The decline of the French
While watching the opening ceremonies of the Paris Olympics, two things stuck out:
It was raining in Paris, like I remember it always was.
And the big opening number featured Lady Gaga, an American, and the big closing number featured Celine Dion, a Canadian.
When I lived in Paris, 45 (!) or so years ago, it was pretty much always raining. That first summer, in our immeuble de grand standing in the 7th arrondissement, we wore sweat pants and sweatshirts in July and August because it was so cold and damp. We were convinced that Parisians’ generally sour mood then—at least to Americans—was simply a reflection of their generally sour weather. We were convinced that Yip Harburg, who wrote the lyrics to “April in Paris,” had never been east of the East River.
With the exception of the opening ceremonies, Parisian weather has apparently changed significantly since that time. According to data from Météo-France, metropolitan Paris has experienced 22 significant heatwaves since 2010, more than during the entire 1947-2000 period.
On occasion, temperatures during the summer, within the peripherique, have exceeded 100 degrees, which is unimaginable to anyone who remembers Paris from decades ago or anyone who has had to descend into the clammy metro.
But the weather is not the only thing that’s changed in Paris and in France. It is also unimaginable, at least to me, how the city and the nation have ceded their position of cultural centrality in the modern world.
Paris and France had been at the forefront for centuries. After all, Paris was Voltaire, Rousseau, Descartes. It was Monet, Cezanne, Picasso. It was Hugo, Balzac, Proust. It was the center of the art world and the literary world. It was the place that represented the highest attainments of high culture, a society that stood for the preeminence of la vie philosophique and la vie artistique.
That sense of cultural refinement had drawn Americans from Thomas Jefferson to Josephine Baker to James Baldwin. It drew us, too, because Paris seemed so much more sophisticated—yes, high-brow—than the American world we knew.
Sure, we came for the wine and the baguettes and the onion soup gratinee, but 45 years ago we loved moving to a place where serious culture permeated daily life, where the most popular show on television was Apostrophes, which was notable writers being interviewed by a serious book lover.
Like many of us back then, we were indeed smitten.
And when we arrived, not really that long ago, Paris and France were still what they had been. While America—and Britain—were thrashing their guitars, Paris was still lyrically literate Aznavour and Brassens and, of course, Brel (yes, I do know he actually was Belgian, but he sang in French and performed mostly in France. And after all, as the show title said, “Jacques Brel is alive and well and living in Paris”). At our marriage, six years earlier, we had recited the lyrics to Brel’s “If we only have love.” (Seemed more appropriate than the lyrics to the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.”)
The French were still at the cutting edge of making movies for adults, with directors like Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer. They dominated intellectual life, too, offering the world its preeminent philosophers—Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, Levi-Strauss.
The world’s most influential writers wrote in French—Camus, Genet, de Beauvoir, Malraux. Even the Irishman Samuel Beckett wrote in French.
They dominated, not surprisingly, the world of haute couture—Dior, Saint Laurent —and haute cuisine, with their top chefs, Paul Bocuse, Michel Guerard, Joel Robuchon, the standard for excellence and the progenitors of la nouvelle cuisine.
All that dominance, not so much anymore.
When we lived there, we could almost see it changing daily, the uniqueness of French culture getting subsumed by the tidal wave of world—read American—commercial culture.
A Burger King would open on the Champs-Elysees and wasn’t just patronized by touring Americans, but filled with Parisians.
Antenne Deux, one of the original three French television stations, would start showing American films. In English. With French subtitles.
French pop stars—Johnny Hallyday, Eddy Mitchell—were taking Anglicized names.
The tsunami was hard to resist and maybe it all was inevitable. The world shifts, the cultural dominance of Athens and Rome fade into irrelevance. Why not Paris, too?
Maybe the cultural center passes to Brooklyn or some place in California or maybe Singapore.
Or maybe, and this is my guess, there simply is no one center anymore.
Globalization—not just of commerce but of culture, too—happened. With the spread of technology and the advent of the digital and the glories of instant communication and affordable travel, we’ve lost geographic uniqueness.
So K-Pop is big worldwide. And rap, born in the south Bronx, now dominates French music. (France now has more rappers than any other country except the U.S., owing, perhaps, to its large population of sub-Saharan and north African descent.) A couple of months before the Olympics, Taylor Swift sold out the arena where swimmers now do their laps.
Rather than filtering down from haute couture, fashion now filters up from the street. There was a time, not that long ago, when you could identify the Americans in Paris because they were the only ones wearing jeans. Now everyone does.
A few months ago, when I was in Paris, I saw that restaurants and cafes, from the Place du Chatelet to the outskirts of Belleville, now feature le hamburger. You can even get a pretty good bagel in Paris these days. Pretty much anywhere you go, French people now speak at least some English.
And Sartre and de Beauvoir are no longer sitting at the Café de Flore. Of course, if they were still around, they’d have a podcast—available wherever you download your podcasts—or have a weekly newsletter on Substack.