The fall of Paris

Paris used to be the most self-confident city in the world. Brash, assertive, boastful: Manhattan claimed to be the best. Cool, elegant, sophisticated, supercilious: Paris knew that it was the best. This is no longer true. Paris has lost its élan, and that has created a love-hate relationship with the UK. Everyone seems to know someone who is working in London. The ones left in Paris cannot decide whether to punish us or join us: to hope that Brexit fails — or to fear that Brexit might fail, and keep able young Frenchmen from job opportunities in London.

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Flics everywhere, tattiness, tension: one is reluctant to acknowledge the successes of evil, but terrorism is at the core of Paris’s problems. In this most civilised of cities, there is a fear that civilisation is losing control. On all sides, there is a loss of faith in the French system: economic, administrative and diplomatic. La grande illusion of post-war French foreign policy — Europe as a French jockey on a German horse — now seems just that: an illusion. One must always remember that French political self-belief has never been more than a sticking–plaster to cover deep wounds: 1940, Vichy, the Liberation, which did not happen quite in the way that de Gaulle described. When the French fall off their high horse, they suffer.

Yet we must not exaggerate. In Paris, you are convinced that there is only one way to translate chic — parisienne. The girls have an allure: a blend of gamine and grace, haute couture and mischief. That got us talking about the naughtiest girl of the 20th century, Pamela Harriman, a Dorset aristocrat who ended her life as the American ambassador to France, with so many adventures along the way.