Paris

Saturday

Graham Robb

Has Notre-Dame ever been a symbol of unity for the French?

From the kitchen of her apartment on the Quai de la Tournelle in Paris, the journalist and broadcaster Agnès Poirier could see the bright yellow plumes of smoke rising into the sky. Notre-Dame de Paris was on fire, and suddenly, in that tourist-crowded, hyper-expensive ‘cradle of France’, nothing was certain — ‘democracy, peace and fraternity’ — any more. The following morning, children living on or near the Île de la Cité took to school little plastic bags filled with blackened bits of roof picked up from balconies and pavements (as well as probably quite a lot of lead dust) which ‘dated back to the Crusades’. Live-streaming of that apocalyptic conflagration

Monday

Gavin Mortimer

My life as a French prisoner of coronavirus ‘war’

Seventeen per cent of Parisians have fled the city since President Macron ordered France to be confined, as part of his ‘war’ strategy to defeat coronavirus. The lockdown, which began on Tuesday, is for two weeks but on Friday the government indicated that it will likely be extended into April as France struggles to contain a pandemic that has now claimed 674 lives. Police are rigorously enforcing the regulations forbidding people to leave home except to buy provisions or briefly stretch their legs. Thousands have been fined for breaking the rules of confinement and there are reports that in future people will be jailed for up to six months if

Monday

Gavin Mortimer

Paris is increasingly lawless – but the middle-classes don’t seem to care

Ah, Paris, the city of love, the city of light, the city of larceny. Theft, burglary, pickpocketing, assault and homophobic acts are on the up, and even the city’s Procureur, the public prosecutor Rémy Heitz, has admitted the stats ‘aren’t good’. No, they’re not. Theft, for example, increased by 15 per cent in 2019, up from 124,875 recorded incidents to 144,552. Pickpockets are also enjoying a boom period with an increase of 35 per cent in 12 months, and there were 7 per cent more burglaries last year than in 2018. True, car theft and gun crime have dropped but physical assaults have risen by 13 per cent, sexual harassment on the

Wednesday

Michael Moorcock

Michael Moorcock: I feel I’ve been cheated by the British state

Back to Texas to prepare for guests arriving for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Once again we left our Paris home not knowing whether we would return as citizens or aliens. As for so many others, the number of uncertainties introduced into our lives by Donald Trump and Brexit are legion. Reaching my 80th birthday I also feel a bit cheated. I religiously paid into social security for some 45 years, now to be told that, because I lived abroad for more than 12 years, I am no longer eligible to claim a UK pension or healthcare. Much as I continue to support the NHS, I doubt a private insurance company could

Thursday

Douglas Murray

The carnage inside Charlie Hebdo: an eyewitness’s account of the attack

It is almost five years since two trained jihadists went into the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris and killed 12 people. Philippe Lançon survived the editorial meeting that was taking place as the gunmen burst in. Published to huge acclaim in France last year, Disturbance is his account of events. It is long, perhaps too long, with numerous discursions. But who would edit such painful, painstaking testimony? On the morning of the attack, Lançon had been weighing up whether to go to Charlie or to Libération, where he also worked. He chose to go to Charlie, whose difficult, brilliant, brave team had kept producing the magazine, despite a decade

Thursday

Stuart Jeffries

The poetry of sewers

‘Welcome,’ says our guide Stuart Bellehewe, with an imperious sweep of his arm, ‘to the cathedral of shit.’ Before us rises Abbey Mills Pumping Station in all its grade II*-listed glory. It arose on east London’s marshes in 1868, giving Victorians a fecally fixated premonition of postmodernism’s fetish for mashing up architectural styles. Observe, urges Stuart, the Russian Orthodox-style cupola surmounting the cathedral, clearly quoting church design. Savour, he urges, the gothic Venetian design of the arched windows and of the corkscrew twist incorporated into the rainwater downpipes. The steeply pitched mansard roofs evoke Flemish designs; brass and copper florets on the doorways are derived from Celtic art. Until 1940,

Wednesday

The Spectator

In pictures: May Day protests in Paris turn violent

Hundreds of people have been arrested after violent May Day clashes in the centre of Paris. Tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of the French capital to mark the event. Stone-throwing protestors clashed with police, as officers – more than 7,000 of whom were deployed – responded with tear gas. Gilets jaunes, who have held anti-government protests weekly since November, teamed up with May Day marchers. Here are the latest pictures from Paris:

Thursday

Dennis Duncan

Method in the madness

Have you heard of the Oulipo? The long-running Parisian workshop for experimental writing? Even if you haven’t, you might have heard of some of its members: Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, Marcel Duchamp. The group’s stock-in-trade (so-called ‘constrained writing’) is best illustrated by their most notorious production: Perec’s 1969 novel La Disparition which manages to avoid using the letter ‘e’ (and which was miraculously translated into English as A Void). Founded in 1960, the Oulipo spent its first decade in self-imposed semi-secrecy. While its academic sibling, Structuralism, came to dominate literature departments both at home and abroad, the Oulipo watched discreetly in disdain: why are the structuralists so dry, so up

Monday

Douglas Murray

Notre Dame’s loss is too much to bear | 15 April 2019

Civilisation only ever hangs by a thread. Today one of those threads seems to have frayed, perhaps snapped. It is impossible to watch the footage coming out of Paris, all that can be done is to groan and turn away. It is not possible to watch the spire of Notre Dame collapse. It is not possible to watch the great cathedral consumed by fire. Evelyn Waugh once said that in the event of a fire in his house, if he was able only to save his children or his library, he would save his library because books were irreplaceable. Only at a moment such as this is it possible to

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Picture gallery: Notre-Dame cathedral devastated by fire

Firefighters are continuing to tackle a blaze that has devastated Notre Dame in Paris. The medieval cathedral’s spire and roof have both collapsed as a result of the blaze. President Emmanuel Macron, who has arrived at the scene of the fire in the centre of Paris, said: ‘Like all of my countrymen, I am sad tonight to see this part of us burn.’ Thousands of people have gathered outside Notre Dame, with some onlookers singing hymns and openly weeping as rescue workers continue to try and put out the flames in the 850-year old building. Here is a picture gallery showing the devastation:

Thursday

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Pearls and swine

The best booers, in my experience, are the Germans. There’s real purpose and thickness to their vocals. Italians hiss. The English grumble. The French? A bit of this, a bit of that. I approve of booing — or feedback, as I like to think of it. It’s galvanising and exhilarating, even when infuriating. Are you with them or not? One caveat: save it till after the performance, please. The French do not hold to such niceties. One piggy old Parisian thought it appropriate to shout at the stage during Sunday’s performance of Opéra Bastille’s new Troyens. And not once. But three times. On that third cry, he got on to

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Apocalypse Dau

Dau is not so much a film as a document of a mass human experiment. The result is dark, brilliant and profoundly disturbing. For three years up to 400 people, only one a professional actor, lived for months at a time on a city-sized set specially built for the shoot near Kharkov, Ukraine. Modelled on the real Kharkov Institute of Experimental Physics between 1938 and 1968, every detail on the set was scrupulously in period, from the light fittings to the lavatory paper. The participants — who included a real-life Nobel Prize winner and famous orchestra conductor as well as real former KGB and prison officers — were required to

Saturday

Jonathan Miller

Whoever declares victory in France this weekend, Macron’s reputation has been diminished

Emmanuel Macron, though it may be a little premature to be sure, appears to be maintaining the semblance of a grasp on his capital today. He seems to have done it much in the manner of Inspector Renault in the film Casablanca, with a roundup of the usual suspects. The sun had barely risen on Paris before the Interior Ministry had announced hundreds of arrests. But few of these seem to have been made on the street. We have seen no camera-phone pictures of mass arrests. Rather, they were made in a pre-dawn sweep. The police will have known exactly who they were looking for. The operation appears to have

Thursday

Gavin Mortimer

Yellow fever

I met a friend for lunch in Paris last Sunday. He and his wife had come up from the countryside for a weekend’s shopping. As we sat down, their nerves were still frayed from the previous day. It was, they told me, the most terrifying few hours of their lives. Trapped between the rioters and the police, they retreated to their hotel, where staff instructed them to stay in their room. The mob soon arrived and against a background noise of helicopters, police sirens, breaking glass and detonations, they tried unsuccessfully to force their way inside the hotel while singing an ode to the Révolution. It has been said that

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Let them buy Teslas! How Macron provoked an uprising

Emmanuel Macron is supposed to be the cleverest man in France but he has painted himself so completely into a corner that there’s no way out. Whether the gilets jaunes insurrection achieves its objectives or not, it has become his nemesis. As the yellow wave roils France, Macron is a diminished figure after a crunching fall to earth. Bastion of anti-populism, he has united 70 per cent of France against him. He did self-identify as Jupiter. Now, perhaps, he is looking like a sickly lame duck, albeit one for whom the word hauteur might have been invented. Instead of the confident leader, lecturing and preening on the global stage, he

Thursday

Claudia Massie

Poster boy

You don’t need to be much of a psychologist to understand the trajectory of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Born to aristocratic first cousins, in a family never shy of consanguinity, he was blighted by congenital deformities and weaknesses. When his brittle legs broke in his teenage years, they stopped growing altogether, leaving the adult Lautrec tiny as well as weird-looking, with his heavy lips and thick-lidded eyes. Fortunately, Montmartre was waiting for him, offering a boozy and bosomy refuge from his peculiar family and woeful self-regard. In the dance halls of the capital, Lautrec found his people, and in his art they found themselves. His paintings tell the story best, all

Thursday

Johanna Thomas-Corr

Short on wit

Nominative determinism is the term for that pleasing accord you occasionally find between name and profession: the immigration minister named Brokenshire, the sprinter named Bolt, and so on. Apparently, there was once a Republican candidate for the California state assembly called Rich White. And how wonderful for there to be a comic novelist called Patrick deWitt. Booker-shortlisted for his western pastiche, The Sisters Brothers, and praised as a latter-day P.G. Wodehouse, the Canadian author certainly seems sure of his calling. My copy of French Exit opens with a letter explaining that each character in his fourth novel ‘deliver[ed] on his or her promise, or beyond his or her promise’. Is

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

The piano tuner

William Boyd’s 15th novel begins well enough. In 1894 Edinburgh, a 24-year-old piano tuner is promoted to the Paris branch of the firm he works for. Boyd is good on the inner workings of the piano: ‘the hammers, the rockers, the jacks, the whippens, the dampers — its innards were exposed like a clock with its back off or a railway engine dismantled in a repair shed.’ Brodie Moncur, the tuner in question, is possessed of perfect pitch and a fine sensibility which places him at odds with the brutal household of his tyrannical father and nine siblings (his mother has died in childbirth). The early domestic scenes possess real

Thursday

Laura Freeman

Round the horn

After the England football team beat Tunisia at this summer’s World Cup, they celebrated with a swimming-pool race on inflatable unicorns. Purple hooves, rainbow manes, cutesy eyes, yellow horns like upended Cornetto cones. The millennial unicorn is unrecognisable from the medieval. The proud unicorns of bestiaries and courtly romances have become the twinkling Bambis of Instagram. Search #unicorn (more than nine million posts) and canter into a pastel clearing of long lashes, swishy tails and crystal horns. ‘My favourite colour,’ announces one unicorn, pink, prancing, wide-eyed, ‘is glitter.’ Compare the simpering My Little Unicorn of the emoji palette with the noble creature in the ‘Unicorn Tapestries’ (c.1500), which hang in

Thursday

Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Sebastian Faulks’s ghosts in Paris

In this week’s books podcast, I’m talking to Sebastian Faulks about his brilliant new novel Paris Echo, which describes the twined stories of a Moroccan teenager and an American academic in the French capital – and the way that the ghosts of the past, from the Occupation to the decolonisation of North Africa, still play out in the present. I asked Sebastian whether writing from the point of view of a 19-year-old Moroccan means he’s going to be chucked in the Lionel Shriver High Security Prison for “cultural appropriation”, whether Paris Echo is an excursion into Magic Realism, how his serious literary novels coexist with his writing James Bond or