You know that feeling when you haven’t seen someone for several years and when you do, you really notice the changes? Generally it is a melancholy moment: you spot the extra wrinkles, the added pounds. Occasionally it can be positive: gym-toned physique, amusing new green-and-orange hair. Lots of us had these moments as we emerged, blinking and bewildered, from the bunker of Covid.
I’ve just had this same experience, but with a city. Paris. The French capital is a place that I know well. I must have visited a dozen times over the decades. I’ve seen the Louvre Pyramid go up, I’ve seen Notre-Dame go down in flames (on TV, in a horrified airport in Vegas). But I have not been to Paris since before the pandemic, so I was keen to check out how the old girl was doing.
The Rue de Rivoli, that most sublime of shopping streets, is mainly occupied by American candy stores
The first sign that Paris was not doing well came when I arrived at Gare du Nord. There was a homeless man begging right outside the main gate. A few metres later I saw the unmistakable signals of fentanyl use: some poor hobo juddering, like a zombie, towards the Métro.
That’s Gare du Nord, I said to myself; the gateway to the edgier banlieues has always been sketchy. As for fentanyl, I’ve recently seen troubling evidence of its usage in Camden Town in London, where I live. If fentanyl has also hit Paris, it just means the City of Light and London are level-pegging, as ever.
From Gare du Nord I got an Uber (a definitely positive evolution – gone are the days when cabs in Paris were as rare and pricey as gondolas in Venice). The Uber took me across the north-west quadrant of the inner city, and as we went my darkling suspicions grew. All the shuttered shops were the first major unhappy symptom: I saw so many I checked the calendar to make sure I hadn’t inadvertently arrived on a public holiday. But non.
I concluded that a lot of the stores were permanently closed, presumably by Covid, or the cost-of-living crisis and WFH. What’s more, where the shops were shuttered, the slats were sprayed with arrogant graffiti. And there was plentiful litter bowling down the boulevards, some of it snagged by the ugly concrete barriers which divide Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s cycle-oriented city streets.
At this point, I’d gone from the slightly amused schadenfreude which every patriotic Briton feels when he sees the French in a pickle, to a state of disquiet. Yes, France is our sweet enemy, but I deeply enjoy travel there, I rather like the French and I revere Paris – so I don’t want this magnificent citadel of western civilisation to truly suffer. That would be bad.
I checked into my nice four-star near the Arc du Triomphe (eerily quiet and polite, as cycles and e-cars replace the whirring engines). I reassured myself that I was probably imagining it. Maybe the unseasonal wintry sky was denting my mood. Also, the preparations for the Jeux olympiques – roadworks, renovations – were not helping, reinforcing the sense of messy urban chaos.
And yet as I stepped out to flâner the place, I kept seeing the same troubling signs. Indeed, they got worse. Right outside, in my luxe, calme et volupté neighbourhood, the nearest bank was sprayed with graffiti, adverts for the younger Le Pen were angrily smashed, there was litter everywhere, and a drunken wino was squatting above the tunnel where Princess Di expired.
By now I was leaning into the mood. If Paris is having a bad moment, I was determined to document it, so I did. The litter and graffiti continued; worse, I saw evidence that Parisians have stopped caring. Broken benches, pointlessly shattered road signs, a vandalised statue, some soiled toilet tissue and a pair of shoes discarded in the Tuileries.
The grottiness peaked when I reached the dead centre. Notre-Dame is being cleverly restored, and that briefly lifted my spirits, but away from the old cathedral the pockmarks of urban decay, right in the heart of the French capital, were impossible to miss. The Rue de Rivoli, that pivotal axis of French urbanism, that most sublime of shopping streets, is now mainly occupied by American candy stores, tatty souvenir bazaars, empty shop fronts, and more homeless. You can say the same about parts of Oxford Street but Oxford Street was never sublime.
Right in front of the Hôtel de Ville I found someone apparently living in a car. Around the corner I came upon a small camp of migrants. Down the next boulevard I walked past more tents and a guy apparently in a coma, flat out on the concrete. On and on it went. At some juncture my phone told me that ‘Afghan asylum seekers are rioting in the 11th arrondissement’, so by the time I reached Les Halles I was properly uneasy – and that is never the right mood to take to Les Halles.
Les Halles has been dire since anyone can remember. Insanely, in the 1970s, the French knocked down their beautiful Victorian equivalent of Covent Garden and replaced it with a horrible shopping centre. Realising their terrible mistake, they recently knocked that down and replaced it with an even worse shopping centre: a urinous yellow metal cage.
This pustule is home to one of the most menacing urban environments I have encountered in a European city – and I’ve been to Naples. Les Halles at sundown on a Saturday is grim: urgently patrolled by groups of men, or just single men, and almost no women; some of the men dance, or yelp. Most stare: aggressively, drunkenly or angrily. I got the hell out and retreated to a consoling brasserie with red velvet banquettes and tasty onion soup. They, at least, stay the same, even as everything else changes. Though the prices are now much steeper.
What is happening in Paris? It is probably the same post-Covid urban malaise that affects so many western cities. It is just more noticeable in a city as lovely as the French capital. However, the malaise is real, and I fear for the place in the coming Olympics, when the eyes of the world will focus on the homeless, the grottiness and the edginess. I am sure a city as storied and glorious as Paris will eventually rebound, but these are not problems you can fix by July.
Next day I went to the grand anniversary exhibition of Impressionists at the Musée d’Orsay. I was surrounded by haute bourgeois Paris, so oddly absent from the streets. I was, in other words, watching affluent Parisians looking, with obvious yearning, at images of their own city from the sun-dappled 1870s to 1880s: when it was truly the City of Light, the cultural capital of the world. I also noticed that in Claude Monet’s ‘Boulevard des Capucines’, his depiction of the new and grand Haussmann streets, you cannot see a scrap of litter or a trace of graffiti.
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