduled an interview with him, I sat waiting for
half an hour at the restaurant table. Finally, I heard the sound of panting from the staircase. After that, a
long time passed. Climbing to the first floor seemed to be a challenge. At last Houellebecq staggered
into sight, looking much better than his revolting publicity portrait. (With most writers and their
publicity photos it’s the other way around.)
Once he had slumped into his seat, exuding a whiff of alcohol, he seemed quite happy to sit there

forever, as if he had nothing else to do. As he smoked (illegal in French restaurants since 2008)
he reflected: ‘Inside oneself, one knows one is overrated. Still, rather me than someone else. The other
writers who take themselves for superstars are actually less good than me. So why not me?’
I started to ask, ‘Are there no writers today who you …’, and he interrupted: ‘No, I am the best.’
He graciously limited his claim: ‘I am not the best in general: in the past there were others better
than me. But currently I am the best.’
I fumbled for a retort. Finally, I came up with, ‘How about Philip Roth?’ (still alive at that point).
‘Look, we won’t speak badly of Philip Roth in the interview, there is no purpose in that, but I find
that he repeats himself. It’s often the same book, in my view.’
Thinking about that conversation later, I realised what was un-Parisian about it. Houellebecq wasn’t
measuring himself against the Left Bank. He was competing with the world’s best people in his field.
As for almost everyone else in France, they are excluded from the Parisian court from birth. A
friend of mine grew up in a small French town, 500 miles removed from Parisian codes, the son of
Algerian Jewish immigrants. He had a telltale southern accent – a stigma avoided by provincials from
anywhere north of the Loire river, such as Jouyet and Hollande. My friend’s origins were instantly
obvious to Parisian courtiers. Instead of a grande école, he attended elite universities in the UK and
US, then made his career outside France.
My friend built foreign networks, which never did much for him in Paris. But for others, even

thousands of miles from Paris, Parisian networks could still help. The American teenagers Tony
Blinken and Robert Malley met in the 1970s at the bilingual Parisian elite school Ecole Jeannine
Manuel. In 2021, Blinken became Joe Biden’s secretary of state and Malley the US special envoy to
Iran.
In Paris, not even great wealth, by itself, can buy you entry to court. I once interviewed the singer
turned multimillionaire entrepreneur Bernard Tapie, in his 600-square-metre mansion. It stood in the
unimpeachably elite Left Bank neighbourhood of Saint-Germain. The problem was that Tapie, ‘un self-
made man’ in the French phrase, who had grown up poor in the Parisian banlieue, had furnished the
place in an almost parodic gold-leafed baroque style: Hollywood Versailles. The verdict, for any
visiting elite member, would be unforgiving: a beauf with money. Someone like Tapie might be invited
to a Parisian elite dinner, but sniggered at the moment he walked out the door.
Similarly, the far-right leader Marine Le Pen was raised in a chateau just outside Paris, yet never
acquired elite codes. Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the far-right Front National (now the
Rassemblement National), had been given the chateau by an admirer, and always remained proudly
vulgar. When his first wife Pierrette walked out on him in 1987, writes the scholar of populism
Catherine Fieschi, ‘she made off with Jean-Marie’s best glass eye, but forgot the urn containing her
mother’s ashes’.6 Much of the subsequent divorce proceedings were devoted to orchestrating a swap of
the two items. Pierrette later pocketed 400,000 francs for posing nude for Playboy. Years afterwards,

she made up with Jean-Marie and moved back into the chateau. To the Parisian elite, the
crassness of the Le Pens was almost as bad as their whiff of Vichy.
The Parisian court runs France beyond the Périph almost as if it were a colony, or at best a holiday
resort, inhabited by smelly ploucs who hadn’t absorbed any of the Parisian culture they were taught at
school, and who vote far right or far left. The fundamental facts of plouc life escape most decision-
makers. Jouyet grasped that large swathes of France had no broadband internet only because he
suffered the experience in his second home (his parents’ old house) in Normandy. He admits he never
got around to alerting Hollande. ‘In my defence,’ he notes, ‘nobody in government was interested in the
subject.’
Western Europe’s largest country is commanded from a few arrondissements of Paris. Thierry
Breton was born into a high-status Parisian family, and almost immediately placed on the elite
conveyor belt: the elite private Ecole Alsacienne in the 6th arrondissement, then prépa at the elite
public lycée Louis-le-Grand in the 5th, and on to an elite institute for engineers, l’Ecole supérieure
d’electricité (Supélec). Breton ran companies, wrote sci-fi novels, became minister of economics, and
then chief executive of the IT company Atos. One day I interviewed him there for a corporate video.
When his staff videographer accidentally messed up a short take, Breton bawled her out in front of a
room full of colleagues.
The way France worked, Breton couldn’t ask underlings for feedback or advice even if he wanted
it. He was brillant, so he was supposed to decide, alone. At the time of writing, he is European
Commissioner for the Internal Market – forever a member of the Elect.

No wonder that when things go wrong, ordinary French people tend to blame Jouyet’s elite:
it never asked them how to run the country.
 12
Who’s for Dinner?

Eventually, my wife and I integrated to the point where we began getting invited to dinners in French.
We coped with the conversations rather than illuminating them, and after four hours of wine-fuelled
Parisian banter, we’d stagger home shattered. Anthropologically, though, the experience was
invaluable. I’ve always resisted the idea that there is a ‘real Paris’. There are many different Parises,
many of which are barely French. Still, if you pinned me down and forced me to pick the ‘real’ one –
the Paris that’s most distinct from other great capitals, the one where the city’s hidden business is
transacted – I’d go for the Paris we discovered over dozens of dinners in people’s flats.
Around the world and all through history, humans have built trust over food. But communal dining is
an especially powerful socialising agent in a city where the food is world-beating, trust in strangers
low, and the eating etiquette of unmatched complexity. Paris is a place where you generally only do
business with somebody once you’ve eaten with them. The dinner table is the city’s chief networking
zone, the equivalent of golf or strip clubs in other countries.

This fact has always baffled Anglos. In 1778, the newborn United States sent two joint
commissioners to Paris, Benjamin Franklin and the future American president John Adams.1 The duo
were charged with getting French money and support for the revolutionary wars against the British.
Adams, a puritan, thought the way to fulfil his mission was to wake up early and work all day.
He was dismayed to find that Franklin preferred dining. ‘The Life of Dr. Franklin,’ Adams
complained, ‘was a Scene of continual discipation.’ Franklin, who in the US had been the famed
advocate of ‘early to bed and early to rise’, in Paris breakfasted late, then hung out with ‘all Sorts of
People’, until it was time to dress for ‘dinner’ (by which Adams meant lunch).
The meal was ‘the only thing in which he was punctual’, bitched Adams. ‘He was invited to dine
abroad every day and never declined unless when We had invited Company to dine with Us. I was
always invited with him, till I found it necessary to send Apologies, that I might have some time to
study the french Language and do the Business of the mission.’ After dinner, Franklin would take ‘tea’
with ‘Ladies’, the engagement typically stretching into the evening. ‘He often came home at all hours
from Nine to twelve O Clock at night’, snorted Adams, who sometimes had to wait days before he
could get his colleague to sign documents.
Adams plainly thought Franklin was a layabout. I made the same sort of mistake for years in Paris.
How could people with proper jobs fritter away so much time queuing to buy food, cooking it, eating
and drinking with friends till the early morning even on school nights, then spending half the next day in

recovery mode? If there was business to sort out, why not do it with a phone call, or a coffee?
Like Adams, I had work to do.
It took me years to understand that Parisian diners were also working. In fact, they were working
more efficiently than I was, and their fellow diners usually weren’t simply friends. French dinners,
explains sociologist and Parisian diner Michel Maffesoli, are the site of three exchanges: of goods,
love and ideas. The networking – as Franklin presumably grasped – is all the more efficient for being
disguised as hedonism.
I gradually absorbed the basic rules of Parisian dinners: only ploucs say ‘bon appétit’ or take
second helpings. But my learning curve shot up once I got my hands on one of those rare codebooks to
Parisian life: Dîners en ville, mode d’emploi (literally, ‘Dinners in Town, a Manual’) by Guillemette
Faure, a Le Monde journalist who lived for twelve years in New York.2 (Disclosure: I have dined with
her.)
Faure explains that ‘the Good Lord created lunches and breakfasts’ chiefly as low-risk testing
grounds for auditioning potential dinner guests. If you pass the audition and get invited to dinner at a
Parisian’s home, or to their second home in a Paris-approved bit of the countryside, Faure counsels
against making food requests. Eating in France remains a communal experience, not an individual one.
The French word for chum is copain – literally, someone with whom you share bread. If you eat your
own thing, then by definition you’re not a copain. If you’re a vegetarian, even today it is sometimes
better to keep quiet and just shove the meat around your plate.
Faure recommends arriving precisely twelve minutes after the announced starting time. Once you

pass through the apartment door, from the public sphere into the private, you may – depending
on the pre-existing relationships – be permitted to start calling people ‘tu’. You’ll probably exchange
only a few friendly words with the hosts’ kids, before they are shunted off to the unseen nether reaches
of Parisian apartments, but this is an important rite of passage: meeting the children anoints you as an
intimate.
The usual Parisian seating plan at table is man-woman-man-woman. This cuts down on all-male
conversations about sports, and increases flirtation, especially because partners aren’t seated together.
Hosts are supposed to serve their own effortless, home-cooked, peasant-style signature dishes,
inspired by their home terroir (or pretend home terroir) in some bucolic French region. The
homeliness furthers the illusion that everyone has gathered just as ‘pôtes’, and not at all pour
networker.
But the biggest test of the hosts’ status is the people they can lure to their table. The gathering –
along with the art and books on the walls, and the view from the window, ideally of the Eiffel Tower –
becomes a kind of tableau of the hosts’ lives. It’s like a group portrait of prominent Dutch seventeenth-
century burghers. That scene one Saturday night on the Left Bank, when they still have all their Parisian
powers, and some of their beauty, is how they will want to be remembered.
Ambitious Parisian hosts aim to assemble stars of several totally unrelated professions, topped off
if possible with the sitting French president, on a night when he isn’t hosting his own dinner at the

Elsyée. Hollande, during his presidency, would sometimes pop up at mates’ dining tables. If
this happens at a meal you’re at, advises Faure, you should treat it as a natural occurrence, laugh at the
president’s jokes and, above all, not talk politics.
In general, Parisians don’t talk business at dinner, or if absolutely necessary, then only in the last
fifteen minutes. Transactions are considered dirty, and must be hidden. In Faure’s dictum: ‘You’re at
table, not on LinkedIn.’ However, she adds, after dining together, you acquire the right to phone any of
your co-diners (though perhaps not the president). A business meeting works better if you’ve got to
know each other outside business.

Business-disguised-as-friendship meals are also staged twice a day in Parisian restaurants. Most of the
chief power places are in the 7th arrondissement, where French politicians cluster. Guided by insider
tip-offs, however, I left the beaten track and found what I believe to be the ultimate Paris power
restaurant: Le Stresa. You wouldn’t think so to look at it. It’s a poky family-run Italian trattoria with a
fading red awning, hidden away on little rue Chambiges, devoid of car valets or paparazzi. Though
Stresa is in the middle of the ‘triangle d’or’ of the wealthy 8th arrondissement, a casual passer-by
would hardly notice it.
I walked in one late afternoon, a time when French people aren’t allowed to eat, and was sat down
at an empty table by Stresa’s front-of-house man, Tonio Faiola. He had the white shirt, unbuttoned
sleeves and disarming smile of a small-town ristoratore. He, his four southern Italian brothers and
their nephew did all the work here except the washing-up. But Stresa’s peasant homeliness was cover

for an elite networking society. Faiola admitted: ‘We are a bit of a closed club. Our system is to
know our guests.’
You could get a table in Stresa only on the say-so of other regulars, almost all of whom were male
members of the Parisian elite. President François Mitterrand had been a regular, introduced here by his
councillor, minister, pal and unofficial gastronomic adviser Michel Charasse.
Stresa’s walls were adorned with discreet homages to club members: a Ferrari model signed by
champion driver Michael Schumacher, portraits by the sculptor César, and photographs by American
artist Peter Beard. (Stresa’s American clientele – Woody Allen, John McEnroe and Leonardo
DiCaprio, and Andy Warhol before them – are not random tourists.)
In the restaurant’s front room, where time seemed to have stopped in 1955, the tables sat elbow to
elbow in a horseshoe formation. Since you couldn’t help but overhear your neighbours’ conversation,
the Faiolas had become Parisian masters of space management. They planned who would sit next to
whom. No tables from the same profession side by side was the house rule. (Many Parisian hosts
follow a similar dinner strategy.) And late on an evening when the mood was good, the Faiolas would
introduce one set of diners to their neighbours. After midnight, the room could end up feeling like one
table.
Stresa is the sort of discreet place where another regular, Nicolas Sarkozy, ought to have celebrated
his election as president in 2007. Fatally, though, he held his victory party a couple of streets away, in
flashy Fouquet’s restaurant on the Champs-Elysées, surrounded by billionaire French media barons. In

the Parisian tradition, Sarkozy had long dressed up his work relationships as friendships. He
borrowed the yacht of Vincent Bolloré, owner of the TV channel Canal +. He made Martin Bouygues,
main shareholder of the biggest French TV channel TF1, godfather to one of his sons. He described
Arnaud Lagardère, who owned much of the French print media, as ‘more than a friend, a brother’. The
party at Fouquet’s demolished Sarkozy’s man-of-the-people reputation, and put a lasting dent in his
presidency on the night it began. ‘If I had to do it all over again,’ he reflected years later, ‘I wouldn’t go
back to that restaurant.’
I walked out of Stresa feeling that I had finally discovered the secret dining table of Parisian power.
But in fact, in the Parisian elite, there is always a next layer on the onion: years later I would discover
Le Siècle dining club.

Irritated as I was by much of Parisian dining culture, I have to admit that there were things I admired,
too. The dinners weren’t only about networking. They were also, often, genuinely joyous. On a good
night in Paris, the conversations, food, beauty, friendships and flirtations could transport you to a higher
realm.
I liked it that Parisians would devote long hours just to eating and talking ‘en petit comité’ (roughly,
‘in a small group of intimates’). (I remember the night we brought friends visiting from New York to a
Parisian dinner. After an hour they thought: really? You’re just going to sit here all evening, with the
same group of people? So they rang a high-status New Yorker who was also passing through Paris and
went to meet him for drinks.)

I liked it that dinners here were taken so seriously that they were a phone-free zone: almost
nobody put theirs on the table, and it wasn’t done even to pull it out for a discreet check. (If you
couldn’t resist reading your messages, you went to the bathroom.)
Call me a snob, but I liked it that at Parisian dinners you were supposed to talk about people and
feelings and ideas and books, but not about house prices or the best schools. And like other Parisians, I
found the dinners helped my work. My job as a newspaper columnist practically required me to have
good conversations with interesting people.
On the best nights, the only thing that stopped me melting into the experience was my mediocre
French. I began to plot the perfect Parisian dinner. The guests would be a hand-picked group of
beautiful minds, eating Parisian but speaking English. Ideally, the dinner would be a regular thing. I
presented the idea to a French-American friend.
‘What’s the point?’ he asked.
‘The point is good conversation,’ I said.
‘That’s an end in itself,’ he agreed.
We brought in my friend Florence, who is such an extrovert that she suggested we hold the dinners
on Monday nights because those were the only evenings when she was sometimes at a loose end. So the
three of us founded the Paris Supper Club. I know: it sounds awful, exactly the sort of exclusionary
wannabe elite institution that I’ve been describing. But the idea was to keep all that’s best about
Parisian dinners without the bad bits: the name-dropping, status-seeking, male monologuing, and

mocking of cons. In the Paris Supper Club, we genuinely wouldn’t care what your job was, or
your nationality. If you were poor, we’d pay for your dinner. The only criteria to be invited was that
you were nice, interesting, and (the most seductive quality of all) a good listener, in English.
We made the odd casting error, but any narcissist or bore or phone addict or good person too shy to
cope only ever got invited once. It turned out that international Paris was packed with fascinating
people. We ended up with a core of regulars, about half of them French English-speakers, plus a
revolving cast of guest stars. Halfway through the meal – usually in the same little restaurant that we’d
book out for the evening – we’d reshuffle the seating plan, to save anyone imprisoned next to the wrong
person. We had some pretty good evenings, and brought together improbable people, like the time the
Latin-America-based journalist went home with the Syrian refugee. The club still exists, now under a
new, younger, French présidente.
It isn’t a network. It’s just a lot of fun among friends. Or at least that’s what we say in Paris.
 13
Macron: The Seducer Who Ate Paris

On the May night in 2017 when Emmanuel Macron was elected president, our friends from the
neighbourhood WhatsApped each other joyous photographs of clinking wine glasses. The thirty-nine-
year-old had won 93 per cent of the vote in our arrondissement. His far-right opponent Marine Le Pen
had never prospered in Paris.
The man who would later be pilloried by French provincials as the incarnation of Parisian
arrogance had himself come from the provincial bourgeoisie. Macron grew up in a red-brick terraced
house in the northern town of Amiens. His mother was a doctor in the social security system, his father
a doctor and professor of neurology, whose most cited academic article was on sneezing in cats.
Their eldest child attended a local Jesuit lycée. Aged sixteen, too mature for his peers, he started a
relationship with his married forty-year-old drama teacher, Brigitte Auzière. Brigitte’s daughter
Laurence had tipped her off: ‘There’s a lunatic in my class who knows everything about everything.’
Macron’s parents, hoping to separate him from Brigitte, packed him off to board at the exclusive

Parisian Left Bank state lycée, Henri IV, but on weekends he continued to court her. His parents’
plot failed: she eventually followed him to Paris.
Macron was making an ancient French journey: the ambitious provincial remade himself as a
Parisian. But even as he conquered Paris, he and his generation were plotting to update it.

He studied at the Parisian grande école Sciences Po, and simultaneously did a philosophy degree in the
banlieues at Nanterre, writing his thesis, inevitably, on Machiavelli. He fancied himself a creative
intellectual, but his novel Babylone, Babylone never found a publisher. After Sciences Po, rejected by
the intellos of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, he got into the power school of ENA. Graduating,
inevitably, near the top of his class, he followed forebears like Hollande’s copain Jean-Pierre Jouyet
into the Inspection Générale des Finances – the mightiest old boys’ network within the French state.1
Having completed the bingo card of the Parisian elite CV, Macron could now do anything. He did.
He was able to live multiple lives, because he reportedly only needs four hours’ sleep, doesn’t have
children, and works faster than everyone else.
He and Brigitte found an apartment in the 15th arrondissement, on the Left Bank. It was a little west
of the pricey elite cluster around the Luxembourg Gardens, but handy enough for restaurants. In the
Parisian tradition, Macron ate his way to the top. One early colleague recalled: ‘He never ate alone. At

breakfast, lunch or dinner, he always saw someone.’2 His local canteen was the brasserie La
Rotonde, on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, a mirrored-ceiling place whose political heritage goes
back to Lenin and Trotsky, both occasional visitors before the Russian Revolution, when they may have
encountered the regulars Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani.
The penniless Italian-Jewish alcoholic and drug addict Modigliani often paid for his drinks with
paintings. After he died young in 1920, the brasserie’s Auvergnat founder, Victor Libion, assumed that
his worst customer would become even more obscure in death than he had been in life. Libion sent a
kitchen boy to fetch the canvases from the cellar, then burned them on the pavement. Today, replicas of
Modigliani’s priceless works hang over La Rotonde’s eternal red plush and golden lampshades.
The Tafanel family took over the brasserie in 1971. The brothers Gérard and Serge Tafanel first
noticed Macron amid a group of young people brought in regularly by an older man, who seemed to be
a professor and would pay for the whole group. Later, Macron brought work contacts to La Rotonde,
and once even his parents. ‘That’s the art de vivre à la française,’ explains Gérard Tafanel.
‘Everything is done at the table,’ nods Serge. The brothers, dressed in identical blue suits with black
ties, rave about Macron. He would eat without fuss at any small table, and always dropped into the
kitchen to greet the cooks and washers-up.
The grand séducteur traversed the Left Bank charming older elite males as he had Brigitte. Jouyet
was just one of many senior Parisians who left the dining table imagining himself to be the kid’s one
true mentor. Meanwhile, Macron kept in touch with his own generation at énarque weddings –
ceremonies where the caste solidified itself.

Macron worked for the inspection, and for the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, sixty-four years his
senior. He joined the Parisian investment bank Rothschild, after various of his ‘mentors’ made phone
calls to recommend him. Rothschild traditionally hires senior state functionaries, so as to stay close to
the centre of French power; the late President Pompidou had worked there, too.
In Macron’s brief, brilliant banking career, he charmed the boss of Nestlé, never previously a
Rothschild client, into letting the bank help negotiate the company’s purchase of Pfizer’s baby-food
business for $11.9 billion.3 Macron walked away with a bonus of about €1 million. Once he became a
politician, his spell at Rothschild would generate anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
Macron built yet another Parisian network inside the Socialist Party. Years later, I discovered that
he had been an occasional attendee of the Socialist salon I had sat in on in the film producer’s exquisite
house. I don’t remember ever noticing him, but when I checked the old invitations in my inbox, there he
was, at his work address of the time: emmanuel.macron@rothschild.com.
He established base camps in every sector of elite Paris. But he always kept in mind that power in
this city is concentrated in the state. In 2008, at a dinner in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a mentor introduced him
to the senior Socialist politician Hollande. Soon afterwards, writes Guillemette Faure, the young man
invited Hollande to dinner at his flat, and informed him who else would be present. To Hollande’s
amusement, ‘there followed a list of French bosses and decision-makers’.4

When Hollande became president, he appointed Macron as his counsellor. One man who
encountered Macron in government at the time told me that at 6 a.m., after all-night economic
negotiations, when everyone else in the room had begun to snarl, Macron alone would still be fresh,
and courteous even to the cleaning lady.
He quit as Hollande’s aide in 2014. Like many elite members of his generation, he spoke fluent
English (in Paris it was becoming a marker of being modern and first-rate) and he agreed to become a
visiting fellow at the London School of Economics. The arrangement would entail spending a night a
week in London. A spiritual Londoner, Macron at this point could have graduated from le petit Paris to
the global elite. Many of his peers were doing just that, draining Paris of brains, reducing it to a mere
national capital. But Macron ended up cancelling his LSE gig: Hollande summoned him back to court to
become economics minister.
In Macron’s ministerial lodgings, the dinners continued remorselessly. To create the illusion of
intimacy, he and Brigitte invited at most eight people per sitting. Artists and actors consorted with
corporate chieftains. Brigitte specialised in getting others to talk.5
All the while, Macron and his peer group of thirtysomething white male alumni of grandes écoles
were growing impatient with their elders. One day in 2015 I visited an aide of his in the maze of
Soviet-style buildings that is the economics ministry. As soon as we sat down, the aide – an énarque
who would later climb to power behind his master – realised, to his embarrassment, that he had
forgotten to rub out a saying scrawled in English on the whiteboard behind his head: ‘If it moves, tax it.

If it still moves, regulate it. If it doesn’t move, subsidise it.’ I looked up the quote later. It was
from an attack on ‘socialism’ by Ronald Reagan. The saying summed up, accurately, how Anglophone
elites viewed France. Many of Macron’s peers sympathised with the anglosaxon diagnosis. Hollande
would never have known Reagan’s phrase, still less quoted it, let alone in English.
To an experienced charmer of older men, Hollande was an easy mark. The president imagined
himself to be Macron’s mentor, and presumed that the youngster would wait his turn – still decades
away – to go for the top job. But meanwhile, Macron was studying Hollande to learn how not to be
president. After work, together with his young technocrat friends, he plotted a new movement. It grew
into a political party, En Marche, which united the senior figures of centre-left and centre-right who had
mixed so amicably at those Parisian dinners.
Helpfully, Hollande completed the destruction of his own reputation. The president had wanted to
be a newspaper columnist, but hadn’t made it. Perhaps to compensate, he spent many happy hours of his
time in the Elysée gossiping with journalists from Le Monde. They eventually published a book that
sank his slim chances of even running for a second term.
In 2017 Macron campaigned for the presidency as a kind of human anti-depressant pill, the
incarnation of renewal. The voters he was targeting were France’s well-educated, well-paid, urban
winners. The Macronian strategy was to unite two groups that differed chiefly in their fashion choices:
hipster centre-left bobos and unhip centre-right bourgeois, both of whom had fenced themselves off in

France’s prettiest urban neighbourhoods. You found them in Paris, but also in exquisitely
liveable Bordeaux and Lyon, and in small towns like Compiègne and Limoges. These urban winners
worked in the professions, fashion or tech, or for successful French multinationals from L’Oréal to
Total. They lived off sushi and international trade, spoke English, and agreed with Macron that France
needed to embrace globalisation. Many of them had done just that in their own lives: in the 2017
campaign, Macron raised more money from French people in Britain than in France’s ten largest
provincial cities combined.
On 23 April, the first round of the presidential elections, he and Brigitte arranged to bring a few of
his campaign staffers to La Rotonde for a post-vote bite. On the day, she warned the Tafanel brothers,
‘If we win, we’ll come with more.’ Phone calls continued throughout the day, and as the forecasts
looked better and better for Macron, the number of expected diners rose: the Tafanels were told to
prepare for forty people, then fifty. In the end, after Macron topped the first round, over 200 diners
showed up, practically bursting out of the Rotonde. TV cameras on the pavement outside captured the
celebrities, the financiers and the champagne.
When Gérard Tafanel came home shattered at about 4 a.m., he turned on the TV to discover that his
brasserie had become infamous. Macron’s dinner was being portrayed as an elite bacchanal to rival
Sarkozy’s ‘Night at Fouquet’s’. The brothers were initially outraged – ‘we are sons of peasants’, says
Gérard, and their prices were nowhere near Fouquet’s – but with hindsight they realised that the
coverage was good for business.
 Two weeks later, the run-off of the election pitted Macron against Le Pen (whose supporters
didn’t speak English). Now the urban winners were supplemented by the large chunk of the population
who couldn’t countenance a far-right president. Macron took 66 per cent of the vote.
He had never eaten alone in Paris, but in spirit he had travelled alone to the presidency. Once
elected, he felt no loyalty to his past ‘mentors’. Imagine the chill that descended on Jouyet when his
supposed protégé didn’t reply to his congratulatory text messages. Then Macron banished him from the
only city on earth: he made Jouyet ambassador to London. The séducteur had killed again. Hollande
descended from the Elysée to an office on the rue de Rivoli, where he found himself with little to do
but have lunch with practically anyone who asked.
As president, Macron continued to dine out. The chosen restaurant would get a call an hour
beforehand, and he would stride in so fast that diners two metres away might miss him. Now, though, he
reserved his charm for more consequential elders, such as Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. He
would discover that they weren’t as clubbable as Hollande and Jouyet.

Macron didn’t just want to be president. He wanted to be a great president. He was going to reinvent
France. ‘We need to create the next 50 years of economic growth,’ he said.6
How? Whereas Hollande had spent his presidency gossiping at Parisian dinners, Macron jetted
around having meetings in English. Every Friday morning he’d metaphorically rush to the Elysée’s

doormat to grab the latest copy of his beloved Economist magazine. Among other things, he
wanted Paris to steal business from post-Brexit London. His elite generation had spent their adult lives
envious of London; now was their chance for revenge. In my interviews with French officials, I noticed
that mentions of Brexit often prompted a smirk. I took this to mean, ‘Those anglosaxon fools have shot
themselves in the foot, and we can take advantage.’
But the UK or US were no longer anybody’s role models for a successful society. The new wonks’
ideal was Scandinavia. Macron’s project was to shift France several latitudes north. To give the
country some of the social mobility of Scandinavia, where children born at the bottom have a better
chance to rise, he halved class sizes in primary schools in deprived neighbourhoods. His reform of the
French labour market – for which he borrowed the word ‘flexicurity’ from Denmark – made hiring and
firing easier. It worked: companies became less frightened to hire, knowing that if things didn’t work
out they wouldn’t have to hang on to the employee until retirement. Unemployment, a French plague
since the early 1980s, embarked on a years-long slide.
Yet the very method of Macron’s Scandinavian project was quintessentially French: a boss telling
sullen underlings what to do is a familiar sight in any French office. Macron had a Parisian faith in the
state – and especially the presidency – as the agent of change. He understood that Hollande had lacked
presidential grandeur, so he cast himself as ‘Jupiterian’. But when most French people looked at him,
they saw a jumped-up little banker dressed up as king.
 14
How to Become French

When the Macron era began, my wife and I were on a quest to become French. For me this was a new
departure, something I had never intended to do.
After all, I had arrived in Paris armed with a burgundy European passport (‘United Kingdom’, it
said on the inside), which allowed me to move around the continent pretty much at will. My poor wife
was a mere American, so I watched pityingly when she began jumping the endless hurdles to make
herself and the kids French. The French state regards Frenchness as the secular equivalent of the
Buddhist state of ‘bodhi’, or ‘enlightenment’, so it makes it deliberately hard to attain.
I wasn’t going to bother. I had only moved to France for a cheap flat. And I came from a family that
had always taken a utilitarian view of nationality. My ancestors figured out early that your passport is
your fate, then managed to upgrade theirs in almost every generation. My great-grandparents were
Lithuanian Jews, subjects of the Russian czar. But in the late nineteenth century Jews were getting out of
the Russian Empire. There was a packet boat that sailed from the Baltics via Britain to South Africa,

so, especially after gold was discovered in Johannesburg in 1886, they followed each other
there. None of my lot struck gold, but the earliest recorded Kuper in Johannesburg ran a bar near what
is now Ellis Park rugby stadium.
My mother was born in Johannesburg, a British citizen through the fluke of having a dad who had
been born in Manchester before his Lithuanian-born parents emigrated again to run a shop in a tiny
Rhodesian town. The family lasted nearly a century in southern Africa, doing well out of apartheid,
before my parents left for England in the early 1960s. Once there, my father became British – first prize
in the nationality lottery, or so it seemed at the time.
Soon afterwards they were off again. I was born in Uganda in 1969, where my dad was teaching at
Makerere University in Kampala. But just around the time that I showed up, my parents’ plan to
dedicate their lives to helping build post-colonial Africa collided with the rise of the brutal Ugandan
military dictator Idi Amin. We went to London, then knocked around a few other countries, and I ended
up spending most of my childhood in a small Dutch town where there weren’t many other
cosmopolitans. I’m sure my dad would rather have found work in Paris, where he’d had a blissful few
months as a student.
Like small-town gay teenagers, small-town cosmopolitans tend to escape to the metropolis the
minute they are old enough. I lived in Berlin, Boston and London before Paris. Over the years here I
became, in effect, an invisible Briton, a de facto European. But on 23 June 2016, I sat up till dawn with
my mouth wide open watching the vote for Brexit on TV. British nationalists had stripped me of my
Europeanness.

I had always found nationalism ludicrous. Why believe that the place where you happened to
be born is superior? Mine turned out to be a minority view. The British prime minister who emerged
from Brexit, Theresa May, branded people like me ‘citizens of nowhere’. Nationalists like her treated
identity as binary: you’re either Us or Them. I was with the philosopher Amartya Sen, who said that
everybody has multiple identities. I was British, Parisian, a Londoner, a dad, a citizen of nowhere, a
Dutch football fan, a South African cricket fan, etc. I knew that my particular attachments weren’t better
than anyone else’s. They just happened to be mine.
Still, one of my strongest identities was European, and Brexit had removed my right to spend the
rest of my life anywhere I wanted in Europe. Especially while a no-deal Brexit threatened, there was
also lots of uncertainty. I wasn’t even sure I could keep living in my flat with my wife and kids. And so,
from the morning after the Brexit vote, I spent my leisure hours collecting a lifetime’s worth of
documents for my naturalisation dossier. Becoming French was the biggest personal admin challenge of
my time in France. I can put it no higher than that.
French administration worships documents, and the most sacred of them all is the birth certificate.
Merely having one is not enough. You have to keep getting it freshly certified, presumably in case the
facts of your birth change. To the French bureaucracy, a birth certificate that’s more than three months
old is about as valuable as an egg that’s more than three months old.
One morning I took the metro to the Ugandan embassy, wondering how to explain the complexities

of my case: a British citizen, born at Mengo hospital in Kampala, emigrated as a baby, now
living in France, etc. But when I walked in and asked the man behind the reception desk if I could get
my birth certificate stamped, his first words were: ‘Brexit, right?’
‘You knew?’ I asked.
He said, ‘Every day this place is full of Brits born in Uganda, coming in with their birth certificates,
trying to become French.’
On the long path to Frenchness, I ran into all kinds of fellow questors. After my language exam,
administered by a French-Armenian woman who moaned to me about the deficient French of Asian
applicants, I got chatting on the pavement outside with an Algerian fast-food chef and a Tunisian
cleaning lady. I briefed them on the test, and tried to reassure them: ‘You both speak fluent French,
you’ll be fine.’ The man replied gloomily, ‘In the restaurant, the lads and I speak Arabic all day,’ and
the woman said, ‘I couldn’t do the grammar even in Arabic at school.’ I hope they made it.
While I waited to naturalise, I went to Paris’s prefecture of police opposite Notre Dame to ask for a
residence permit. The wing for foreigners has various rooms depending on your country’s status: a long
queue for people from former Yugoslavia and other disrespected places; an entire room marked
‘Algerian students’; and another marked ‘Asia-Oceania’, to which, in defiance of geography, post-
Brexit Britons were being sent.
The Asia-Oceania room was so high status it was almost empty. Seconds after I walked in, my
number was called, and a bureaucrat began performing the French bureaucratic ritual of tut-tutting

about my documents. I was missing some essential ones, because the prefecture, cunningly,
hadn’t put them on its list of requirements. But the bureaucrat consulted her boss, and on the spot
granted me a five-year permit, presumably on the grounds that I was employed and white. Because I
hadn’t brought along my wife’s passport, I was officially classed as single – or, in the deflating French
word, ‘célibataire’.

I was still hunting for my documents when, one day in 2017, my wife got the letter in the post: she and
the children had become French. To honour their entry into the Elect, they were invited to a ceremony
in the Panthéon, the secular church of the nation, the place where France buries its greats.
We arrived one summer morning for an unmistakably French event. At 8.30 a.m., 221 new French
people of all colours were jostling outside the Panthéon gate in the rain, everyone pushing to squeeze in
first, restrained by officials eager to remind us that they were the state and we mere citizens. Then we
sat on the pews waiting nearly an hour, while an official tested the sound system by endlessly droning
out the days of the week: ‘Lundi, mardi, mercredi …’ The 221 had clearly attained Parisianness,
because none of them spoke to anyone else.
Theresa May had been mocking a cosmopolitan elite, but our crowd visibly wasn’t that. Even
dressed in their finest, most of them looked dowdy and old. Many migrants only go through the bother
of naturalising decades after their arrival, once their French children are grown up and the parents
accept they are going to die here.

Finally, a speaker welcomed us to the Panthéon. He told us that the crypt beneath our feet
contained everybody from Voltaire to Marie Curie. He added encouragingly: ‘Some of them, like you,
were not born French.’ The Roman-born Pole Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, for
instance, had metamorphosed into the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who fought for France in the First
World War (and died of the ‘Spanish flu’ two days before the Armistice).
We were shown a short film covering the key French themes: protestors, fighter jets, praying
Muslims, vegetable shoppers in a market, armed soldiers patrolling train stations. Next, a bureaucrat
made a bureaucratic speech of which I cannot remember a word, and then we all sang the Marseillaise.
My kids knew it by heart. They sometimes sang it at birthday parties, unselfconsciously, with their
friends, who are the children of Greek and Senegalese and Ivorian and Portuguese immigrants, mixed in
with the odd Auvergnat.
The bureaucrat listed everyone’s home nation: Argentina to Bangladesh, Russia to Senegal: ‘221
new French people,’ she said, and the crowd applauded itself. Especially those from poor countries
had just acquired a life-changing piece of paper.
The moment the ceremony ended, just as we began basking in the miracle of transformation,
functionaries shooed us onto the street. I later learned that although ours was the first ever group to
become French in the Panthéon, we were only the warm-up act. The next group got live music, and one
of their number, a twenty-five-year-old named David who had been born in Chile, made a speech about

being taken hostage by the terrorists who attacked the Bataclan nightclub in 2015. One terrorist
had asked him, ‘What do you think of François Hollande?’ and David had replied, ‘I don’t think
anything, I’m not French.’ When the terrorist discovered he was Chilean, David recalled, ‘I sensed a
loss of interest, something that disconnected in his glance.’ That saved David’s life. Having gone
through that, he explained in the Panthéon, he had decided to become French.
By the time he was giving his speech, my family was celebrating over croissants in a nearby café.
They were now French-American dual citizens. I interviewed them about their feelings. Leila said, ‘I
don’t feel different at all. I just feel that it was a waste of time while he was checking the sound
system.’ I told her that in a century, her great-grand-children in Rio or Sofia would be desperately
searching through old boxes for her certificate of naturalisation.
The wife hadn’t noticed any extra Frenchness either: ‘I was hoping I’d become thinner.’ Joey said
he felt ‘normal’, and was disappointed Macron hadn’t come. Leo shrugged, ‘I was already French. No
need to become any more French.’
That was it: they were all already French, but also American, and British. The other people at the
ceremony weren’t going to stop feeling Peruvian or Tunisian, but their faces were glistening regardless.

My own quest for Frenchness inched forward. One afternoon, in an office on a charming little street
near Notre Dame, a bureaucrat interviewed me to check, in essence, whether I was an Islamic
fundamentalist. What did I allow my wife to do? (A better question would have been the other way
round.) At the bureaucrat’s request I then delivered a short lecture on General de Gaulle,
cannily emphasising the upsides, and getting a little too much into it. After a few minutes her eyes
glazed over and she cut me off. Then she demanded a fresh copy of my daughter’s birth certificate.
I heard nothing for nearly a year. Finally, I was summoned to the ministry of interior. Two civil
servants led me past practice rooms for terrorist and other disasters to a basement, where they
interrogated me for an hour, apologising self-consciously for ‘l’administration française’. The focus
of their questions: Was I a spy? Had I ever been contacted by the intelligence services of any country?
This was a sore point: I have always felt offended that Britain’s MI6 never tried to recruit me at
university, even though I was studying German, a major espionage language of the day. Irritatingly, the
spooks did tap up a posher fellow student whose only languages were Latin and ancient Greek. I
imagine that everyone always denies being a spy when asked, so I struggled to make my denial sound
convincing. As the civil servants ushered me out, I asked, ‘Will your suspicions affect my citizenship
application?’ ‘Not at all,’ they reassured me.
They were right. One day, five years after I had begun climbing the French mountain, the letter
arrived: ‘I have the pleasure to inform you that you have acquired French citizenship …’
I had become French – on paper. I still didn’t feel it, and I didn’t expect I ever would. The language
had been too hard-won ever to feel entirely natural. I would never get most of the cultural references –

the set texts from lycée, the 1980s TV programmes, the rap quotes. When I did the washing-up, I
still listened to podcasts in English. And Parisian etiquette would baffle me forever.
But I wasn’t particularly concerned about feeling French. It wasn’t the point. I had been born with a
lucky citizenship, and now I had upgraded again, this time to the number one passport on earth, as
ranked by Kälin and Kochenov’s Quality of Nationality Index. My new carte d’identité would allow
me to spend the rest of my life in a place that suited me well enough. My ancestors would have been
proud.
 15
The Suburbs Win the World Cup

The French system treats parents as know-nothing irritants. Schools and sports clubs try to keep them
out of the way while trained experts – the agents of the Republic – raise the kids. At school, especially
after the terrorist attacks, parents were barely ever allowed through the front gate. At football matches,
we’d stand behind the fence, watching from afar over plastic cups of coffee, discouraged even from
cheering.
In the early years of our kids’ football careers, we parents would grumble to each other about the
quality of play. The children simply chased the ball in a pack. The coaches, the ‘éducateurs’, initially
seemed content just to let them play. But over the years, passing patterns emerged. By the time our kids
were about ten, parents would sometimes exchange glances after yet another sophisticated attacking
move and murmur those words of Parisian praise: ‘Pas mal.’
It turned out our children had landed in global football’s biggest talent pool. Somehow the sport had
become a world-beating sphere of Parisian excellence, like fashion or cuisine.

For decades, the Parisian elite disdained football. When Le Monde newspaper was launched
after the war, and started to grow into the elite’s neighbourhood gazette, it published just one sports
article a week. ‘The reporter writing the column would be given a desk at the end of one corridor in an
eight-square-metre room, not much bigger than a cupboard’, writes Alex Duff in Le Fric.1 François
Truffaut, in his 1959 film Les quatre cents coups (‘The 400 blows’), depicts football as just another of
the horrors that adults impose on boys. In the film an absurdly enthusiastic gym teacher, wearing shorts
and doing silly arm exercises, marches a class through Paris to go and play a match. Behind his back,
the boys peel off one by one.
Western Europe’s biggest city didn’t even have a serious football club until 1970, when the
couturier Daniel Hechter helped merge two smaller clubs to form Paris Saint-Germain. Le Monde only
launched a regular daily sports page in 1995.
But by then the city’s suburbs were filling with kids who didn’t have much to do beyond play
football. In most banlieues, the football club grew into a dominant local institution, on a par with the
church or the mosque. At first, much of the local talent probably went unscouted. Not a single starter in
the French team that became European champions in 1984 grew up in the Paris region.
Gradually, though, scouts started making the drive out to the banlieues. In 1998 the French team that
beat Brazil in the World Cup final in the new Stade de France, in Paris’s poorest suburban territory,
Seine-Saint-Denis, starred two immigrant Parisians. Patrick Vieira had arrived from Senegal aged nine,

while the French Caribbean Lilian Thuram, in a classic example of banlieue mixité, had first
played football for a club called Portugais de Fontainebleau. Thierry Henry, who came from my friend
Julien’s banlieue of Les Ulis, had performed delicious cameos in France’s earlier matches in the
tournament.
 I was in the Stade de France for the final, and then in a café at Opéra till dawn, and it’s still the
happiest I’ve ever seen Paris. In fact, it was the happiest French communal moment since the Liberation
of 1944, with the difference that in 1998 all French people were on the same side. Parisians literally
danced in the streets, cheering their ‘Black-Blanc-Beur’ (‘Black-White-Son of Arab’) team. When they
sang, ‘On a gagné!’, ‘We have won’, they didn’t just mean in football.
Even then, the victory was more complicated than simply everyone feeling French. Alongside the
French flags were many Algerian ones, waved in honour of France’s hero of the night, Zinedine Zidane,
whose parents had come from a Berber-speaking region of Algeria.
Still, for boys in the banlieues, 1998 became a vision of how they could become French. Having got
the message early on that elite education wasn’t for them, most tried to express their talents in other
domains. The footballer Nicolas Anelka, the comedian Jamel Debbouze and the actor Omar Sy grew up
together in the impoverished banlieue of Trappes. French rap started in the Parisian banlieues, and
eventually displaced balladeers like Serge Gainsbourg and Jacques Brel as the country’s most popular
music genre. Victor Wembanyama, a seven-foot-two basketball prodigy from the western banlieues,

son of a Congolese-origin father and a white French mother, was the first overall pick in the
NBA draft in 2023. Some other banlieusards expressed their ambitions through drug dealing, and a tiny
minority through armed jihad.
In football, once the suburban talent came on stream, France became the world’s most consistently
successful national team. From 1998 to 2022, les Bleus reached four of the seven World Cup finals,
winning two of them. I once asked Paul Pogba, who made it from the banlieues to the French team, why
the suburbs produced such good players. He replied, ‘Because there is only football. Frankly, the
people in the neighbourhoods sometimes can do stupid things that take them down a bad path. But there
is football to help us.’ Banlieue kids played outside to escape their cramped apartments, and weren’t
distracted by holiday trips or violin lessons. Train-deprived Les Ulis produced the French
internationals Patrice Evra and Antony Martial as well as Henry.
Pogba grew up with his mother and twin elder brothers in the north-eastern suburb of Roissy-en-
Brie. Their little white apartment block still stands beside a stone ‘Terrain Multi-Sports’, with
basketball hoops and mini football goals. Pogba’s immigrant dad from Guinea trained his sons using
balls that he had pumped up to be rock-hard. If the boys could shoot with those, ordinary footballs
would be a cinch.
A short walk from the Pogba building is a state-funded football club with accredited coaches, US
Roissy. In the solitary stand of the main field, I asked Pogba’s childhood coach, Sambou Tati, a local
man who had become club president, whether little Paul always wanted to become a pro.

‘All the boys want to be pro,’ Tati replied. ‘The only problem was that he dribbled. I’d say,
“No Paul, you lose time.”’ And Tati mimed Pogba’s wailed response: ‘Waaah!’ But the French football
system taught Pogba. At thirteen, he was recruited into the academy of Le Havre, the port town 200
kilometres from Paris. Aged fifteen, he graduated to Manchester United, while his twin brothers
became journeymen professionals.
Tati unlocked the door of a little stockroom inside the grandly named ‘Bureau football’, and
showed me shirts signed by the three Pogbas. Each had written the identical inscription: ‘For my first
dream club.’ Years later, one of the twins, Mathias, would be arrested after being accused of joining a
gang armed with assault rifles that tried to extort €13 million from Paul.
Over time, Parisian banlieusards filled the national team, les Bleus. Ever more of the players were
of sub-Saharan African origin, reflecting the latest wave of French immigration. Their rise resonated
beyond football. In France as in many countries, the men’s national football team is regarded as the
nation made flesh. Those eleven young men in blue polyester shirts incarnated contemporary France.
Les Bleus morphed into a kind of device for debating race.
A team of non-white expatriate multimillionaires seemed designed to press practically every French
button. In the twenty-first century, the relationship between Bleus and population degenerated into a bad
marriage in which one partner kept horribly betraying the other. The nadir was hit in Knysna, South

Africa in 2010, when the team, squabbling with their coaches, went on strike mid-World Cup.
The image of refuseniks encased in headphones sulking on the team bus (‘the bus of shame’) stuck in
French collective memory. The moment the banlieusards stopped winning, they became banlieusards
again. The Left Bank but increasingly far-right philosopher Alain Finkielkraut derided the team as
‘Black-Black-Black’.
After Knysna, the new national coach, Laurent Blanc, and other officials at the French football
federation secretly debated quotas to limit the number of black kids getting into youth academies. The
discussion leaked, yet none of the officials was forced to resign. Many French fans probably supported
their plans.
For years after ‘the bus of shame’, the home crowd in the Stade de France was so cold that Pogba
sometimes felt as if he were playing away from home. Approval ratings for les Bleus were polled
almost as assiduously as the French president’s, and in one survey in 2013, 82 per cent of French
people felt negatively about the team. In part, the grumbling was typically French, diagnosed Danny
Cohn-Bendit, football fan, long-time green politician in Germany and France, and the leader of Paris’s
1968 student revolution. ‘France is a whiny country,’ he told me. ‘It’s a deep-seated part of French
culture.’
Les Bleus hit a new nadir on 13 November 2015, when it emerged that their forward Karim
Benzema had tried blackmailing his teammate Mathieu Valbuena over what instantly became known to
every French person simply as ‘le sextape’. That night, 130 people were murdered in the attacks on
cafés and the Bataclan. Incommensurate though the two events were, both heightened French anxieties

about young men of immigrant Muslim origin. Lilian Thuram, the full-back of 1998 who had
become an anti-racism campaigner, decoded attitudes for me: black footballers were required to be
exemplary because they were considered ‘not quite legitimate’.
But after 2015, the relationship between nation and team began to thaw. Speaking symbolically, les
Bleus brought their angry partner flowers. When they stepped off the team bus, they sometimes actually
smiled at fans. They were under instructions to belt out la Marseillaise before games. The team kit was
redesigned to look like rugby shirts, with tight chests and wide collars, presumably in an attempt to
borrow some of that sport’s popularity – rugby is an emblem of white, rural, south-western France.
By this time, my kids were playing football. Leila was almost the only girl in the club, and was
treated as a freak who shouldn’t be passed to. I always tried to be a hands-off football dad, watching
quietly from the touchline, never shouting at my kids or the referee. The only time I strode enraged onto
the field was during a training session, when several of Leila’s teammates were rolling on the ground
laughing at her weak shot. I felt guilty: the reason she couldn’t shoot yet was that I had started her at the
club two years late, because of my unthinking assumption that girls didn’t play football.
Paris has strict rules for how women should dress, move and hold themselves. These rules – made
mostly by men – privilege elegance over vigour, freedom, or even man-pleasing sensuality. So Leila
reported that when she took the métro to training in her tracksuit, old ladies glared at her. Football
helped turned her into a feminist. But sticking with the game wasn’t easy. There were so few

female players of her age that she ended up joining a girls’ team in a banlieue thirty minutes
away. Eventually, she quit.
It was much easier for my sons, who found their place in a male world. Every day, they honed their
technique kicking around with other boys on the local play street. Like boys everywhere, they dreamed
of becoming professional footballers – except that for boys in Paris, this wasn’t just a dream. Scouts
from around Europe were scouring the Parisian ‘basin’. Even our little neighbourhood club had set up
some sort of partnership with a French second-division club. A Turkish-Senegalese boy in my sons’
team had an older brother who had joined the youth academy of FC Toulouse, in the top French
division. I asked his dad what the level there was like. ‘About the same as our team here,’ he replied.
My sons’ coach, Mustapha, who had only joined an amateur football club aged fifteen, turned pro
and ended up playing in the Portuguese third division. I’d watch my kids play on banlieue fields named
after heroes who had grown up there: the ‘Stade Blaise Matuidi’ in Asnières-sur-Seine. With all that
around you, how could you not dream? A Congolese immigrant dad at our club, whose own life seemed
to have run into disappointments, was training his kid to be the next Thierry Henry.
Our French-Portuguese friend Tomás, who had ascended from the working class by going to
university, worried that football might distract his son from the true path. One day we were in a van
driving to a tournament in Limoges, Tomás, Julien and I in front, our eight-year-old boys gabbing about

football behind us. At a traffic light, Tomás leaned back and said, ‘Boys, you do know that none
of you is ever going to be a professional footballer?’ The kids slumped into a dumbfounded silence,
while Julien and I screamed with laughter.

Among our neighbourhood friends, it was customary for several families to club together to buy a joint
gift for a child’s birthday. At the parties my boys attended in spring 2018, the gift was always obvious:
the rugby-style France football shirt. By then, les Bleus had redeemed themselves through endless
displays of humble patriotism. Shortly before the World Cup in Russia, one poll found that 61 per cent
of French people now approved of them, even if, predictably, three of the four most popular players
were white. Just to show the population how unspoiled they were, the team was going to spend the
World Cup in a depressing-looking four-star hotel outside Moscow.
The long-term growth of the Parisian banlieues – and all those state-funded artificial fields – had
paid a football dividend. About half the starters for les Bleus that World Cup came from the Paris
region. Many other Parisians played for the African countries where their parents had come from. In
fact, calculated the Serbian sports sociologist Darko Dukic, if you added all the national teams
together, Greater Paris had produced sixty players and coaches who had participated in the previous
five World Cups – more than any other metropolitan area on earth. The city probably produced more
talent than all of North America and Asia combined.
I spent the 2018 tournament in Russia, reporting for the Financial Times, but I often felt that the real

action was happening back home. For France’s games, each of my sons’ gang of friends took
turns to host a viewing party. Parents and kids would cram into somebody’s apartment, cheer on les
Bleus over pizza, then sing Beatles songs together. Our living-room walls were left smeared with red-
white-and-blue face-paint after the children bounced around celebrating the 4–3 victory over
Argentina.
When school ended, and most Parisians disappeared for the summer, my wife and kids watched the
France–Belgium semi-final in a local café where the customers howled the Marseillaise before kick-
off. Afterwards, crowds trooped up the street to Place de la République. The last time it had filled up
like that was for the ‘Republican march’ after the Charlie Hebdo massacre three years earlier.
The revelation of the World Cup was France’s nineteen-year-old forward Kylian Mbappé. He had
grown up a short bus ride from Paris, in the north-eastern suburb of Bondy, which was built on a forest
where highwaymen used to lie in wait for stagecoaches leaving Paris. By the mid-nineteenth century,
the city’s excrement was being dumped in Bondy. A hundred years later, immigrants from dozens of
different nationalities began to arrive.
Mbappé was a typical banlieue mix: his father Wilfrid was from Cameroon, his mother Fayza is of
Algerian origin, and their relationship had encountered initial hostility from some people around them.
In Bondy, the Mbappés grew into local pillars of the Republic. Fayza ran leisure activities for children,
while Wilfrid coached at the banlieue’s football club. Kylian’s childhood bedroom overlooked the
field.

The Mbappés took in an older boy who had immigrated from Congo without his parents, and
nurtured him into a professional footballer. When Kylian’s school class went on a trip to Greece, Fayza
made sure that every child could come along whatever their home circumstances. Her ambition for her
son was to attend HEC, the elite Parisian business school. It didn’t happen. By 2018, a giant image of
Mbappé in full flight festooned the side of one of Bondy’s fading 1960s apartment blocks.
In Russia, France made it to the final against Croatia. Pogba, the Bleus’ off-the-field leader, who
delivered stirring pre-match speeches in the changing-room, reflected later: ‘I felt more pressure going
to play for Roissy-en-Brie against Pontault-Combault [the next banlieue], with the whole
neighbourhood there to insult us, and ready to smack us if we won, than I did for a World Cup final.’
My friend James McAuley of the Washington Post went to watch the game in Bondy, where he
found a big chunk of the suburb’s multiethnic population seated in front of outdoor screens, waving
French tricolours for ‘Kylian National’. These weren’t the so-called ‘lost territories of the Republic’,
concluded James. This was the Republic – even if Parisians inside the Périph hadn’t yet realised.
Mbappé would tell me years later: ‘I have always felt French. Of course I have origins that I don’t
deny, and which are part of who I am. But I have made my whole life in France, and never at any point
did anybody make me feel I wasn’t at home here.’
Inevitably Mbappé scored in the final, and France won 4–2. Straight after the game, in what was
obviously a planned PR gesture, the players literally wrapped themselves in French tricolours. Macron

planted a kiss on Mbappé’s forehead. At the post-match press conference, a journalist was just
putting the first question to the French coach Didier Deschamps when a dozen French players burst in,
chanting Deschamps’ name, and spraying all of us in the room with water, energy drinks and
champagne. They danced, sang, disappeared, then burst in and did it again. Just before they finally left,
Pogba, the ringleader, shouted, ‘Vive la France! Vive la Republique!’
A few months later, Mbappé brought the little golden trophy home to Bondy. It was a way of telling
the place, ‘Thank you for everything you have done for me’. In return, he had given his banlieue a
legend, a hero’s journey, and an identity. From that day in Moscow onwards, Bondy would be known as
Kylian Mbappé’s hometown.
 16
The Revolution Against Paris

Our boulevard is on the traditional route of French protest marches. Some mornings we’ll step out of
our building, having forgotten to check the French news, only to find the Communist Party kiosk
literally on our doorstep and thousands of marchers with banners flowing past. On rough days, violent
protestors – known as casseurs, breakers – roam the boulevard burning rubbish bins and smashing bus
shelters. In the evenings, non-white garbage collectors clean up the mess.
By the time my children were five, they knew what a strike was. When my son Leo was about
eleven, he began spending his Saturdays attending the demonstration du jour at Place de la République.
He’d come home with stories of being tear-gassed by police, or kidnapped by a local pharmacist who
had locked him in her shop until a riot was over. Mostly, I was happy for him: my small-town
childhood had been duller.
About eighteen months into Macron’s presidency, in late 2018, possibly the biggest series of
protests in postwar France broke out: the uprising of the ‘gilets jaunes’, the ‘yellow vests’. The gilets

jaunes were marching in an age-old Parisian tradition. But there was a twist: this time they
were protesting, in part, against Paris itself.

The density and walkability of Paris make it ideal for revolutions. Haussmann may have hoped to stymy
uprisings by building wide boulevards that troops could fire down, but his avenues turned out to be
ideal for demonstrations too.
Every generation of Parisian protestors knows it is marching in the footsteps of May 1968, August
1944 (the uprising against the German occupiers), 1871 (the Paris Commune), 1832 (the barricades of
Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables) and 1789. Each new uprising is a homage to past uprisings. And
Parisians will rise up against anything. When Jean-Paul Sartre’s coffin was carried through the city in
1980, some of the mourners said they were protesting against his death. In my time, during a long
garbage strike, there was a protest in support of rats.
The French phrase for a wave of protests is ‘mouvement social’, and that’s true in the most literal
sense: protests here are extremely social. Going on a Parisian manifestation – known affectionately as
a manif – is a group outing, a chance to catch up with your friends, eat hot dogs together, smoke and
flirt. On the radio on Saturday mornings, protestors wish each other ‘Bonne manif!’ You typically
march in a cluster of people you know: members of your local party or your niche NGO or the trade
union at your workplace. This circle might be half of your life, the source of your friendships and your
spouse.
The ambient mood of a good manif is joyous anger. The highlight of the day is often a fight with the

riot police, the CRS, who, in the French policing tradition, treat the population as the enemy.
They make no effort to mingle with the crowd, never chatting with demonstrators to defuse trouble, but
stand waiting for the moment they can unleash their tear gas and batons. Many demonstrators are
waiting for the same moment: it makes the perfect Instagram post.
In the evenings, exhausted protestors gather at République, where they sit on the giant Marianne
statue – ‘to eat, to rest, to wait for someone, or to make a phone call’, wrote our neighbourhood
sociologist, Sarah Gensburger.
Manifs are so glamorous – a form of street theatre – that they are also a kind of pose. For teenagers,
going on a demo is a French rite of passage. During one mouvement social over pensions, my
daughter’s lycée was periodically blockaded by pupils waving banners with slogans like ‘Against
Capital’, even though nobody was sure what capital was, and they weren’t going to retire for half a
century at best. One morning, the blockaders closed off all entrances to the school, stopping anyone
from getting in. Then, at twelve o’clock, they went inside to get lunch in the canteen, and school
resumed.
A friend of my daughter’s at a nearby school conspired with other pupils and teachers to turn their
own blockade into an occupation: a sleepover with fun activities, like making banners and repainting
classrooms. The friend planned to sleep at school till the Saturday. ‘Then I’ll take my weekend.’ I was
told that even at one of our local primary schools, the children ritually marched up the grand staircase
at the start of each morning chanting, ‘Macron démission!’ (‘Macron, resign!’).

But the magic of Parisian protests is that they are serious as well as symbolic. They are
France’s main counterweight to the almighty president, who is the nearest thing in an advanced
democracy to an elected dictator. The president usually has a majority in parliament. If he doesn’t,
there’s a clause in the constitution, 49.3, which allows him to ram laws through without a vote.
In fact, you could describe the workings of the Fifth Republic without even mentioning parliament.
France has three branches of government: the presidency, the judiciary, and the street. If the president
wakes up one morning wanting to do something, only the street can stop him – by stopping the country
itself through protests and strikes.
And for maximum impact, this has to be done under the president’s nose, in Paris. Even French
revolutions are over-centralised. The uprisings of 1789, 1944 and 1968 were led by Parisians. By
contrast, the car-burning uprisings in the city’s banlieues in 2005 (and, briefly, in 2023) suffered from a
fatal weakness: they barely penetrated the Périph into Paris, and so they petered out fruitlessly.
Over the years, and especially in the era of Macron, the protests against Parisian power started
turning against Paris the city.
We’ve seen that western Europe’s largest territory is ruled like a colony, by technocrats working
from a few square kilometres in the capital city. Ordinary French people’s lives feel determined, right
down to the day they can retire, by a Parisian pretend meritocracy from which they were excluded at
birth. Their resentment grew in the twenty-first century as Paris, like metropoles everywhere, got richer
and richer. It detached from its French hinterland: now it had more links with London than with

Limoges. As the city’s house prices rose, most French provincials could no longer even imagine
buying the shabbiest Parisian apartment.
Then, to cap it all, along came a president who, despite his small-town origins, came off as a
Parisian caricature: the soft face, the tailored suits, the bulging bank account, and the overeducated
diction in which he gave ordinary people their orders. In short, Macron reminded every French person
of their boss.
Soon after taking power he had abolished the wealth tax, hoping to lure home rich French people
who were sheltering their money in London, Brussels or Switzerland. This earned him the enduring
label of ‘le président des riches’. It all felt especially galling to French people given their country’s
promise, proclaimed from the facades of every primary school: ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’. France
isn’t the UK and US, where the power of social class or money is frank.
Almost from day one of the Macron era, French provincials and Parisian technocrats got stuck in a
mutually abusive relationship. The more the provincials defied the technocrats, the more the
technocrats defied the provincials. Macron grumbled about ‘refractory Gauls’ who reflexively opposed
everything the president wanted to do. He seemed to see himself as the grown-up, and they as the
children who didn’t understand reality.
When the ‘président des riches’ added a few cents to the fuel tax, he didn’t imagine the children
would get upset. But his Parisian caste hadn’t grasped how much people in sparsely populated France

beyond the Périph relied on their cars. Also, to French provincials, those few cents hurt. The
French deal is more or less that people hand over a large chunk of their income to the state, and in
return get free education, healthcare, pensions, and sometimes even subsidised holidays. No other
country spends a bigger share of its national income looking after the population. This means that the
popular French refrain that their state has become ‘neolibéral’ (or possibly ‘ultralibéral’) is
ludicrous. But the flipside of the French deal is that even people on modest incomes pay so much in
taxes and charges that many run out of money at the proverbial ‘end of the month’. That’s why everyday
penny-pinching is more common here than in the northern European countries that the French like to
treat as their peer group. People will fill in long social-security forms to reclaim €2.80 for a medicine,
or buy the baguette classique for €1 instead of the superior baguette tradition for about €1.20. When
the price of petrol changes, they notice.
In May 2018 a woman named Priscillia Ludosky published an online petition against the fuel tax.
Ludosky lived in a distant banlieue south-east of Paris. She was in her early thirties, the daughter of
French-Caribbean immigrants, whose Polish name may have come from a freed slave. She herself was
a beneficiary of state largesse: she was living off a two-year government grant to launch a business
selling aromatherapy and cosmetics.
Her petition only got a few hundred signatures before the summer holidays. She pushed it on social
media, and after Le Parisien newspaper wrote about it in autumn 2018 the number of signatures soared
past one million. Then she and a male truck driver (with whom she later fell out) called a
demonstration. They had created the gilets jaunes.

People in France’s exurbs, banlieues and small towns donned high-visibility yellow vests –
an item that all French motorists must keep in their cars – and converted their desolate local
roundabouts into public spaces complete with impromptu buvettes, refreshment stalls. They were
recreating the community of urban life, decoded the Parisian urbanist Jean-Louis Missika.
On Saturdays, they marched on Paris, like the Barbarians come to sack Rome, only amid clouds of
tear gas. Mostly white, overweight, and dressed in artificial fibres, the protestors were instantly
identifiable as out-of-towners. They were demanding to be seen by Paris.
The trade unions had long tried to control the French street. But the gilets jaunes rejected unions
and political parties. Their ideology was to be leaderless – the opposite of France itself. They weren’t
going to have some jumped-up king telling everyone what to do. Since they wouldn’t let anyone speak
for their movement, it was hard to work out what they wanted: they seemed to be demanding both lower
taxes and better public services. Their collective voice was violence rather than words. Waving
effigies of the ‘banker president’, they smashed symbols of Parisian wealth: luxury stores, bank
windows and the restaurant Fouquet’s.
Like most banlieusards, Ludosky only ever came to the city for work and demonstrations. But one
day I arranged to meet her in a noisy café in eastern Paris. I found a quiet black woman in a summer
dress sitting unnoticed at a corner table.
 The gilets jaunes, she told me, had come out of ‘a cumulation of injustices’. Yet even she had been

shocked to discover how much mistrust her fellow protestors felt for politicians, and how they
yearned to transform France. Once the movement began, older people would come up and tell her,
sometimes weeping from hope: ‘Merci, merci, merci! It’s too late for us, we did our demos, we did
1968.’
Ludosky thought the movement had a lot to do with the relationship between Paris and its
surroundings. She explained, ‘When you are in Paris, you are at the heart of the world. If you can say, “I
live in Paris”, you are saying, “I am from a higher social class, I have status”.’ On days when the gilets
jaunes came to town, she reflected, ‘I found more solidarity than hostility from Parisians. But it was
sometimes astonishing to go on a passionate demonstration and see people on a café terrace, enjoying
life. The image of that is incredible.’
The long winter of the gilets jaunes ended only when Macron climbed down. He scrapped the rise
in the fuel tax, and went on a penitential listening tour of small-town France. It didn’t solve much. The
abusive relationship between the population and the Parisian elite had become unsustainable. The
ruling caste sniffed the air and caught the whiff of 1789. There was nothing else for it: the elite was
going to have to reform.
 17
A Sexual Reckoning with 1968

Parisian elite corruption had long been considered a natural phenomenon, like the weather. For many
years, almost the only elite member even bothering to fight it was the judge-turned-politician Eva Joly,
who was, not by chance, a Norwegian immigrant. She finally acquired some allies once Macron’s
generation of slightly uncool technocrats joined the elite. They had seen more of the world beyond
France, and had absorbed some foreign puritanism. ‘Mormons,’ sniffed Jouyet. Macron understood that
when politicians stole even modest amounts of money, or took little perks they didn’t deserve, it
angered voters. And since he rode alone, without friends, he was happy to sacrifice other politicians.
Almost immediately after he became president, his parliament passed a law on ‘the moralisation of
politics’: no longer could MPs hire relatives, spend without providing receipts, or moonlight as
consultants.
Gone, too, were the days of MPs having six-hour Michelin-starred lunches with pretty interns in
tow. Mathieu Pacaud, who ran the restaurant Divellec, which had been Mitterrand’s favourite,

grumbled to me after Macron’s ascension that modern politicians no longer ‘have any money’.
The new law only allowed MPs to expense €50 for lunch, so Pacaud had begun offering a set menu for
€49. In any case, the Macronist parliamentary majority included an unprecedented number of women –
another Scandinavian marker – and they tended to stick to Diet Coke.
The most prominent individual victim of Macron’s elite reforms was the man who had been the
initial favourite to become president in 2017, former prime minister François Fillon. Fillon liked
money. Just a few years earlier, he had posed unabashedly for Paris Match with his family on the lawn
of his enormous medieval chateau. He was the candidate of bourgeois Catholic France, whose spiritual
headquarters are the 7th and 16th arrondissements of Paris, and the first scandal that tripped him up
(and let Macron in) was quintessentially bourgeois: Fillon had accepted a gift of bespoke suits worth
€13,000 from a lawyer linked to African leaders. It then turned out that Fillon had employed his Welsh
wife, Penelope, as a fictitious parliamentary assistant. Over thirty-two years, he had paid her more than
€1 million in state funds for work she didn’t do.
All this was normal in Paris. Lots of politicians employed spouses and accepted gifts. The way
France worked, any ministers who got into legal trouble were judged by a court of their peers, who
tended to the view ‘There, but for the grace of God …’. Now, under Macron, the lenient days were
over. Fillon was ultimately sentenced to four years in prison, with three of them suspended. The
president he had served, Sarkozy, was sentenced to a year for illegal financing of his failed bid for re-

election in 2012. As I write, in 2023, neither man has yet spent a day in prison. Still, by French
standards, this was an end to elite shamelessness.
Some international norms of transparency belatedly reached Paris. Macron’s ministers were taken
off dossiers where they had conflicts of interest, though that only highlighted the sheer number of these
conflicts within the Parisian ruling caste: Marlène Schiappa, when she was junior minister for the
social economy, had to hand in much of her portfolio after shacking up with the boss of a mutual health
insurance provider. Macron’s minister for energy transition couldn’t touch matters involving the petrol
company that her dad used to run, nor deal with the energy company Engie where her ex-husband was a
senior director. And the minister delegate for the digital economy recused himself from anything to do
with Uber, where his sister was a communications chief.
The gilets jaunes had brought the whoosh of the guillotine so close that Macron even promised to
abolish ENA, the academy of presidents, his own alma mater. Admittedly, ‘abolish’ really only meant
‘rename and reform’. Still, that was enough to outrage elite Paris. He also set about scrapping the
grand corps of the civil service, including his own Inspection Générale des Finances. But the deepest
cleansing of the Parisian elite happened beyond elite control, spontaneously, and in the most intimate
sphere of life: sex.
In 2020, Vanessa Springora published a memoir about a relationship she had started at when she
was fourteen with the fifty-year-old writer Gabriel Matzneff. Consent – a title chosen to raise a
question – became an instant bestseller. It helped one of Springora’s readers, a law lecturer named

Camille Kouchner, to find the voice to write her own memoir, La familia grande. Kouchner and
Springora, who had grown up within a short walk of each other in the headquarters of left-wing
intellectual Paris, on the Left Bank near the Jardin du Luxembourg, went beyond simply exposing
individual paedophiles. Their memoirs added up to a counter-attack against the sexual revolution of
1968 – a revolution that had been made by their own parents. Within months, these two short books
helped overthrow the dominant French sexual codes of the previous half century.

You can date the start of the foundational modern French sexual revolution to 8 January 1968, when the
minister for youth and sport, François Missoffe, visited the new university campus in the suburb of
Nanterre to inspect the recently installed swimming pool. Nanterre was ten kilometres west of Paris,
barely connected to the city, and a boring place to live, especially if you were young.
France had been celebrated for centuries as the home of romantic love, but on that winter’s day it
was still a straight-laced, repressive, Catholic nation. The new baby-boom generation – the eight
million French people aged between sixteen and twenty-four in 1968 – struggled for access to sex. The
birth control pill had been legalised three weeks before Missoffe’s visit to Nanterre, but few young
unmarried women could procure it. Abortion remained banned, and many women died having illegal
ones. Régine Deforges, the first female founder of a French publishing house, was about to be
convicted of ‘outrage to good morals’ for publishing the erotic book Irène (originally titled Le con

d’Irène, or ‘Irene’s Cunt’). And on French university campuses that were then filling with baby
boomers, men and women weren’t allowed into each other’s residences. This repression was presided
over by President Charles de Gaulle, born in 1890, whose wife, Yvonne, tried to stop him appointing
divorcees or adulterers to his inevitably all-male cabinet.
When Missoffe arrived in Nanterre on that January day in 1968, he was dismayed to see signs
inviting students to a ‘gang bang’ by the pool. Then a red-haired Franco-German-Jewish student named
Daniel Cohn-Bendit approached him for a light. Puffing away, Cohn-Bendit began complaining about
sexual problems among the young. Missoffe supposedly replied, ‘With a face like yours, no wonder you
have problems of that kind.’ He advised the youth to take a cooling dive in the pool. ‘Now that’s a
response worthy of the Hitler Youth,’ retorted Cohn-Bendit.
By that May, ‘Danny the Red’ was leading what we now know as the 1968 student revolution, with
its playful slogans such as ‘Enjoy unhindered’ and ‘It is forbidden to forbid’. That hot spring, naked
bodies sprawled in Parisian parks. Some women began asserting their right to enjoy sex. In France,
sexual intercourse was invented in 1968 – ‘the first year of the world’, as the French writer Annie
Ernaux called it. Life, she wrote, was suddenly reconceived as ‘a march towards freedom’.
In Gilles Caron’s famous photograph of that spring, Cohn-Bendit is grinning upwards at a helmeted
policeman: youth mocking oppression. De Gaulle branded the student ‘France’s most dangerous
scoundrel’. The far-right newspaper Minute wrote: ‘This Cohn-Bendit, because he is a Jew and a

German, takes himself for a new Karl Marx.’ Whereupon protestors paraded through Paris,
chanting ‘We are all German Jews!’ (The black leftist French MP Aimé Césaire whispered, ‘I am quite
willing to shout it, only nobody will believe me’.)
Within a year of May 1968, de Gaulle had resigned. The old order had crumbled, and the revolution
had updated France. In 2013, when Cohn-Bendit was himself sixty-eight, he told me that the revolution
had taught him something enduring: ‘It gave me the feeling that you can turn the screw of history.’
The place where the soixante-huitards (‘sixty-eighters’) had turned the screw was the Left Bank.
Eric Hazan, veteran chronicler of Paris, wrote that in his 1960s youth, the neighbourhood was ‘the
centre of intellectual and artistic life’: ‘The good bookshops, the best jazz clubs, the good record
shops, the big brasseries, everything that makes a city vibrate was there.’1
The soixante-huitards would rule the Left Bank all their lives. They bought cheap apartments
around the Sorbonne and the Jardin du Luxembourg, joined the cultural elite, and set off on a march
through French institutions. By the twenty-first century, they owned the institutions. And on sexual
matters they remained loyal to their slogan of 1968: ‘It is forbidden to forbid.’
The soixante-huitards were on a lifelong mission to reinvent the world from first principles. This
urge spread to their French contemporaries beyond the rarefied confines of the Left Bank. The parents
of the future economist Thomas Piketty, who themselves hadn’t graduated from high school, were
inspired by 1968 to spend three years raising goats and selling cheese in south-western France. As

Piketty told me sniffily decades later, their activism ‘did not bring them much success in their
professional trajectory’.
Many soixante-huitards became cheerleaders for distant leftist revolutions reinventing other
countries – Castro’s Cuba, Mao’s China, Ho-Chi Minh’s Vietnam and Pol Pot’s genocidal Khmer
Rouge movement in Cambodia. Some of the foreign revolutionaries had actually been shaped by Paris:
Ho-Chi Minh appears to have lived there in the years after the First World War (though the claim that
he worked as a pastry chef in the hotel kitchens of the great Auguste Escoffier is unsubstantiated). Pol
Pot in the early 1950s was a student devouring communist literature on the Left Bank.
The leading French soixante-huitards – almost all of them, obviously, men – gradually grew
disillusioned with leftist revolutions, but they stuck fast to their sexual one. They secured its central
achievement: sexual freedom between consenting heterosexual adults in France. But that didn’t satisfy
them. As the sexual revolution rolled on, many soixante-huitards decided that children needed
liberating too.
In 1974 Gabriel Matzneff, a Parisian Orthodox Christian of Russian origin, published an essay, Les
moins de seize ans (‘The Under-Sixteens’), which would be reprinted for decades. Effectively a
paedophile manifesto, it argued that sexual initiation of adolescents by an elder had been a custom
since antiquity, and was a benefit to society. Many soixante-huitards accepted some version of this
argument. In 1975 Cohn-Bendit, still trying to reimagine ways of living, wrote about erotic encounters

with children in the ‘anti-authoritarian kindergarten’ he ran in Frankfurt. (He later repented for
these ‘fictions’ and denied ever having touched a child. Kindergarten parents and former pupils backed
him.)
Matzneff – whose publisher was Paris’s most prestigious house, Gallimard – wrote a succession of
almost identical, barely fictionalised accounts of his ‘love affairs’ with pubescent girls and boys, in
France and the Philippines. His victims, identified by their real first names, were generally
recognisable to people who knew them. In 1977, his anonymously written petition defending sex
between adults and children was published in the Le Monde and Libération newspapers, signed by le
Tout-Paris of the day – Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes and Bernard Kouchner.
(Michel Foucault refused to sign, but would posthumously be accused of paedophilia.) A large chunk of
the post-1968 Parisian literary elite was endorsing adult-on-child sex, and in France, writers were
heard.
A year after Matzneff’s petition, the country welcomed the filmmaker Roman Polanski, who had fled
the US after pleading guilty to unlawful sex with a thirteen-year-old girl. In 1984 France’s most
celebrated singer, Serge Gainsbourg, sang the suggestive duet ‘Lemon Incest’ with his thirteen-year-old
daughter Charlotte. An accompanying clip showed them canoodling on a giant bed, he topless and she
scantily clad, though both would deny endorsing paedophilia.
A year or two after this, the adolescent Springora began her relationship with Matzneff. At the time
he was living in a tiny apartment, a chambre de bonne (the traditional Parisian top-floor ‘maid’s

room’) near the Luxembourg. The couturier Yves Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Bergé
paid his rent. It was a very Parisian reward for elite membership: not wealth, but the use of a high-
status space. Other elite members helped look after Matzneff. Most of his spending money came from a
small ‘aid to creation’ paid by the National Book Centre, a subsidiary of the ministry of culture. He
was chums with the far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. In 1986, President Mitterrand himself took the
time to write an article for a small literary magazine praising ‘the impenitent seducer’ for ‘the depth of
his thinking’. Mitterrand also invited him to lunch at the Elysées. (Mitterrand later repudiated
Matzneff’s paedophilia, but only in private.)
Springora’s relationship with Matzneff wasn’t a secret. Her mother and the mother’s close friends
knew, and the police Brigade for the Protection of Minors was tipped off by anonymous letters
(possibly sent, perversely, by Matzneff himself). However, the police weren’t about to give a famous
author much trouble, especially not after he showed them Mitterrand’s article. Even the lowliest
Parisian writer owned a lifetime elite membership card, and the elite made its own rules.
While Matzneff was carrying on with Springora, a few streets away on the Left Bank the soixante-
huitard law professors Evelyne Pisier and Olivier Duhamel were raising a family. Pisier had met her
first husband Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Doctors Without Borders, when they visited Cuba as
part of a French delegation of friends of the revolution. On that trip Fidel Castro himself had done
Pisier the honour of choosing her for a night’s pleasure. (Their relationship would continue for four
years.)

When Pisier had children, her mantra was, ‘It is forbidden to forbid’. After divorcing
Kouchner, she married Olivier Duhamel, a cabinet minister’s son who had been a student at Nanterre in
1968. The family spent summers in the 1980s with like-minded friends in the Duhamel family’s palatial
summer house in the south of France. Children and adults hung out naked together by the pool. ‘Some
parents and children would kiss on the mouth,’ Pisier’s daughter Camille Kouchner would recall in her
memoir, La familia grande, published in 2021. ‘Young men were offered to older women.’
At the time, Pisier had reassured her daughter: ‘There’s no harm in it, my little Camille. I know
what’s going on. Fucking is our liberty.’ The children’s dormitory at the summer house was covered
with posters from 1968. Camille fell asleep each night beneath the ironic slogan, ‘Be young and shut
up’.
In Parisian elite tradition, these summer holidays doubled as networking retreats. Thrillingly,
several members and hangers-on of the ‘familia grande’ prospered within Mitterrand’s Socialist
government from 1981 to 1995.
Some parents in this milieu believed in initiating their children into sex. Pisier arranged the
deflowering of her adolescent son by a family friend twenty years his senior, and urged eleven-year-old
Camille to start having sex. It was in this atmosphere that Camille’s twin brother, then aged about
fourteen, confided in his sister that their stepfather Duhamel had begun entering his room at night and
sexually abusing him. Camille wasn’t altogether surprised: after his nocturnal visits to her brother,
Duhamel would come and sit on her bed and chat with her, presumably to win her silence. Neither

child was sure that the incest was wrong. The brother was plagued by the thought that since he
hadn’t resisted Duhamel he may have consented. When the boy finally dared tell his mother what was
going on she accused him of trying to steal her man.
The 1980s nonchalance around paedophilia and incest were hardly uniquely French. In my
secondary school in the Netherlands at the time, a boy in my year was rumoured to have been sexually
abused by his father. But nobody used the term ‘sexually abused’. Instead, in the changing room before
gym classes, the boy would sit in red-faced silence while the head bully and his claque chanted, ‘He
screwed his father!’
Incest and paedophilia happen in all kinds of milieu. But in France they were protected by powerful
soixante-huitards who didn’t worry about sexual consent. After all, fucking was freedom. In 2005,
Frédéric Mitterrand, the late president’s nephew, could write in his book about sexual tourism that he
had ‘got into the habit’ of paying ‘young boys’ for sex. The book won a prize, and he served as minister
of culture from 2009 to 2012.

The journalist Tristane Banon encountered soixante-huitard attitudes after she began telling people that
she had been assaulted by the politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn in 2002. ‘DSK’ had invited the
twenty-three-year-old to interview him in a flat on the Left Bank, but when she arrived, he turned off
her voice recorder and asked to hold her hand. They ended up fighting on the floor until she managed to
flee. As soon as she had made it to her car, her clothes askew, she received a text message from him:
‘So do I scare you?’2

Banon didn’t go to the police. She explained later that they would have told her ‘Go home
and don’t bother people who are working’. Her mother Anne Mansouret – an ex-lover of DSK’s, and
an official in his Socialist Party – dissuaded her from pressing charges. Mansouret already knew all
about DSK’s tendencies, and anyway, he had told her, by way of apology: ‘I blew a fuse.’
For years Banon felt shame about the assault. In 2007 she told the story on 93 Faubourg Saint-
Honoré, a late-night TV chat show that was structured like a Parisian dinner party at a fancy address.
The host exclaimed, ‘J’adore!’, and the male guests treated the whole thing as hilarious. Although the
TV channel beeped out DSK’s name, the story made it into the media, where it was generally treated as
a saucy little tale.
DSK’s sexual proclivities were an open secret within the Parisian elite. Also in 2007, around the
time that he became head of the International Monetary Fund, with President Sarkozy’s backing, Jean
Quatremer, Libération’s correspondent in Brussels, blogged about Strauss-Kahn’s issues with women:
‘Too heavy-handed, he often borders on harassment. A failing known to the media but about which no
one speaks (we are in France).’ After all, in France it was forbidden to forbid.
Only the French masses were not informed about DSK, except through the occasional gag. The
comedian Stéphane Guillon joked on the France Inter radio station in 2009 that ‘exceptional measures’
had been taken in its studios to prepare for a visit from DSK. Women in the editorial department had
been told to wear ‘long, conservative and totally anti-sex outfits’.

By early 2011, most of the Parisian left-wing political elite, in full knowledge of DSK’s
taste for sexual violence, was backing him as the Socialist candidate for the presidential elections of
2012. He tested the waters for a campaign under the Anglophone slogan ‘Yes, we Kahn’. Aided by elite
silence, he was topping the opinion polls, well ahead of Sarkozy, until in May 2011 a chambermaid in
New York accused him of assaulting her in Room 2806 of Manhattan’s Sofitel hotel. Had DSK faced
the same accusation in Paris, it might never have come out. In New York, he was arrested.
Even then, his generation of the Parisian cultural elite still had his back. The feminist Elisabeth
Badinter, a friend of DSK’s then wife Anne Sinclair, expressed her outrage at his arrest. Jack Lang,
former minister of culture, and a signatory of Matzneff’s pro-paedophilia petition of 1977, pointed out
that DSK hadn’t killed anyone. Former prime minister Michel Rocard lamented that the left risked
losing an excellent candidate. The writer Bernard-Henri Lévy (‘BHL’) dismissed Banon as a publicity-
seeker, and complained that American justice was treating his high-status pôte ‘like just another
person’.
Strauss-Kahn was eventually released without charges, but his presidential campaign was derailed.
The soixante-huitards, growing old in their increasingly pricey apartments around the Luxembourg,
grumbled that ‘a new puritanism’ was taking hold in France.
This wasn’t quite right. Most French people remained relaxed about sex between consenting
heterosexual adults. For instance, in a survey by the Pew Research Centre in 2013, only 47 per cent of

French respondents said adultery was always wrong – the lowest proportion of the twenty-one
countries studied. (On the other hand, surveys suggest that the French don’t commit more of it than other
nations.) The difference between most French people and high-Parisian soixante-huitards was that the
former seemed to care about consent. The new French romantic ideal, as in most of the West, had
become the equal relationship. That’s why France, in another shift in sexual mores, in 2013 legalised
the most equal relationship of all: gay marriage.

At about the same time, Gabriel Matzneff won the Prix Renaudot, a major literary prize. This wasn’t so
much an endorsement of paedophilia, or even of his literary merits, but rather the Parisian tradition of
all-white, all-old, and almost all-male juries celebrating their mates. In fact, one juror, a practically
unread novelist named Christian Giudicelli, was not only Matzneff’s publisher but his frequent
companion on 1980s sex-tourist journeys to Manila. Matzneff in his published journals had given him
an English nickname, ‘Eight One One’, after Giudicelli’s room number at Manila’s Tropicana Hotel.
When Matzneff feared a police raid over his relationship with the adolescent Springora, Guidicelli had
hidden her incriminating photographs and letters.
Thirty years later, Giudicelli told his fellow jurors – most of them members of the soixante-huitard
cohort – that Matzneff was ill with prostate cancer, lovesick, penniless, and persecuted by prudes.
Paedophile books no longer sold like they used to, explained Giudicelli. Matzneff had little more to

live on than his state stipend. The poor chap needed a morale boost. The jurors, over their
traditional restaurant meal, agreed. Most denizens of the Parisian literary world knew and liked the
polite, charming Matzneff, and if he outraged some petit bourgeois provincial moralists, then so much
the better. Accepting his Prix Renaudot, Matzneff said, ‘Sulphurous and free writers are essential to
allow the nation to breathe’.
 But by that time, a later Parisian literary generation was rebelling against 1968. The novelist Michel
Houellebecq had been born in the French island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean in 1956 (or perhaps
1958, he thinks) but, in his words, his parents ‘lost interest in my existence pretty quickly’. His hippie
mother abandoned him and went off with a new boyfriend on a voyage of self-liberation to Brazil. Her
baby was packed off to live with a grandmother in what was then French Algeria. Houellebecq was
later raised by his other grandmother in a distant Parisian banlieue, and grew into a declared enemy of
the 1960s. He ended up incapable of believing in anything. His standard main character is a godless
Frenchman living unrooted in an ugly modernity in which sex and everything else have been reduced to
a consumerist free market. Houellebecq told me he was the atomised man that his novels decry: ‘I’m
railing against myself.’
The most prominent female voice in modern French literature was the French-Moroccan Parisian
Leila Slimani. Her first novel, Dans le jardin de l’ogre (2014, later translated into English as Adèle)
recounts a woman’s endless string of joyless sexual encounters. It can be read as a retort to The Sexual
Life of Catherine M. (2002), by soixante-huitard art critic Catherine Millet, which recounts a

woman’s endless string of joyous encounters. Slimani told me, ‘As a woman, to be very honest,
the discovery of sexuality for me was a real disappointment. I think sexuality is very often sad or
melancholic. When I was a teenager, watching movies or reading books, they are giving you a very
glamorous vision of sex, as if everything was beautiful and it was only about love and power. But the
truth is that very often it can be gloomy. It’s just two naked bodies making noise, you know? So I
wanted to write about that. I think a lot of people are fed up with this idea that here in France it’s all
about romanticism and eroticism, and that we know so much about sex.’
After #MeToo erupted in the US in 2017, with the exposure of serial rapist Harvey Weinstein, many
younger French women went on social media to report their experiences of sexual violence, under the
hashtag ‘#balancetonporc’ (‘Squeal on your pig’). But one hundred prominent Frenchwomen, most of
them of the soixante-huitard generation – including Millet and the actress Catherine Deneuve – signed
a petition against #MeToo. They compared the new ‘puritanism’ to ‘the good old days of witchcraft’
and argued that men’s freedom to pester was ‘essential to sexual freedom’.
The soixante-huitard rejection of #MeToo was also a rejection of the US. The French public are
keen consumers of American culture, from McDonald’s to Hollywood movies. Perhaps for that reason,
the Left Bank cultural elite has historically defined itself by contrast with its transatlantic rival.
Matzneff in the 1980s used to rant to the adolescent Springora about ‘sexually frustrated’ Americans

who had persecuted ‘poor Polanski’. Now, if American puritans were pushing #MeToo, then
#MeToo must be bad. When the movement initially struggled to take off in France, the cliché became
that the French enjoyed the delicious game between men and women too much to police it.

During the endless lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, a #MeToo à la française finally arrived, courtesy of
Springora and Camille Kouchner. Their target was the most unequal sexual relationship: paedophilia.
After Springora had escaped Matzneff’s domination, she grew up to become a publisher. His Prix
Renaudot so revolted her that she began writing her memoir. One thing the book attempts to understand
is why her mother permitted the relationship: ‘My mother confided to me that during her adolescence,
the body and its desires were still taboo and her parents never spoke to her about sexuality. She had
just turned eighteen in ’68 … “It is forbidden to forbid” undoubtedly remained a mantra for her.’3
Then Camilla Kouchner wrote her own story.4 Like Springora, she had grown up wracked by the
guilty feeling that she had consented to paedophilia – a common experience for abused children. The
two women freed themselves through writing. Springora reduced Matzneff to a character in her book,
just as he had done to her. Kouchner spoke of immuring Duhamel within her pages. Both women denied
the abusers the honour of naming them: Matzneff is ‘G’ throughout Consentement, while Kouchner
refers only to ‘my stepfather’.
Incest turned out to be startlingly common. Kouchner’s memoir prompted a national outpouring of

heart-rending testimonies on social media, under the hashtag #MeToo-Inceste: ‘I was 15, my
brother …’, ‘It was the cool uncle of the family’, ‘I was five. In one evening, my mother’s brother
destroyed my innocence … In one second I was a hundred years old.’ In a poll by Ipsos in November
2020, one French person in ten broke the ultimate taboo to say they had been victims of incest. Some 78
per cent of these people were women.
Just as with the pro-paedophile petition of 1977, Parisian writers had changed the French sexual
climate. Slimani says, ‘I think France is fairly exceptional in its relationship to literature. You go to a
small village and there are 300 people come to hear you talk about literature. That’s part of the French
soul, this relationship with writers.’
Parisian writers have an impact on all countries of ‘la Francophonie’, the French-speaking world.
Slimani’s Sex and Lies, about Morocco, contributed to an artistic attack on a culture in which men
control women’s bodies and homosexuality remains taboo. Another native Moroccan-turned-Parisian,
Abdellah Taïa, became the first openly gay autobiographical writer to be published in Morocco.
Springora’s memoir shamed the eighty-four-year-old Matzneff’s publishers into action. They
withdrew his books, including his five volumes of paedophilic journals. He lost his state stipend, and
in perhaps the ultimate indignity, was forced to leave the Left Bank and seek exile on the Italian
Riviera.
Mightier figures began falling, too. In the US, believers in the Pizzagate conspiracy had imagined a
paedophile-led elite network at the heart of their capital city. In France, something like that actually

existed. Camille Kouchner’s stepfather Duhamel was much more than a law professor, or even
the head of the body overseeing the Sciences Po grande école (one of Macron’s alma maters, and a
landmark of the Left Bank). In 2019 Duhamel had also been unanimously elected president of Le
Siècle, the dining society of the French elite. The notion of a country’s power brokers gathering around
a dinner table one Wednesday evening every month sounds like something else out of a social media
rabbit-hole, but in Paris that existed too.
Le Siècle, founded in September 1944, meets at the Cercle Interallié club, near the Elysée Palace.
The leaders of French politics (including Macron, Hollande and Sarkozy, and Mitterrand before them),
business, trade unions, the civil service, media, and some artists and academics mingle over
unexceptional food.5 As late as 2020, about 80 per cent of the 766 club members were male. The get-
togethers help melt away ideological differences at the top of society. Le Siècle’s president is pretty
much the chairman of the French establishment.
After Kouchner’s book appeared, Duhamel resigned from the club, saying only that he had been the
target of ‘personal attacks’. His friend Marc Guillaume resigned too, but remained prefect of Greater
Paris. Guillaume initially claimed not to have known about the incest, but finally admitted to having
heard about it in 2018, which was before he proposed Duhamel as club president.
Meanwhile, Frédéric Mion resigned as director of Sciences Po when it emerged that he hadn’t taken
action against Duhamel after hearing about the incest. The philosopher Alain Finkielkraut was sacked

by his TV channel after defending Duhamel on the grounds that the abused stepson was already
adolescent. Duhamel’s associate Elisabeth Guigou, who had also been close to DSK, resigned as
president of France’s Commission on Incest. Guigou insists she only learned about Duhamel’s crimes
from Camille Kouchner’s book. However, Kouchner wrote that the whole ‘familia grande’ had known
a decade before. As Kouchner explains, in the Parisian elite, knowing the secrets of a high-status
person is itself a marker of status. Being a keeper of the secrets solidifies your intimacy with the
transgressor.
The protectors of both DSK and Duhamel were a tiny elite who had followed the same life paths.
They had experienced the same formative generational moment in 1968, spent their adulthoods living
within a walk of each other’s apartments, and preferred to betray their country than their friends. DSK
and Duhamel were born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, the rich town just west of Paris, in 1949 and 1950. Their
contemporary BHL grew up in Neuilly, where Marc Guillaume was born in 1964. The adolescent
François Hollande arrived there from Normandy with his family in 1968. Sarkozy became mayor of
Neuilly in 1983, aged twenty-eight. That’s a decent power quotient for a town of about 60,000
inhabitants.
When the French version of #MeToo belatedly took off around 2020, the soixante-huitard
generation was caught off-guard by the lurch in sexual mores. The targets of attack went beyond
paedophilia. Femicides – traditionally glamorised in France as ‘crimes of passion’ – were suddenly
being denounced by graffiti all over Paris. DSK, who in 2017 had still been seen as a possible

contender in the presidential elections, soon faded from social acceptability. Lifts at the French
parliament were hung with A4 notices stating the legal definition of harassment, noting associated jail
terms and fines, and giving phone numbers for victims to call. In 2021 parliament did something it had
refused to do only three years earlier: it strengthened the law on underage sex, specifying that children
under fifteen could not legally consent. Soon afterwards, an independent report commissioned by the
Catholic Church estimated that since 1950, priests had sexually abused about 216,000 of today’s
French adults.
Powerful Frenchmen began losing their impunity. Where was the judge who had been to the
Sorbonne with your chum when you needed one? Duhamel and Matzneff avoided jail, because the
statute of limitations on their crimes had expired. But the actor Gérard Depardieu was charged with
rape. The former TV news presenter Patrick Poivre d’Arvor was accused of rape and sexual assault.
(Both men deny the accusations.) The former head of the Institut Montaigne think tank was convicted of
spiking the champagne of a female colleague with ecstasy. In a very Parisian twist, the victim was his
former sister-in-law.
Then there was Jean-Luc Brunel, born in Neuilly three years before DSK, and the long-time head of
a modelling agency. Brunel was under investigation for ‘rape of a minor aged over 15 and sexual
harassment’ when he was found dead in his cell in a Parisian prison in 2022. The same end had
befallen his American associate, the sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein. There had been allegations against
Brunel for over thirty years, but the authorities only acted against him after Springora’s book appeared.

The French elite was running scared, and trying to clean up its act in a hurry. Fear of the
guillotine even reached literary Paris: jurors of the most prestigious French prize, the Prix Goncourt,
were barred from awarding it to their romantic partners. (That did leave intact the chief purpose of the
prize: awarding it to your copains.) Though most French people refused to believe it, the Parisian elite
was turning out to be washable after all.
 18
Paris by Bike

Meanwhile, the city itself was being remade. Starting with the terrorist attacks of 2015, Parisians had
taken a series of punches to the face. We had lived through the worst flooding of the Seine in decades;
the sackings by the gilets jaunes; Notre Dame in flames in 2019; then that summer’s heatwave, when
the city recorded its highest ever temperature, 42.6 degrees, an omen of the day when it might have the
climate of southern Spain. The following winter, the longest Parisian transport strikes since 1968
prompted me to abandon the metro and fork out €200 for the kind of no-frills bicycle that had carried
me through childhood in the Netherlands. Oh, and then Covid-19 hit. It would set off a remarkable and
enduring series of changes to Paris.
When lockdowns began, almost every Parisian with access to a country home left town, in an
exodus that echoed June 1940. Friends cocooned in Brittany posted pictures of themselves eating
oysters alone on empty beaches. The Parisians left behind were disproportionately the poor, some of
them locked up with multiple generations in tiny apartments.
During the long dance in and out of lockdowns, Parisian codes – which I had imagined to be eternal

– began to crumble. My sons played badminton in our building’s deserted courtyard, cheered on
from open windows by formerly child-phobic neighbours. One day, the cousin who twenty years earlier
had alerted me to cheap flats in Paris asked me to go and check on his apartment, where someone had
tried to break in. The previous time I had gone there, he had briefed me that his concierge would start
shouting the moment I walked in, and I would have to wait for a pause in the abuse to explain who I
was. This time, a new young concierge sauntered over for a friendly chat.
Generally, Paris was thawing into something that looked almost like conviviality. On one (legal)
walk during lockdown, I watched three older people perform a concert of American singalongs from
their terrace, as neighbours applauded from their balconies. There wasn’t a dry eye on the street for ‘I
Will Survive’.
Clothing codes melted away. One spring night after restaurants had cautiously reopened, I was
sitting with friends on a terrace when one of them said, ‘Look at us in our rags. We’d never have come
out dressed like this before.’ Sweaty jogs became socially acceptable. Paris relaxed to the point that
younger people, especially, began to smile and address strangers with the informal ‘tu’. It was a shift in
mores that would outlast the pandemic.
At first, I worried that France would remain stuck in Covid long after other countries. I thought that
even after a vaccine was found, a large chunk of the mistrustful French would refuse it. In a survey of
140 countries by the Wellcome Trust in 2018, guess which nation was the most vaccine-sceptical?

But it turned out that very few French people actually meant the tough talk. The great
majority got jabbed even before Macron made a passe sanitaire compulsory for going to a restaurant,
taking a train, or doing almost anything. Pretty soon, more than nine in ten French adults were fully
vaccinated. That’s when I had one of those periodic déclics, or sudden realisations, about the French:
people here tended to talk radical but act conservative. When they used extremist language, they were
often striking an aesthetic pose, making a bow to the country’s revolutionary heritage. That helped me
understand French politics: many of the people who voted far right or far left in presidential elections
quietly wanted an énarque in a handmade suit to win. They counted on it happening. It always had.
Then they could spend five years protesting against him.
With the vaccinations, we got Paris back. The Saturday that protest marches resumed, our son Leo
came home reporting that the demonstrators were overjoyed to take up their ritual again. In fact, he
said, there’d been three simultaneous manifs: one by gilets jaunes, another by Algerians protesting
their country’s regime, and a third against police racism. All the protestors had united for the time-old
chant, directed at the watching police: ‘Tout le monde déteste la police!’ (The flipside, of course, was
that the police detested everybody.)
Once lockdowns ended and Paris got going again, we realised: it wasn’t the same Paris as before.
The streets had changed with the people.
After seventy years of car domination, Paris had suddenly begun privileging the bicycle. The mayor,

Anne Hidalgo, had used the first lockdown to unroll temporary cycle paths all over the place.
‘More was done for the bicycle in ten days than in the previous ten years,’ one cycling activist told me.
The city went from three miles of bike paths in the 1990s to more than 150 by the end of the pandemic.
Countless Parisians bought bikes, ditching their prejudices that cycling was only for the Tour de France
or country holidays.
Tooling around town on my own bike, I kept finding cycle paths that hadn’t been there the week
before. My mental map of Paris transformed. I finally began to see how the city fitted together, and how
small it was. You could ride from the eastern edge to the western edge, through some of the world’s
best urban landscape, most of it flat, in forty-five minutes.
Places that had been too much of a pain to visit on a packed metro – the Left Bank, or the Tuileries
Garden – were suddenly barely a quarter of an hour away. When you sailed along above ground in this
beautiful city, overtaking cars stuck in traffic jams, the meanest errand felt like a tourist outing. Soon,
the thought of ever returning to the metro routine felt ghastly: being jostled by strangers, listening to
their videos, inhaling their germs, and spending dead time underground in artificial light at somebody
else’s pace.
Videos appeared on global social media of happy Parisians cycling along the car-free rue de Rivoli.
But these images were deceptive, like Soviet paintings of peasants enjoying a banquet in nature. Cars
still ruled most roads. Each morning, when I cycled the ten minutes from home to my work-flat along
Hidalgo’s new paths, my aim was not to get maimed.

Some days, my ride was so enervating that I’d lose control of my French and swear at rival
road users in English – an effective tactic, because they generally understood but couldn’t immediately
answer back. I found I had absorbed the uniquely Parisian mix of officiousness and rule-breaking: one
moment I’d be shouting self-right-eously at a truck chilling on the bike path, and seconds later I’d run a
red light. If I did stop at a red, cyclists racing up behind me would sometimes ring their bells in disgust.
(I loved the video on social media of a bicycling nun in Paris shooting through a red light.)
Europe’s densest city cannot allocate space to everybody. Whenever Hidalgo had to choose
between cars and bikes, she usually chose bikes. That infuriated suburban motorists who had always
driven to the city, or sometimes through it, using Paris as a shortcut.
She also decided that there were better uses for Paris’s precious surface area than maintaining
150,000 parking spaces, many of which stored heaps of metal that might be used for an hour a day, if
that. The average car took up about fifteen square metres; plenty of Parisians lived in less. Hidalgo let
cafés seize parking spaces on their doorsteps and turn them into outdoor summer terraces. She
pedestrianised dozens of streets around schools, consigning my fight with the SUV driver to a bygone
age. Broadly, non-drivers supported Hidalgo and drivers despised her. But like Haussmann before her,
she had the advantageous personality trait of not caring much what anybody thought of her.
Since only about one Parisian household in three owned a car (approximately the lowest rate in

western Europe), Hidalgo was re-elected in 2020 on a pro-cycling platform. She then declared
the temporary bike paths permanent, and added more. By 2021, according to the town hall’s figures,
bikes moved at fifteen kilometres an hour inside Paris; cars managed fourteen kilometres.
Again, the city was closed off to cars on some Sundays, but this time genuinely. Leo and I developed
a ritual of cycling to the Champs-Elysées and back along the banks of the Seine – which only a few
years before had been an urban highway. In my fantasy version of Leo’s childhood, he never forgets our
rides. Getting around kept getting safer. Here is a miraculous statistic: the number of traffic users of any
kind (pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, anyone) killed in Paris intra muros in April and May 2023 was
zero.1
The new bike lanes turned Paris inside the Périphérique into possibly the most easily traversable of
the great metropoles. With cars squeezed out, the city’s air cleared. Children played on the
pedestrianised school streets. The new café terraces were more fun than the parking spaces they
replaced. Cycling around after Covid, I felt that Paris intra muros had never looked or smelled so
good.
But there’s an iron law of twenty-first-century life: anything desirable will be grabbed by the 1 per
cent. Even more than before, Paris risked turning into a sort of giant gated community for rich people.
Was that inevitable – or could the city do something to remain open to all?
 19
Luxury City?

Over the years I have spent on my work street, I have watched Paris change. The man in my building
whom I remember as a large commanding father of teenagers now lurches along the pavement alone,
sagging to his left, the victim of a stroke. Otherwise, the residents change too fast to keep track of. Only
a minority of people living in tiny Parisian apartments leave in a coffin, à la my late neighbour
Madame Baguet. Most depart either when they start having children, or when they retire.
Some mornings, having survived my biking commute, I’ll stop at the craft coffee shop on the
cobblestone impasse just by my office. A crème (as Parisians call a café au lait) costs €6 a cup. It’s
arguably worth it. Coffee – long the blind spot of Parisian cuisine – has ceased to be melted car rust,
though bearded Australians had to be flown in to oversee the transition. Almost everyone in the coffee
shop is white, perhaps half of them English-speaking; central Paris is becoming a de facto bilingual
city, like Amsterdam. You look at the customers, and you think: these people are living their best lives.
On sunny days I’ll have my coffee outside on a bench. Facing me, five metres away across the

impasse, is a restaurant du coeur, a food bank. In late morning a queue starts to form,
consisting mostly of black women with shopping baskets.
The butcher’s that was just outside my front door in 2002 has become an Argentinian restaurant,
though the owners have kept the old bright-orange facade as a piece of adorable kitsch. The next
restaurant along, which used to be a gay place with net curtains to ward off peepers, now serves all-
comers, with the sole employee tripling as cook, waiter and dishwasher. Also within two hundred
metres of my flat are a bio grocery, two expensive chocolateries, and two artisanal bakeries, each
purveying a complex array of breads. In front of the one owned by a TV chef sits a beggar.
Over the decades, the pace of neighbourhood life has quickened. When I first landed, the average
two-course lunch plus coffee in the local restaurants took ninety minutes. That has since more or less
halved, though you can generally still eat freshly made food rather than reheated industrial stuff as long
as you stick with the formule, the set menu.
Wine has morphed from French lunchtime staple into treat, though Paris is still not like bits of the
US, where anyone ordering a glass during the workday is assumed to have a drinking problem. Younger
French people barely touch the stuff. They generally prefer cannabis.
Getting your lunch bill is quicker than in 2002. You go to the counter and pay, or just flash your
phone. Ever fewer Parisians even take the time for a restaurant lunch: there’s been a long-term slide in

the number of cafés, and a compensatory boom in fast-food places and bakeries, which sell
lunchtime sandwiches. Even in Paris, time has become money.
The gentrification of my street is only an exaggerated version of what’s happened across the city.
From 2002 to 2023, apartment prices in Paris more than tripled in real terms. Space has become so
sought-after that there are controversies over individual trees, condemned to make way for boutiques.
Put it all together and the dreamscape for rich people depicted in the Netflix series Emily in Paris isn’t
just a fantasy. I’ve watched Paris transform from a kind of chilly Rome into London: from museum-
cum-food-hall to an entrepôt for the global 1 per cent.
Thanks partly to Brexit, Paris is now even eating into London’s lead as a business centre. In 2023,
the president of the Paris Region, Valérie Pécresse, boasted, in English: ‘For the first time the Paris
region is the number one in Europe, ahead of London, in new foreign investment. The Paris stock
exchange has overtaken the London stock exchange in total market capitalisation. The Paris region is
number one in the world for R&D investments.’1 And for the first time since at least the 1960s, Paris
was attracting large numbers of ambitious foreigners of the sort who traditionally head to London and
New York. The new Paris’s spiritual headquarters is Station F, a former freight train station in the
unfavoured 13th arrondissement that has rebranded itself ‘the world’s biggest startup campus’. Station
F’s official language is English, but many of the hundreds of tech entrepreneurs it houses are French.
For younger Parisian elite members, a state career has ceased to be life’s first prize.

On first hearing, this sounds like the story of our time: every modern metropole becomes
unaffordable. But Paris doesn’t want that future. It sees London as both a role model and a warning. It
aspires to London’s success without London’s prices. Paris is not, at heart, a city of merchants. It
doesn’t want to build an economy on banking and finance. The city aims to pull off an improbable feat:
to become a twenty-first-century Navel of the World without turning into a fortress of the rich. It even
has a plan for how to get there.

Parisians have been grumbling about gentrification for centuries. Eric Hazan, the city’s modern
chronicler, writes: ‘Ever since the great confinement of 1657 that locked up the poor, the deviant and
the mad in the buildings of the Hôpital Général, the combined action of town planners, property
speculators and police has never stopped pressing the poor, the “dangerous classes”, further from the
centre of the city.’2 Haussmann, who razed slums to build magnificent apartments, was always accused
of expelling the lower orders from Paris.
This century, the process of expulsion has gone up a gear. One Sunday afternoon some years ago,
two mournful friends dropped by our flat for cake. They were a well-paid couple from the bobo caste.
In the popular narrative, it was people like them who had gentrified Paris, driving out the working
classes and genuine bohemians. But our friends had a new story: they themselves were being driven out
of town by even richer people. To afford enough space for their kids, who were at school with ours,
they were moving to the banlieues.

When they’d told the headmaster at school, he had sighed: ‘Everyone is leaving.’ One day,
when Julien and I were watching our kids in the local park, he pointed to the apartment buildings
around the square. He’d calculated that even a couple in the top 1 per cent of French incomes, with two
children, couldn’t afford to buy a three-bedroom flat there unless they also had an ‘apport familial’, a
‘family contribution’ – probably a parental gift or an inheritance. Paris in the 2020s was jumping from
gentrification to plutocratisation: a takeover by the global 1 per cent.
Paris suffers from a problem of scarcity: there isn’t enough of it. So plutocrats of various stripes
have captured its smartest neighbourhoods. Francophone African dictators, for instance, favour the 8th
and 16th arrondissements, plus Neuilly. They adore Avenue Foch, although the Bongos, Gabon’s ruling
family from 1967 to 2023, also picked up an hôtel particulier in the 7th arrondissement. ‘Very
beautiful,’ the head of the French section of Transparency International told me with a certain
admiration. ‘They paid €18 million. They said, “Well, maybe one day we’ll put our ambassador
there”.’
The 1st arrondissement, the geographical heart of Paris, has undergone what amounts to a transplant.
It’s a tiny area, just 1.83 square kilometres, much of which consists of the Louvre and the Tuileries
Garden. In 2002, middle-class people could still afford to live in the 1st: apartment prices there
averaged under €4,000 per square metre, meaning that a couple could find a cosy place for what was
then about €200,000.
Admittedly, the arrondissement in the early century wasn’t very glamorous. The Bourse, the stock

exchange, had decayed into a shabby sideshow. The ancient Les Halles food market had been
torn down in 1971 and reincarnated as a hideous, mostly underground shopping centre. The belle
époque department store, Samaritaine, had shut for what turned out to be a sixteen-year makeover.
The plutocratisation of the arrondissement began with the reconversion of Les Halles in 2016, this
time into a park plus a passable mall. The Bourse reopened in May 2021, now as a museum for the
billionaire François Pinault’s contemporary art collection. A month later, Samaritaine, owned by
Pinault’s billionaire rival, Bernard Arnault, finally returned. That November, the former central post
office was reborn as a five-star hotel. You could lament the transformation, but no city could have
accomplished it more elegantly.
By the early 2020s, hardly anyone could afford to live in the 1st any more. The only members of the
lower orders who still hung on were the homeless freezing in their sleeping bags on the rue de Rivoli.
A lot of them were sleeping outside empty flats – more than 30 per cent of the arrondissement’s
apartments had no permanent inhabitants. The same was true in the 6th, 7th and 8th arrondissements.3
Many of these flats were used as second homes, by everyone from Manhattan lawyers popping in for a
fortnight a year to French pensioners who spent most of their time in Provence. Other flats were rented
out as Airbnbs for the legal maximum of 120 days a year and left empty the rest of the time. Across
Paris, the number of vacant homes more than tripled between 1968 and 2019, to over 250,000, or
nearly a fifth of the total housing stock.4
The city centre was morphing from open-air museum into open-air Louis Vuitton store. More and

more, the business of Paris was luxury. By 2024, four of the ten highest valued companies on
European stock markets were French luxury outfits headquartered in Greater Paris: Bernard Arnault’s
LVMH, L’Oréal, Hermès and Christian Dior (which was owned by LVMH). Paris itself was becoming
a luxury brand. Fittingly, several of the city’s new public drinking fountains streamed sparkling water.
The people who run Paris aren’t going to roll back plutocratisation. But they intend to confine it to a
few bits of the city. They aren’t chasing global HNWIs, ‘High Net Worth Individuals’, begging them to
come and park their money here. Rather, the battle is to equip Paris with enough affordable rental
apartments.
And in that battle, the authorities possess a weapon that most Anglophone cities lack: the French
state owns lots of social housing in Paris, plus land on which it can build more. It can also step in and
use ‘the right of pre-emption’ to buy a private property that’s for sale. Sometimes the municipality buys
dilapidated buildings and turns them into social housing. By 2023, nearly a quarter of the population of
Paris inside the Périphérique, about half a million people, lived in social housing – almost twice as
many as at the start of the century. That half a million probably included most of those black women
with shopping bags at our local food bank. More than another 130,000 people were on the waiting list.
(The unlucky ones remain there for decades.) The mayoralty’s target is that by 2035, 30 per cent of
Parisian homes should be social housing, plus another 10 per cent ‘affordable’, meaning one-fifth
cheaper than market prices (though that wouldn’t be affordable for the vast majority of French people).

Not everyone in the city’s social housing is poor: there are state-subsidised homes for
police officers, schoolteachers, and other public-sector workers. In 2022, a Parisian household earning
€70,000 a year could still qualify for a subsidised flat. An architect friend of mine was told that his
family might be eligible for one because Paris was keen to keep the middle classes inside the Périph. It
didn’t want to become a city of millionaires, tourists and poor people, like San Francisco.
So far, a big chunk of Paris has more or less managed to stay mixed. In the city’s eastern and
northern arrondissements, the median household income in 2019 was generally below €32,500 (then
about £28,500), and, in quite a few neighbourhoods, below €21,600.5 Many of the poorer quartiers
that had backed the Paris Commune in 1871 were voting far-left in the 2020s.6 In these neighbourhoods,
Parisian bohemia and its bookshops hung on, exiled from their post-war HQ on the Left Bank.
A diverse population by itself isn’t enough to make a city diverse. Paris still needed to mix the
different groups. To do that, the city’s schools had to change. Historically, the lycées in the beaux
quartiers, the ‘beautiful neighbourhoods’, had functioned as conveyor belts for the all-white French
elite. Senior civil servants, celebrities and the rest of le Tout-Paris arranged strategic dinners with
educational powerbrokers to get their kids into the right school.
Macron himself had come to Paris from Amiens as a teenager to finish school on the Left Bank at
Henri-IV (‘H4’, to insiders). But during his presidency, after the gilets jaunes frightened him into

reforming the elite, teenagers were scattered geographically around Paris’s state schools. Some
even travelled in from nearby banlieues. Soon, kids of colour made up nearly half the student body at
my daughter Leila’s historically posh lycée. Even then, segregation, to some degree, persisted. In 2021,
the first year that her school went mixed, almost all the non-white arrivals were put together in one
class. It also happened to be the only class treated to an end-of-year school trip to Normandy, as if the
new kids needed to be taught additional Frenchness. Many of them were guided towards the less
prestigious vocational stream, the bac pro.
The newcomers often struggled to crack the codes of elite Paris. Some of them came to school in
sweatsuits, whereas Parisian girls had vintage handbags. The culture clash was probably hardest for
pious Muslim girls, who felt half-naked without their headscarves, which are banned in French
schools. Leila reported a conversation with one of these girls:

Leila: What do you want to do when you grow up?

Girl: Work in the airport.
Leila: Why the airport?
Girl: Because there I can wear a headscarf.

Still, at least the city had started to try.

But there was a bigger solution to plutocratisation: expand the desirable bits of Paris beyond the
Périph, into the banlieues, so that far more people could enjoy them. And that’s what the authorities
were doing. They were quietly rolling out a gargantuan plan called ‘Grand Paris’. Its aim: finally to
unite Paris and its suburbs into one city.
 20
Grand Paris: The Making of a New Metropolis

One of the perks of being the ruler of France is that you get to remake Paris. Whereas London and New
York have mostly been shaped by private developers, Paris is the product of centuries of state planning.
Traditionally, each French king, emperor or president seeks a shortcut to immortality by reinventing the
capital for his era. These men, unhindered by expertise, tend to fancy themselves as master urbanists.
Even Emperor Napoleon III handed Haussmann a map of Paris on which he had personally traced, in
red, yellow, green and blue, the boulevards that he wanted built.
But by the 2020s, there was almost nothing left to add to Paris intra muros. The city already
possessed, by some measures, the world’s best public-transit system. The Parisian metro had opened
nearly forty years after the London Underground, but then mushroomed. Because rival private
companies ran different lines, each had an incentive to build lots of stations. That’s why today some
stations are just a couple of hundred metres apart, and your train has hardly started up before it stops
again.

Paris intra muros had no need of more transit, or indeed much of anything else either. The
ancient French project of constructing the capital was practically done. The last three grand public
buildings inside the Périphérique – Mitterrand’s economics ministry and Bastille Opera (both 1989),
and the National Library (1994) – were generally reckoned to be ugly failures. There was hardly an
empty lot in Paris to build anything new on. Nor could the city grow upwards, because most Parisians
had opposed skyscrapers since the aesthetic disaster of the Montparnasse Tower (1973). Paris inside
the ring road was finished (meaning, I hasten to add, completed). All that remained to do was boring
upkeep.
And so, for the first time, French rulers turned their architectural ambitions to the suburbs. Decades
after the banlieues began to dwarf Paris, the French authorities finally accepted that these neglected
places must become Paris too, with Parisian-quality homes, lives and transport links.
‘Grand Paris’ was, to put it simply, a plan to knit together the city and its banlieues by building
sixty-eight new suburban metro stations. The grandest of grands projets, it became Europe’s biggest
infrastructure initiative. France was possibly the only state in the Western world that could have pulled
off anything this massive; building infrastructure in the US and UK, in particular, takes much more time
and money.
‘Grand Paris’ is a more radical makeover than any other Western metropolis is even attempting. By
the time it’s completed around 2030, it could end up being a bigger urban transformation than
Haussmann’s.

‘Grand Paris’ had been a long time coming. The first report on how to connect the city with its
outskirts appeared in 1913 – just in time to be kiboshed by the First World War. The ‘plan Prost’,
which envisaged a united ‘Grand Paris’, was approved on 22 June 1939 – and almost instantly
kiboshed by another war. So Paris and its suburbs remained separate worlds.
When the banlieues resumed their growth after the Liberation, they did so at first with hardly any
public transport. Only in the 1960s did the state begin building a suburban train service, the RER. Ever
since, the people who keep Paris functioning – immigrant cleaners and security guards and the South
Asians who spend their lives in sweaty underground restaurant kitchens cooking French food – have
commuted in every day from the suburbs. Their joke is that they are ‘going to France’.
But they have never had enough train lines. The RER became a poor service for poor people. The
waits between trains, on dirty underlit platforms, were much longer than on the metro. Nor did the
system keep up with the endless growth in the banlieues’ population. By the early 2020s, the RER’s
line A was Europe’s busiest train line. At rush hour, it carried well over 600,000 passengers – more
than the entire population of Lyon. Europe’s second-busiest line was the RER B. The few Parisian
metro lines that were extended into the suburbs sometimes carried as many as seven passengers per
square metre during rush hour. Fights, ‘bagarres’, broke out daily.
Priscillia Ludosky, the gilet jaune, told me that the nadir of banlieue life was the packed train into

Paris on a Monday morning. A triumph was getting off at your home station in the evening,
especially if you were in time to tuck in the kids. Some people did ninety-minute commutes each way
for forty years. When Ludosky asked them how, they’d reply, ‘It’s the routine that sets in. What else can
you do?’
Once banlieusards made it home, they felt done for the day. Parisian elites would never have said
it, but it suited them that the journey from the suburbs remained sufficiently arduous for the classes
dangereuses to come to town only when they had to. That kept Paris respectable. Parisians themselves
seldom had much reason to make the reverse journey to the suburbs. On the rare occasions when they
did, the stock joke was, ‘I’m going to the banlieue, I’m taking my passport.’ As the British architect
Richard Rogers remarked: ‘I know of no other major city where the heart is to such a degree detached
from the limbs.’
When Nicolas Sarkozy was interior minister in the early 2000s, he fearmongered against the latest
incarnation of the classes dangereuses: the mostly dark-skinned immigrants who populated the suburbs.
During the banlieue uprisings in 2005, he called the young rioters ‘racaille’, ‘scum’. On the other
hand, more than most politicians, hyperactive ‘Sarko’ took an interest in the banlieues. He saw that the
region’s centre of gravity was shifting outwards.
When he became president in 2007, he set out to remake Paris. He wanted the capital to remain a
‘ville-monde’ – broadly, a ‘global city’ that competed with London and New York. But how? The city
of just over two million people inside the Périph lacked critical mass. There was no other choice: the
nearly ten million banlieusards – along with all the suburban companies and universities and research

institutes – would have to be brought in from the cold, properly connected not only to Paris but
to each other. One model was the rise of Brooklyn vis-à-vis Manhattan in the last few decades.
Something like that (but with much more social housing) ought to be achievable for the Parisian
banlieues.
Sarkozy assigned the project to the former top civil servant Christian Blanc. One of Blanc’s aides,
Alexandre Missoffe, was a distant relative of an official named Michel Missoffe who had worked on a
proto-version of ‘Grand Paris’ a century earlier. In October 2008, Blanc went to see Sarkozy in the
Elysée to elaborate the plans. But it was the middle of the global financial crisis, Sarkozy’s phone was
ringing non-stop, and there was no chance to talk. Finally, Sarkozy asked Blanc, ‘What are you doing
this weekend?’
Blanc said he’d be happy to pop in for chat.
 Sarkozy asked, ‘Could you come to China with me? We’re having a meeting of Asian and European
heads of state in Beijing, and I have to convince the Chinese president to involve himself totally in
managing this crisis. On the flight there, I’ll be monopolised by preparations for the meeting, but we
can talk on the way back.’
That’s how it was done. ‘Somewhere over the steppes of central Asia,’ recounts Blanc in his book
Le Grand Paris du XXIe siècle (most of it actually drafted by Alexandre Missoffe), ‘we spent ten or so
hours working on the future of Grand Paris, global city.’1 Their plan would take twenty years, and end
up costing more than €40 billion.
The way to remake a city is through transport. Sarkozy and Blanc decided to build 200 kilometres of
new metro tracks – more or less doubling the existing system’s size. Driverless trains would carry

people from one banlieue to another, generally skipping Paris. The aim was to give the region
multiple centres instead of just the one.
The two men initially intended to build around thirty suburban metro stations. But once the
communes in the banlieues found out about the plans, each began lobbying for its own station. In the
end, the authorities agreed to build sixty-eight stations outside Paris. By the time the project was done,
98 per cent of the inhabitants of Grand Paris were meant to be living within ten minutes’ walk of the
metro. Even a suburb as poor as Clichy-sous-Bois, the birthplace of the 2005 riots, would finally be
connected to Paris. White exurbs that felt abandoned by the Republic might be lured back from the far
right and the gilets jaunes if they got stations. Over time, whether Sarkozy had intended it that way or
not, his scheme became part of the panicked elite attempt to pacify left-behind France.
Once almost all suburbanites could get around by public transport, most would no longer need cars.
Then the metropole would be able to excise its great design flaw: the Périph, which cuts off Paris from
the suburbs. The ring road was projected to lose several of its lanes, shrinking into an urban boulevard,
which would be lined with trees and (in the quintessential Parisian touch) cafés. On some stretches, the
road could be roofed over with parks and pedestrianised squares. By the 2030s, Parisians could be
having their apéros on Périph terrasses.
Sarkozy and Blanc also planned to add enough new housing for one and a half new Parises. On top
of each new station, and within five minutes’ walk around it, the state would build a neighbourhood

with thousands of lovely apartments. Creating more housing should, in theory, help keep a lid on
prices even as these banlieues become more desirable. The supply of homes would expand along with
demand. If the plan worked, Grand Paris would bring the advantages of gentrification without the
unaffordability.
Soon after construction began on the new metro lines, a Scandinavian politician I know passed
through town. ‘So,’ he asked jovially, ‘are the French finally going to decentralise the country?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘they are going to centralise it even more.’
Greater Paris was already the biggest metropolitan region in the European Union. It had as many
inhabitants as the next fourteen French cities put together. Once ‘Grand Paris’ was done, the metropole
would have the potential to drain much of the rest of the country.
Even before the new stations opened, the banlieues were becoming more appealing. Many suburbs
had begun to Parisianise, driven partly by exiled Parisians. Take the French class marker of where you
buy your cheese. Parisians have long got it from pricey speciality shops, fromageries, which are
considered symbols of French civilisation. Banlieusards traditionally bought cheap cheese in the
supermarket. But by the 2020s, fromageries were spreading even into the historically poor, immigrant
northern banlieues. Before long, no doubt, many cheesemongers will themselves be immigrants, just as
ever more French bakers are of North or West African origin.
 True, the banlieues remained troubled. At the end of June 2023, they exploded into violent riots
after a policeman shot dead a seventeen-year-old boy of North African origin named Nahel in Nanterre.

Videos went around the world of youths plundering shops and attacking their own buses,
schools, town halls, etc. It looked like a replay of the 2005 riots (though in fact there was also a
parallel with 1968, when a rather different youth uprising had begun in Nanterre). On the fourth night
after Nahel’s killing, I cycled out to the eastern working-class banlieue of Bagnolet – where rioters had
just burned the wall of the local police station – to watch a riot.
But I couldn’t find one. Searching the town, I saw nothing more ominous than a security guard
posted outside a kebab shop. Bagnolet had houses as pretty as in any French village, and a rainbow
logo for Pride month etched on the street. A minute’s walk from the police station, the café terraces of
the Place du Centre were crowded with locals of all colours. I couldn’t resist: I sat down and had beer
and charcuterie.
The riots turned out to be a three-day wonder. As everyone picked over the pieces, it became clear
that this hadn’t been ‘the revolt of the suburbs’. Rather, it was rioting by a small minority of teenaged
boys. The average age of those arrested was seventeen. And despite what the far right said, these kids
weren’t some foreign entity threatening French culture. To the contrary: nothing could be more Parisian
than a street uprising.
Perhaps the most revealing thing about the whole episode was the response by the banlieues’ adults.
Most were horrified by the violence, and many helped stop it. Parents organised night patrols. Locals
doused fires with jugs or garden hoses. A woman yelled at boys breaking into a school, ‘Not the
school!’ A father frogmarched his son away from a riot and chucked him into the car boot. Mothers held

protest marches against the riots. Nahel’s grandmother appealed for an end to the violence. All
these people felt a sense of ownership of their suburbs. This was their home.

Any project that takes twenty years is going to run into some unforeseen historical changes. The first
big surprise to hit Grand Paris was the return of the bicycle. During the pandemic, while Hidalgo was
laying her bike paths inside the city, the state was laying even more in the banlieues. Crossing places
from the suburbs into Paris began to proliferate. For the first time, it became feasible for many people
living in the ‘petite couronne’, the ‘little crown’ of nearby suburbs, to commute to Paris by bike.
All of a sudden, years before the new metro lines had opened, ‘Grand Paris’ was prematurely taking
shape. Best of all, connection by bike was fantastically cheap. The new suburban cycle paths cost an
estimated €500 million – or a bit over 1 per cent of the planned metro extensions. The electric bicycles
that were coming into vogue started at about €750 and could easily do 20km an hour. As the bill for
Grand Paris’s metro lines kept mounting, some critics pointed out that it might be cheaper to scrap
some of them and just give every commuter an e-bike.
Not all of Sarkozy’s grand plan was going to make it. Some of the sixty-eight stations might never
open, or not for decades. His schemes for new apartment blocks relied on the cooperation of suburban
mayors, many of whom didn’t want their small town or rustic French village to rise high like Shanghai.
They preferred building rustic pavillons. If the mayors got their way, the metropolis would end up
sprawling even more.

Still, some portion of the ‘Grand Paris’ project would end up being executed. Many
banlieusards were going to experience life-changing cuts in their commutes – in some cases, from
ninety minutes to thirty. And all this was tantalisingly close. The first tranche of Grand Paris was
scheduled to open in 2024 – in time for what were billed as the ‘Paris Olympics’ but were just as much
a celebration of the suburbs.
 21
The Suburban Olympics

Greece is the birthplace of the Olympics, and Victorian Britain is the birthplace of modern sport. But
although the British codified most of today’s games, they weren’t very interested in playing them
against foreigners. That’s why the birthplace of international sports competitions is Paris. Most of these
contests – including the modern Olympics, which return to the city in 2024 – were invented in the years
around 1900, within a mile or two of the Seine.
Here is a one-hour walking tour of Paris. It starts in the Grand Amphithéâtre of Sorbonne
University, where in June 1894, Pierre de Frédy, also known as Baron de Coubertin, a small Parisian
with a big moustache who was still only in his early thirties, called on 2,000 delegates from around the
world to support a revival of the ancient Olympics. ‘It is given to us,’ Frédy explained to them, in the
universal language of French, ‘to meet in this great city of Paris, whose rejoicings and anxieties are
shared by the world, so that one could call her its nervous centre.’1
Having sat in that magnificent auditorium and struggled with its acoustics, I wonder how many of
them heard him. Still, his claim, at that time, was a platitude. Of course the delegates were meeting in

the Navel of the World. Of course they were listening to a Frenchman. Of course he was trying
to civilise them, just as French soldiers of the day were busy ‘civilising’ Indochina and much of the top
half of Africa. The delegates voted for Frédy/Courbertin’s proposal, as he later wrote, ‘chiefly to
please me’.2
Of course they chose Paris as host of the first modern Olympics, in 1900. But six years felt like a
long time to wait, and so it was decided to kick off the Games in Athens in 1896, even though the Greek
capital didn’t want them. When the Olympics reached Paris four years later, they coincided with the
Universal Exhibition being held in the city. Paris’s metro had just opened, and the 1900 exhibition also
featured an electric railway, news film, and many of the world’s great recent paintings and photographs
(not all of them French).
For the next leg of the tour, leave the Sorbonne auditorium and walk towards the river, crossing it at
Notre Dame. Keep heading north until you reach the grimy streets around the Bourse. Find the rue du
Faubourg Montmartre. On this street one November lunchtime in 1902, in a now vanished brasserie
called Zimmer, a junior reporter of the newspaper l’Auto suggested to the editor that they invent a
cycling race around France. The editor gave a time-honoured Parisian response: ‘For me, it’s a no.’
The newspaper’s financier went ahead and started the Tour de France anyway.
Cut south-west to the rue Sainte Honoré. Find number 229. In an office on the courtyard here in May
1904, seven European men including the French grocer’s son Jules Rimet founded the Fédération

Internationale de Football Association, FIFA. Rimet, a lawyer and wannabe poet, would later
become its president and invent football’s World Cup.
From the rue Sainte-Honoré, walk another ten minutes south-west to Concorde. Find the mansion
that flies the flag of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile. A month after Rimet et al. had
founded FIFA, posh automobile enthusiasts set up the FIA here, and began writing the international
rules for motor racing.
Long after Paris ceased to be the Navel, the French continued creating international sport. One
midwinter’s day in 2013, a friend and I visited the last survivor of this Parisian era in his bourgeois
apartment near the Jardin du Luxembourg. Jacques Ferran, ninety years old when we met him, and, in
the French way, already retired for nearly three decades, was a hangover from the era when sports
journalists could live in prime Left Bank. He wore his remaining grey hair long on either sides of his
bald head, in the manner of a traditional Paris bohemian. He kept himself busy writing a treatise on
bridge (‘I’m a very good player’) and following the sports news. At one point in our conversation, the
concierge walked in with Ferran’s daily copy of L’Equipe – the sports newspaper where he had spent
most of his career.
Ferran’s bourgeois parents had wanted him to study, and were shocked to discover he had become a
sports journalist – ‘une décadence terrible’, he chuckled. He joined L’Equipe in 1948. The paper was
the successor to l’Auto, which had created the Tour de France but had been shut down after the
Liberation for having collaborated with Vichy.
In the 1950s, Ferran was part of a small group of L’Equipe journalists who from their office in

Montmartre built much of the furniture of today’s European club football. Their leader was
Gabriel Hanot, a remnant of the belle époque who had played football for France before suffering a
flying accident in the First World War, and had later coached the national team. One night in December
1954, a L’Equipe correspondent covered a friendly match between Wolves and Honvéd, the English
and Hungarian champions, and took offence at the Daily Mail newspaper’s conclusion that Wolves’s
victory meant the team were ‘champions of the world’. That gave Hanot the idea of creating a European
Cup for the champion clubs of the different countries.
Who should run the competition? Parisians, obviously. Ferran showed us the photocopy – he had
lost the original – of his handwritten ‘1er projet de l’Equipe – février 1955. Projet d’un réglement
d’une Coupe d’Europe de football’. The paper – full of crossings-out, a living historical document –
was the first draft for the competition that would kick off that same autumn.
The matches finished at 10.45 p.m., and journalists filed their copy down the phone line as there
was no time to write it down. The newspaper’s boss, Jacques Goddet, who was still in bad odour for
having collaborated, never did the night-time reports himself as he found it too stressful. The European
Cup has since morphed into the Champions League.
Around the same time as the L’Equipe men were creating their competition, another Parisian, Henri
Delaunay, Rimet’s one-time sidekick, seventy-one and near death, finally managed to make a reality of
his decades-old dream: a European Championship for football’s national teams.

In 1956, when Ferran was editing L’Equipe’s sister magazine, France Football, a few of its
journalists created the ‘Ballon d’Or’, the Golden Ball award for the European Footballer of the Year.
‘Which of us had the first thought?’ Ferran asked himself. ‘It barely matters, I would say. One of us.
Nobody remembers. Now there is no one left but me.’ A jeweller in the rue de la Paix made them a
winner’s trophy – ‘a little thing’, recalled Ferran. The updated award, now overseen by Rimet’s
creation FIFA, has been fought over in our time by Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. Ferran died in
2019, aged ninety-eight.

Long after Paris invented international sport, it continued to regard the Olympics as practically its
baby. But the city’s bids to host the Games of 1992, 2008 and 2012 all failed. That dented the self-
confidence of the French authorities. No Parisian elite member wanted to waste years of their career
leading another doomed bid. When a tentative plan to pitch for the 2024 Games was put to Anne
Hidalgo, she asked: ‘Do we have a chance of winning?’ Finally, it was decided to have one more go. In
2016 I had breakfast with Bernard Lapasset and Etienne Thobois, who were leading Paris’s bid. The
International Olympic Committee was scheduled to choose the host at a meeting in Lima on 13
September 2017. Lapasset (who sadly wouldn’t live to see the Paris Games) mimed his prospective
cheers. ‘Or,’ added Thobois, ‘we hide between our legs.’
In the end, Paris and Los Angeles were the only candidates to host in 2024 and 2028. In Lima, the
IOC hastily awarded each city a Games before either could change its mind.

So much had changed since 2005, when I had watched on the big screen at the Hôtel de Ville
as London beat Paris to the 2012 Games. This time, Paris’s anointment, coming a year after Brexit,
symbolised the two cities’ reversal of fortunes. But more than that, Paris’s plan for 2024 reflected the
change in the authorities’ mental map: in the spirit of ‘Grand Paris’, the Games were to be much more
suburban than the one planned for 2012.
The proposal for 2012 had been to put the athletes’ village inside the Périph. By contrast, the
epicentre of the 2024 Games will be the poor department of Seine-Saint-Denis, five minutes and a
world away from Paris by packed RER train. Seine-Saint-Denis is inhabited largely by immigrants
from Africa and their descendants. One resident in six lives below the official poverty line, the highest
level in metropolitan France. The only two new constructions for the Olympics have both been built
here: the athletes’ village, and an aquatics centre. ‘These Games,’ one Parisian municipal official told
me, ‘are above all the construction of a Grand Parisian identity.’
The Stade de France, the national stadium, opened in Seine-Saint-Denis in 1997, but it hadn’t
noticeably helped the area. For 2024, every resource was being poured in. A year before the Games, I
went with a friend, who had been born in Seine-Saint-Denis to immigrant parents, to visit the building
sites. It was a beautiful summer’s morning, which made it easy to feel optimistic, and I admit that I was
blown away. The Olympic village, built along the river, was on a scale that could never have been
crammed into Paris proper: several blocks of airy buildings, each of ten storeys or so. Judging by the

artists’ renderings hanging outside, they were to be shrouded in trees and plants, in line with the
city’s new ideology of ‘végétalisation’.
The thinking behind the village, as Thobois had explained to me, was ‘One month for the Games,
then fifty years for living’. Once the athletes left, these buildings would become a mix of social and
market-priced housing, offices, shops and cafés. Nearby, schools were being built for still unborn
residents.
It all gave me hope for the city’s future. Admittedly, the Olympic village was a showpiece – the first
neighbourhood of the Grand Paris project. A lot of what comes afterwards won’t look as nice. But the
Olympic village still shows how good affordable housing can be now that city planners have learned
from the blunders of the post-war decades.
The architecture of the banlieues has improved over time. Town planners have dynamited some of
the monstrous apartment blocks built from the 1960s to the 1980s (though some residents were
devastated to lose their family memories). After my friend and I had admired the Olympic village, we
wandered around the existing neighbourhoods nearby. We passed low-rise, twenty-first-century flats
with greenery, kids playing rugby, and a bustling street market between the cycle lanes.
Just across from the market was the construction site of the biggest metro station in Greater Paris,
Saint-Denis Pleyel. When all the work is finished before the Games, the first big segment of the ‘Grand
Paris’ project will be complete. The station will house four different lines, putting the locals within a
comfortable fifteen minutes or so of Paris. People might build such fulfilled lives here that they
will never feel the desire to ‘monter à Paris’, ‘climb up to Paris’. In fact, one day the residents of
Seine-Saint-Denis might even say that they live in Paris.
 22
Death in Paris

Everybody has an alternative life, one they could have led but didn’t, but that’s particularly true of us
migrants. One day, during a stay in my wife’s old stomping ground of New York, we paid a nostalgic
visit to the apartment that she had left in 2004 to come to Paris. On the street outside her building, we
had a shock: the telephone booth was still there. It’s apparently one of the last in the city, and is
regularly used by movie crews who want to recreate Old New York. The sight took us back in time.
Reeling, we approached my wife’s front door. It appeared not to have been painted since 2004. A
grimy panel of names hung beside the doorbells. And there, by flat 2C, was my wife’s name! Nobody
had ever bothered to remove it.
We were shaken. Did my wife have a double, living in her old apartment all those years? Who had
had the better life?
I’m confident that we have. Speaking just for myself, the Paris me has had a fuller experience than
my alter ego who took out a thirty-year mortgage on a flat in the London suburbs. Here I have lived
amid beauty, massively upped my eating game, learned something of another country’s way of seeing

the world, and – because of the life-changing timing in buying that apartment – wasted less time
worrying about money.
Paris has also, unexpectedly, become home. My Paris friends are now my old friends. When I told
one of them my fantasy of retiring to a Spanish seaside village, he asked, ‘Who will be your friends
there?’ That’s when I realised I wasn’t going anywhere. In fact, I will probably spend eternity in Paris.

There comes a moment in a man’s life when he looks in the mirror and thinks, ‘My grandfather!’ After
more than twenty years in Paris, I am approaching my mid-fifties, and the pictures of me as a fresh
immigrant in 2002 show, frankly, a different person.
The stages that loom ahead of me in Paris – old age, then dying – feel dauntingly French. The very
acronym for a French old-age home, Ehpad, sounds alien. It would be the first French institution I’d
ever lived in. I don’t think I could get used to people telling me where to sit and how to eat and who to
eat with – even if, as so often in France, they really did know better than me. It would be like the
French école primaire I never had.
After that, I would have to learn to die in a foreign language. Any new segment of French
vocabulary is hard to master. An Englishwoman who works as a palliative nurse here told me that
dying immigrants often struggle to explain their symptoms and medications in French. Some in their
final months revert to their mother tongues. One Englishman she’d nursed, half of a gay couple who had
spent decades in Paris, was delighted to be able to speak English to her as he died.

So many migrants, French and foreign, came to Paris almost by accident, just for a bit, and
ended up being buried by their Parisian kids. The official stats show that for decades now, more than
four out of every five people who die in Paris were not born in the city.
 One of those dead immigrants was an Englishwoman I knew, a vivacious spirit in her forties. The
last time I saw her was at a loud party she’d hosted. One evening soon afterwards she’d complained of
a stomach ache and, a couple of hours later, she was gone. I attended her cremation at the Père-
Lachaise cemetery, on the eastern edge of the city. I think that got me in the habit of taking Sunday walks
around Père-Lachaise.
Reputedly the world’s most visited graveyard, it was one of several secular cemeteries created by
Napoleon. To encourage status-conscious Parisians to be buried there, the authorities transferred the
remains (or the supposed remains) of the writers Molière and La Fontaine and the medieval lovers
Héloïse and Abélard here.
The trick worked. Two centuries later, Père-Lachaise’s leafy walkways are as densely packed as a
Parisian street, lined with the ornate tombs of bourgeois families. Some of the residents, in the Parisian
way, state their grande école on their tombstone: Pierre Hypollyte Amillet (1785–1830) attended the
Polytechnique (chapeau, Pierre!). The Guatemalan writer Miguel Angel Asturias, an immigrant who
appears to have gone native in Paris, lists his prizes in chronological order, starting with the ‘Prix
Falla’ for ‘best pupil of secondary studies’. You have to scroll down a while to see his Nobel Prize for

literature (1967). On the tomb of the F. Biundo family sits a heart-shaped plaque: ‘For François
– your friends from Fouquet’s’, the posh restaurant. There’s the grave of the Maigret family, one of
whose dead, the doctor Paul-Maurice Maigret, was a neighbour of Georges Simenon’s and may have
inspired the name of the great detective.
The bourgeoisie is one face of Paris. The other face, the revolution, has its own corner of Père-
Lachaise, grouped around the ‘Mur des Fédérés’, the wall where French troops executed 147 members
of the Paris Commune in 1871. The section nearest that wall is a resting-place for veterans of
revolutionary and anti-Nazi causes. Here you’ll find the marble tombstones of functionaries of the
French Communist Party, as well as Spanish exiles who died ‘pour la Liberté’ in the Second World
War, and monuments to the victims of concentration camps.
But I always find myself drawn to Père-Lachaise’s Anglo graves. Oscar Wilde’s is mutilated. The
sculptor Jacob Epstein adorned it with a statue of a winged youth, but at some point the youth’s
prominent penis offended an unknown prude, who snapped it off. More recently, so many tourists
planted lipsticked kisses on Wilde’s tomb that it has had to be shielded by Plexiglas. I find it easier to
identify with anonymous Anglos spending their afterlife in eastern Paris. Who was Henry F. Knight
(1856–91), apparently buried here by his brother?
It is still just about doable to get a spot in Père-Lachaise. One recent arrival is the prominent
businessman Bernard Darty, who died in 2018. The controversial writer Violaine Vanoyeke has
somehow managed to buy a plot in advance, and has already adorned it with a fetching marble

sculpture of herself, her provisional dates (‘23.04.1956–’), and the inscription ‘Writer,
Egyptologist, Latinist, Hellenist, Linguist, Pianist’.
I’d like to put together something similar for myself. But given the way these things work in Paris,
you can only get into a good graveyard inside the Périph if you are able to pull the right strings. A
Parisian friend of my wife’s, after discovering that she was terminally ill, spent her final months
lobbying for a prime spot. To the end, she couldn’t imagine moving to the banlieues. Happily, she
succeeded.
Like any event in French life, death here is first of all a bureaucratic act, covered by strict formal
rules – which can always be overridden. A woman I know, who was given the task of cremating an
immigrant friend, was told by a funeral director that it’s illegal to scatter ashes in France. However, the
director added, should she decide to scatter nevertheless, he had an assortment of urns for her to
choose from – a compostable one if she wanted to leave her friend in nature, another that dissolved in
the seas, and so on. ‘Hang on,’ the woman interrupted, ‘you said scattering ashes was illegal.’
‘Madame,’ the director replied, ‘c’est la France.’
I want to be buried, not illegally scattered, but I don’t have the status for a Parisian cemetery. When
I go – perhaps run over by a police car speeding to score some lunchtime French tacos – I’ll
presumably end up in the banlieues. Still, by then they may have risen in the world; after all, Père-
Lachaise, when Napoleon got it started, was itself in the banlieue. I expect that in the ambulance, as I
speak my dying words – perhaps my name, address and social security number – my final sentiment

will be immense gratitude for this long strange Parisian trip. I especially want to say thank you
for the lunches.
 Glossary

anglosaxon: the term used by French people to refer to all people from English-speaking countries,
chiefly the US and Britain. Not to be confused with the English word ‘Anglo-Saxon’, which refers
to the people who lived in early medieval England.
bagarre: fight, punch-up, brawl.
banlieue: suburb. In Greater Paris this refers to the territories outside the Périphérique ring road. The
word ‘banlieue’ has connotations of poverty and immigration, but in fact many ‘banlieues’ are
middle class or higher.
bobos: bourgeois people with bohemian tastes such as cycling, coffee and bio food. The closest
English equivalent is ‘hipsters’.
copain: chum. Literally: someone with whom one shares bread.
énarque: a graduate of the exclusive Ecole Nationale d’Administration, which has produced four of the
last six presidents up to Emmanuel Macron.
formule: also ‘menu du jour’, or ‘menu’. A French restaurant’s daily set lunch menu, which is the best

affordable meal on earth in two or three courses.

manif: short for ‘manifestation’. A demonstration or protest.
Paris intra muros: literally: ‘Paris within the walls’. The term now refers to the city of about 2.1
million inhabitants inside the Périphérique ring road.
Pavillon: the small modern houses with gardens that characterise many banlieues.
Périphérique, or Périph: See the entry for ‘banlieue’. The ring road, completed in 1973, which has
had the probably unintended effect of severing the city of Paris from its surrounding suburbs, or
‘banlieues’.
plouc: broadly, peasant or yokel. A pejorative word often used by Parisians to describe non-Parisians.
pôte: mate. See ‘copain’, above.
wesh: an interrogative word from Algerian Arabic that has been repurposed in Parisian slang to mean
‘yo’, ‘hey’, or ‘wow’.
 Notes

1. The Accidental Parisian

1 Roy Jenkins, Churchill (London: Macmillan, 2001), p. 616.
2 Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1989), p. 392.

2. Losing to London: Paris versus the Anglosphere

1 Graham Robb, Parisians (Kindle Edition), p. 264.
2 Saul Bellow, ‘My Paris’, excerpted in Jennifer Lee (ed.), Paris in Mind: Three Centuries of Americans Writing About Paris (New
York: Vintage Books, 2003), p. 59.

3. Parisian Neighbours
1 Leila Slimani, Chanson douce (Paris: Gallimard, 2016), p. 64. My translation from the French.
2 franceinfo Culture, ‘Une lettre de Proust évoquant les ébats de ses voisins adjugée pour 28.000 euros’, 25 April 2017, retrieved at
https://www.francetvinfo.fr/culture/livres/une-lettre-de-proust-evoquant-les-ebats-de-ses-voisins-adjugee-pour-28-000-
euros_3365323.html, accessed 19 September 2023.

5. The Real Parisian Traffic Code

1 George Simenon, Le déménagement (Paris: Librairie générale française, 2019), p. 33. My translation from the French.
2 See Graham Robb, Parisians (Kindle edition), pp. 426–7.

3 I swear – wallah! – that this is not a cute pretend kid-quote that I invented later.

6. The Code-breaking Charlatan

1 The Political Warfare Executive, ‘Instructions for British Servicemen in France 1944’ (Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 2005), p.
26.
2 James Baldwin, from ‘No Name in the Street’, excerpted in Jennifer Lee (ed.), Paris in Mind, p. 260.

7. Neighbourhood Terrorism
1 See Sarah Gensburger, Memory on My Doorstep: Chronicles of the Bataclan Neighbourhood Paris 2015–2016 (Leuven: Leuven
University Press, 2019).

9. Paris for Jews

1 See European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, Manifestations of Antisemitism in the EU 2002–2003, retrieved online
at https://fra.europa.eu/sites/default/files/fra_uploads/184-AS-Main-report.pdf, accessed 19 September 2023.
2 For much more detail see Marc Weitzmann’s Un temps pour haïr, translated into English as Hate: The Rising Tide of Anti-Semitism in
France (and What it Means for Us) (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019).

10. The Day of the Three Cafés

1 See Christian Blanc, Le Grand Paris du XXIe siècle (Paris: Le Cherche Midi, 2010), p. 52.
2 See Blanc, Le Grand Paris du XXIe siècle, p. 54.
3 Raphaëlle Bacqué and Ariane Chemin, La communauté: Une banlieue au défi de l’islam (Paris: Albin Michel, 2018).
4 See Annie Ernaux, Journal du dehors (Malesherbes: Gallimard, 1993).
5 Christiane Rochefort, Les petits enfants du siècle (Paris: Librairie générale française, 2021), p. 94.
6 See Raphaëlle Bacqué and Ariane Chemin, La communauté, p. 181.
11. The Tiniest Elite

1 Jean-Pierre Jouyet, L’envers du décor (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 2020).

2 See François Denord and Paul Lagneau-Ymonet, Le concert des puissants (Paris: Raisons d’agir, 2016).
3 Jouyet, L’envers du décor, p. 123.
4 Ariane Chemin and Raphaëlle Bacqué, ‘Les Jouyet, un couple au pouvoir’, Le Monde, 7 October 2014. My translation from the French.
5 See Serge Halimi, Les nouveaux chiens de garde (Paris: Raisons d’agir, 2005).
6 Catherine Fieschi, Populocracy (Newcastle: Agenda Publishing, 2019), p. 48.

12. Who’s for Dinner?

1 See Jennifer Lee (ed.), Paris in Mind (New York: Vintage Books, 2003).
2 Guillemette Faure, Dîners en ville, mode d’emploi (Paris: Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2017).

13. Macron: The Seducer Who Ate Paris

1 For full biographies, see Marc Endeweld, L’ambigu Monsieur Macron (Paris: Flammarion, 2018) and Sophie Pedder, Revolution
Française: Emmanuel Macron and the Quest to Reinvent a Nation (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).
2 See https://www.liberation.fr/politiques/2017/05/07/emmanuel-macron-l-elysee-pied-au-plancher_1567939/, accessed 20 September
2023.
3 Endeweld, L’ambigu Monsieur Macron, pp. 135–6.
4 Faure, Dîners en ville, p. 279.
5 Faure, Dîners en ville, p. 62 and p. 200.
6 Anne-Sylvaine Chassany, ‘Emmanuel Macron defends his reforms in rare TV pitch’, Financial Times, 12 April 2018.

15. The Suburbs Win the World Cup

1 Alex Duff, Le Fric: Family, Power and Money: The Business of the Tour de France (London: Constable, 2022), p. 4.

17. A Sexual Reckoning with 1968

1 Eric Hazan, Paris in Turmoil (London: Verso, 2022), p. 23.

2 See the Netflix documentary series Chambre 2806: L’affaire DSK, directed by Jalil Lespert (2020).
3 Vanessa Springora, Le consentement (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 2020). All translations from the French are mine.
4 Camille Kouchner, La familia grande (Paris: Seuil, 2021). All translations from the French are mine.
5 See François Denord and Paul Lagneau-Ymonet, Le concert des puissants (Paris: Raisons d’Agir, 2016), pp. 109 ff.

18. Paris by Bike

1 Statistics from the prefecture of the Ile-de-France (or Greater Paris) region, retrieved 26 July 2023 at https://www.drieat.ile-de-
france.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/IMG/pdf/drieat_barometre_securite_routiere_idf_avril_2023.pdf and at https://www.drieat.ile-de-
france.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/IMG/pdf/drieat_barometre_securite_routiere_idf_mai_2023.pdf

19. Luxury City?

1 Autonomy Mobility Weekly, ‘Paris Region rolls out the red, white and blue carpet’, email newsletter, Week 2, September 2023.
2 Eric Hazan, The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps, translated by David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2020), p. xiii.
3 Atelier parisien d’urbanisme, ‘7,086,619 habitants dans la métropole du grand paris au 1er janvier 2020’, Note 222, February 2023.
4 Jean-Louis Missika, ‘Moins de Parisiens, mais plus de Grands-Parisiens: la densité en Île-de-France’, La Grande Conversation, 6 April
2023.
5 From Atelier parisien d’urbanisme, retrieved at https://www.apur.org/sites/default/files/documents/cartefichiers-
attaches/carte_web_apur_revenu_median_menages_mgp.pdf?token=gn4SPxRH, accessed 20 September 2023.
6 See https://twitter.com/AntonJaegermm/status/1513809550943604741?s=20&t=wEJbI0866cgk07g58UpGgQ, accessed 20 September

2023.

20. Grand Paris: The Making of a New Metropolis

1 Christian Blanc, Le Grand Paris du XXIe siécle (Paris: Le Cherche Midi, 2010). All translations from the French are mine.
21. The Suburban Olympics
1 Nouvelle Revue Pédagogique Lycée, no. 83, January 2019, p. 23. My translation from the French.

2 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Macropaedia, 1991 Edition (London: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991), p. 198.
 Acknowledgements

Thanks to some of the parisiens, past and present, who taught me about Paris: Selsabil Amine, Anna
Sophia Beetschen, Michael Chabon, Delphine Dhilly, Catherine Fieschi, Yaël Ginzburg, Henry Grabar,
Robert Graham, Olivier Guez, Pauline Harris, Sami Hawash, Julien Karyo, Natalie and Nicolas Kugel,
Richard Kuper, Colombe de Lastours, Nico Le Goff, Guillaume Lagane, Mathieu Lefevre, Victor
Lugger, Florence Martin, Spencer and Sabine Matheson, Jean-Louis Missika, Alexandre Missoffe,
Stein van Oosteren, Nicolas Saada, Henry Samuel, Lyn Silove, Mark Stabile, Madany and Hawa Tall,
Darren Tulett, Shahin Vallée, Patrick Weil and Sarah Wilson. Thanks also to Albrecht Sonntag for
taking me along to meet Jacques Ferran, to Jake Lingwood, and to the Financial Times and Le Monde
for letting me reuse passages that first appeared in their pages.
I go back many years with my agent, Gordon Wise at Curtis Brown, and my publisher, Andrew
Franklin at Profile. I’m grateful to them both for making this book happen. I’m also grateful to Penny
Daniel at Profile, and to Susanne Hillen for her copy-editing.
Lastly: merci infiniment to Pamela Druckerman, Adam Kuper and Sarah Wilson, who all read the

manuscript, and did what they could to make it more fluent.

 Also by Simon Kuper

Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford

Tories Took Over the UK
The Happy Traitor
Football Against the Enemy
Barça
 Copyright

First published in Great Britain in 2024 by

Profile Books Ltd
29 Cloth Fair
London
EC1A 7JQ

www.profilebooks.com
Copyright © Simon Kuper, 2024
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or
introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 80081 648 0
eISBN 978 1 80081 649 7