According to my friend Anne-Elizabeth Moutet, writing in last week’s Spectator, Paris is going downhill fast – and it’s all the fault of the city’s Socialist mayor, Anne Hidalgo.
I wouldn’t want to be the arbiter in a fight between A-E, as I call her, and Hidalgo. They are both grandes dames, if not prima donnas, who represent France at its cutthroat best. If I heard that they had fought a duel in the Tuilleries Gardens at dawn, I would not be in the least surprised.
The Spectator headline gets straight to it: “Anne Hidalgo’s socialist reign of error in Paris”. After that, the argument gets ugly fast:
“The City of Lights is today demonstrably dirtier, uglier, more dangerous, and harder to navigate than when Hidalgo came to power. Since last winter, Parisians have expressed their mounting outrage at the state of the city on social media, posting pictures with the hashtag #saccageparis (#wreckingparis).
There are photos of overflowing rubbish bins (“Parisians are dirty”, the Mayor explained); crabgrass and bald patches replacing carefully-tended flowerbeds and lawns (“watering plants is ecologically-dispendious” according to a Hidalgo deputy); videos of rats under tunnels or on the banks of the Seine (no comment); littered squares of earth at the base of the city’s trees replacing the nineteenth century rose-shaped wrought iron protective grilles (“the city encourages Parisians to plant and tend vegetation in these newly-freed spaces”); huge concrete girders to be used as seats installed in historic squares while the city’s classic dark green benches are left or sold off (“Paris is beautified every day by contemporary design”); and, everywhere, more concrete, in rough blocking barriers, painted yellow and abundantly graffitied, disfiguring major thoroughfares like Avenue de l’Opéra or Rue Royale under the guise of ‘materialising’ cycle lanes.”
The piece – hugely popular with Spectator readers – goes on like this for another eight hundred words. But you get the point. La Moutet is not a fan of Hildalgo’s. Should the mayor, born and raised in Cadiz, be nominated as the Socialist candidate in next year’s presidential elections and somehow succeeds in snatching the keys of the Élysée from Emmanuel Macron’s nerveless grasp, my friend will be spitting blood.
But is she right? About Paris, I mean. My wife and I are just back from a week-long trip to the capital, during which time the legal speed limit for the city within the Périphérique was reduced, in most cases, to 30 kph (21 mph). If this made a difference to how drivers behaved, I must have missed it. Plus ca change and all that. Everything, in fact, went smoothly during our visit. The city looked positively magnificent and, coming as we did from rural Brittany, we were thrilled by the roar of motorcycles at 3 am and the crash and thump of bin lorries that make up the dawn chorus.
The Metro, as ever, was clean and efficient; the electric buses (by some way my favourite mode of travel) purred through the streets, taxis were reasonably priced, the bars and restaurants did a roaring trade, the Louvre was sensational, the staff at L’Hotel Littéraire de Swann – a shrine to Proust on the Rue Constantinople – were both cheerful and polite and La Rentrée, the return of the natives after their summer retreat, seems to have passed without anyone throwing a punch.
Tout le monde looked happy, or at any rate content (the French equivalent, with its deliberate hint of ambivalence). There were no street demos, no migrant clearances and not a yellow vest to be seen.
It was a joy to sit at an outside table on the Rue Lafayette and watch the world go by. Our glasses of Brouilly arrived at just the right temperature (lightly chilled), while on the opposite side of the street, a young man draped in anti-Covid PPE made a brisk trade in walk-in vaccinations.
A trip to the Basilica of St Denis, situated among the banlieues ten kilometres north of the Seine, was a reminder that Anne Hidalgo is not the only one in French history to stand accused of civic vandalism. The Revolution nearly did for St Denis as the burial place of scores of French kings and queens. The tombs that were to have been their final resting place were ransacked and desecrated, twice, in 1793. Bodies, dating back centuries, were dragged from their coffins and tossed into a newly-dug mass grave.
Today, 228 years on (long enough, surely, for the Chinese to make up their minds about the Revolution), order has been restored, but the monuments, now numbered and heaped together, are empty shells.
Is it an irony, or just a sign of the times, that in 2021 the most visited graves are those of Louis XVI and his Queen, Marie-Antoinette, whose decapitated corpses were recovered by Royalists and given pride of place among the Bourbons? I don’t know. But there is little doubt that monarchist sentiment, mixed with Republican glee, remains a feature of France’s collective psyche.
I mentioned the Louvre. I hadn’t been for years. I wasn’t prepared to wait in line an entire morning, surrounded by teenagers from America, Japan and China for whom the world’s most famous museum was merely an opportunity to take a selfie with the Venus de Milo. But, thanks to Covid, we were inside within five minutes and free to roam the galleries as if on a private tour. The one reminder of the age we live in came when I briefly pulled my mask down so that my son, visiting from London, could take a quick snap of me standing in front of the Mona Lisa.
No sooner had I exposed my face – not exactly that of an anarchist – than a guard, bearing a striking resemblance to the actor André Maranne, who played Clouseau’s much put-upon sergeant in The Pink Panther, tapped me on the shoulder. “It is up to you, Monsieur,” he began, a sly smile playing across his features. “You can either replace your mask or you can pay a fine of one thousand-five hundred euros. It is entirely your decision.”
I was briefly tempted to call him a silly little man but reconsidered. This was, I think, wise. Some years previously, in Communist East Berlin, I was ejected from the Pergamon Museum for touching a Babylonian statue contrary to a warning that (as was pointed out to me by a female security guard the spitting image of the Russian ambassador in Doctor Strangelove), was clearly displayed, in English as well as German.
Masks, I should add, are practically de rigeur in Paris. My son, more used to the laissez-faire ways of London, was impressed. QR-code checks were practically universal, even in a little Lebanese café at eleven o’clock on Sunday night when we were the only customers. Strict mask protocol was also followed on the train on the way home to Brittany, which left the Gare Montparnasse precisely on time and arrived in Guingamp precisely as scheduled.
I can only conclude that Anne Hidalgo was not responsible for the timetable.