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.
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.
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