France is on holiday. It’s official. I know this because when I went to pick up newspapers yesterday (this being central Brittany), I was able to buy Le Parisien, the capital’s house organ, owned by luxury goods giant LVMH.
When le tout Paris heads off to the coast, they leave behind the smog and humidity that envelop the city at the height of summer. But they do not abandon, even for an instant, their need to know what is going on in the 20 arrondissements that spiral out from Notre Dame to the ring road (Le Périphérique) and beyond. Thus, as July prepares to give way to August, Le Parisien is dispatched post-haste each morning before dawn to all parts of what the media likes to refer to as the Hexagon, where it is snapped up as proof that metropolitan concerns are not suspended just because the metropolis itself has been turned over, full-time, to tourism.
