ancient cities

metro stretched north to south (from Montmartre
to Montparnasse), then that would christen the
foremost literary journal of the second decade of
the twentieth century: Nord-Sud. Transportation
mattered immensely in this immense city, as in all
cities, and this symbol of Paris transport became,
like much else in and of Paris, what mattered
everywhere. The theory of the image that Reverdy
proclaimed in that journal named after that metro
spread to England and America, as elsewhere.
Paris was, as so often, the source of much. What
happened in Paris happened all over.
Paris has always represented whatever was most
French about Frenchness—when there was a revolution
against the bourgeois spirit, it was the provincial
import to the big city who would inspire it.
The great creators among the French—Balzac,
Henri Beyle (Stendhal), and Flaubert in the nineteenth
century and then Guillaume Apollinaire,
Paul Claudel, André Gide, Pierre Reverdy, and
André Breton for literature in the early part of the
twentieth century, before André Gide, André
Malraux, and the existential crowd of Jean­Paul
Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir, on
to the writers of present­day literature—like the
artists of then and now, have centered their works
and lives around the big city. Its cafés have been
their meeting places, well known and much loved.
Most important, from the beginning, the Paris café
has represented the very crux of civilization, the
place where things are discussed, political arguments
are carried on, literary and artistic movements
nourished, and the differences between
classes and talents and fortunes somehow smoothed
over. Sartre and Beauvoir carried on their existentialist
discussions in the Flore and the Deux
Magots—and during the war, the cafés served as
warming places as well as writing places for the
inhabitants of heatless hotels and apartments.
Everything echoed from Paris out. The events
of May 1968—called les événements or simply
“May” (the appellation of the far left)—were
echoed in other countries, most particularly in
New York, with the occupation of Columbia
University, for example. The upheaval, which
stirred students and workers alike, seemed about
to overturn the country, but the excitement petered
out, and things seemed to resume almost normally.
Not quite, however. In the universities,
professors were marked by their role in the events,
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and the fidelities and betrayals were not easily
forgotten.
In more recent times, as never before, there has
been a problematic relation between the slums or
bidonville of Paris and the government. The influx
of immigrants from Algeria—the pieds noirs—and
the settlers from North Africa as from many other
Francophone territories has led to conflagrations
of an increasingly violent nature. In this context,
alas, the party of, and the influence of, Jean­Marie
Le Pen cannot be overlooked. Racism prevails in
some parts of the country, and no less in Paris, as
various incidents over these past few years have
proved. This is especially true in la France profonde,
or the nonmetropolitan parts of the country.
There has been undeniably, over the years,
between the centralizing power, not just of Paris
but of the country France, and the French­speaking
inhabitants of other countries, outside “the
hexagon”—the shape of metropolitan France
(France métropolitaine or la Métropole, are terms
used to differentiate France from the French colonies).
In 2007, a movement sprang up of interest to
all Francophiles, which expressed itself in a manifesto
called Littérature-Monde, rebelling against
the term and concept of la Francophonie, or
French­speaking parts of the world, conceived of
as a sort of otherness or non­hexagoneity. The idea
of the marginalized other has fallen into grave
disrepute, and the term Francophone seems to
stress that. No one, says the manifesto, speaks
Francophone, and no one writes it either. This
manifesto was occasioned by the awarding of the
Nobel Prize to Le Clezio, himself not a hexagon
product and the excitement about this kind of
revolution in literary imagination.
While Paris is not mentioned in what has
become the iconic work on world cities, pushed to
the side by Tokyo, London, and New York, the
Paris metropolitan region is the fifth­largest urban
economy in the world (and the largest in Europe).
It is home to UNESCO and to 37 of the Fortune
Global 500 companies, and it is visited by some
45 million tourists each year. To better position
itself in the global competition for world city status,
new skyscrapers (1,000 feet and higher) have
been approved in the business district of La Defensé,
scheduled for completion in the next decade, and
City of Paris authorities have said that they will
relax restrictions on building heights within the