We tend to view Paris as a fairytale princess, all romance and half-seen glitter. But for all its glamour, Paris has actually been depressed and irritable for a couple of hundred years now.
Far from being subdued by it, the citizens of Paris wear this perma-gloom like a disconsolate badge of honour. More tightly packed than in any housing estate high-rise, Parisians lead their stressed, underpaid lives defiantly. They mock and complain. They rail and grumble. Unlike anywhere I’ve ever known, in this city, if you say something nice about the place, the citizens disdainfully correct you. Paris doesn’t believe it is the best place. It just knows everywhere else is worse.
Parisians have always been like this. Show me a jolly cockney-type in a Balzac or Zola novel. The 19th-century city was a cracked pot on an unattended stove, boiling over every decade or so. Riots, barricades, militias and then a whole lot of informing on your neighbours. National political life has long been driven by the ferment of the capital’s mutinous and untrusting streets. And it is just the same now. Or worse. Paris has had something of a prewar air ever since I’ve known the city.
But now Parisians really feel they’ve got something to bitch about. The Olympic Games are coming. One hundred years after their last visit. It is estimated that the Games will cost around €8bn (£7bn) – though no one really seems to know. They definitely aren’t going to make €8bn – everyone agrees on that. Densely packed, constitutionally grumpy, already Paris is being negatively affected.
Disruptive works are under way on key central sites. Métro stations have begun closing and ticket prices will nearly double. Students are being kicked out of university halls of residence to accommodate athletes. Important hubs such as the Place de la Concorde, the Trocadero and Les Invalides will close almost completely. For the first time, breakdancing will be an Olympic event. This is cheering no one up.
We tend to forget, but the London 2012 Olympics were also preceded by six months of carping and bellyaching: “It’s going to cost too much”, “Who needs all these new stadiums?”, “Nobody likes the Olympics anyway.” But what is happening in Paris is many magnitudes more plaintive and exasperated.
Everyone I know here basically hates the idea of the Olympics, which rather makes you wonder what they’re for. People resent the authorities shutting down large parts of this small, overpopulated city for something that nobody cares about. What normal person can name three Olympians? Usain Bolt, Jesse Owens and that bloke from Chariots of Fire? Parisian bosses are telling workers to go on holiday or work from home for the duration. As a friend told me last week, it’s beginning to feel a lot a lot like a Covid lockdown.
The organisers’ attempts to generate some enthusiasm are painfully inept. The Olympic mascot has provoked unanimous mirth and is called “the giant clitoris” (the French, at least, appear to know what one looks like). The official posters produce general cringing and the national team shirts look like they’ve been made with old toothpaste and toilet paper. The Hôtel de Ville (City Hall) has been covered with some painted boarding, which has managed to make a rather pretty part of Paris look like the bleakest part of Sunderland on a wet Sunday in 1973.
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But it’s not just the flesh wound of the failed aesthetics that is making Parisians want to punch someone. In addition to the evicted students (many of them foreign students with nowhere else to go), private landlords have been trying to get rid of tenants, at least temporarily, in the expectation of extortionate profits during the Games. Last week there was universal glee over media stories about how disastrously this gambit has collapsed. Many landlords expecting up to €1,000 a night have failed to rent their flats or rooms at all. Now they’re offering them for a tenth of the price.
La Mairie had proposed removing the bouquinistes, the much-loved book stalls that line the banks of the Seine. After unanimous outrage, the president was obliged to say this was no longer going to happen. Ugly attempts to exclude street sleepers and migrant camps during the Games have also revolted the public. Parisians don’t love their homeless people any more than anywhere else, but they are deeply allergic to state crackdowns. And in the city with perhaps the worst disability access in western Europe (life is unbelievably hard in Paris if you use a wheelchair), the coming of the Paralympics at the end of August feels like an unforgivable hypocrisy.
Then, of course, there is the dread shadow of very serious security concerns. France has suffered disproportionately from Islamist terrorism. After the violent convulsions of 2015 and 2016 (including the murderous attacks on Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan and Nice), French police and security forces have been on semi-permanent alert for nearly a decade. They have enjoyed remarkable success in preventing attacks – much of which is discreetly unpublicised.
Many security measures will be announced only days before the Games begin (inevitably adding to the air of disorganised disruption). All police leave for the summer months in the Île-de-France has been cancelled, massive overtime is scheduled and backup units from provincial police forces are ready to take up any slack. The Crocus City Hall attack outside Moscow in March – in which nearly 150 people died – underlined again the inherent vulnerability of public gatherings now. Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to attend the opening ceremony here. A Games without a major attack would feel like a victory infinitely more precious than any gold medal.
Meanwhile, Paris mutters and grumbles to itself like a pessimist being told to cheer up. Perhaps the Games will be an uproarious success after all. Maybe the French will win a gold medal in breakdancing. But, in a country deeply at odds with itself, launching a giant shindig designed largely for television cameras and subject to corporate prerogatives is not going to win you any friends. Essentially, staging an Olympic Games is about improving how the world thinks of you. With an absoluteness hard to describe, Parisians don’t give a stuff what the world thinks about them. It is, by far, their best feature.
Robert McLiam Wilson is an award-winning Paris-based novelist