Must Paris reinvent itself?

In this odd book, the Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper narrates his experience as an expatriate ‘uptight northern European’ living in Paris with his family. His American wife, Pamela Duckerman, also a journalist, is the author of Bringing Up Bébé, a culture-shock memoir about having children in Paris and discovering French child-rearing ways, which are often radically at odds with American ideas and habits. Impossible City touches on some of the same territory (Kuper’s French acculturation through his children’s schooling and socialising), but it aims at a more comprehensive portrayal of rapidly evolving 21st-century Paris, warts and all; or, as he puts it, in a phrase that some may find a little crude, running the gamut ‘from croissants to terrorists’.

Kuper tackles first the ‘French sacralisation of Paris’, a city whose grand 19th-century ‘stage set’, designed by Baron Haussmann at the behest of Napoleon III, has been strenuously preserved through architectural conservation, maintenance and ‘the shoving of cemeteries, bus garages, municipal dumps and anything else unsightly into the netherworld of the suburbs’. This stage-set capital is, Kuper observes, ruled by a complicated etiquette made especially impenetrable to newcomers because it remains, by and large, tacit. Countless non-dits (things that are left unsaid) will only be clarified through trial and error. As a result, beneath the surface Parisians are often ‘charlatans’ who merely perform their Parisian identity by imitating others while working things out as they go along.

Kuper is right to note that Paris is full of people originating from the suburbs, provincial France and foreign lands who are keen to faire leur trou (‘make their own hole’ or find their place in society) and become Parisian by absorbing the city’s cultural ways. This has been the case for a long time.