A history of Paris over the past few hundred years, though mostly focused on the 19th and early 20th centuries, because this period has much richer information sources. The book looks at various aspects of the city (Ghosts, Zone, Canaille, Le Business) in each chapter, with an historical view of that aspect. Very much a history of the people - which for most of this period implies poor people. What I see underlined in this book is the fact that so much of what we consider picturesque or essential to our view of "Paris" is based on poverty and misery. The idealized street life is in part a life of poor people with no other place to be, except a miserable hole to sleep in. Or trying to cobble together some kind of sustenance scrambling after opportunities in the street. There is some kind of dissonance between this idealized view of free, wide open Paris (or New York) and the poverty and misery that underlies it. Free and wide open because so many of the inhabitants have nothing to lose and nothing to look forward to? No future?
On the other hand, you can see how buckled down, narrow and safe life has become as western societies have become wealthier across the board, and have accumulated more things that can be lost. There has been some kind of taming of humanity, a hollowing out in some way, a domestication. In a sense we have become farm animals - safe, secure but oh so dull. Trade it for uncertainty, instability but ever so much excitement and stimulation? Hmmm. No society has made this reverse choice yet. This is what is happening in Istanbul right now actually. As the middle class grows, the society becomes more enclosed and more homogeneous.
Hard choices.
This book also underlines how Vanishing New York by J. Moss is a bit naive in its complaint. There is still a whiff of the white middle class tourist on a slumming run (though a small whiff, as the author has his reasons for searching out the freedom and openness of New York City).
I suppose, in a sense, there are two types of people in this swirling mass of humanity that gave New York and Paris their character and flavour. One, the people who are genuinely different somehow, who don't fit in - for them, the jumble and mishmash of the city represents some kind of freedom to be. The other type are the poor and miserable for whatever reason - drugs, lack of education, generational poverty, psychological problems. They live on the margins, not by choice, but by necessity, or through inevitability. These are the people who are ignored when you romanticize this older time period.
The one thing that is radically different though, is the way rich and poor mixed in Paris - at the theatre, in the street, in cafes and bals. This does not happen in Toronto (or New York any more) by the sound of things. Probably not in Paris either, as lower income people are pushed further and further out from the centre.
This book also touches on art and its role in gentrification. This may have actually started in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century. Before then, artists were in the orbit of the rich and the wealthy (theory) but when art moved away from representation and tradition, (and buyers) artists ended up in the poorer areas like Montmartre. As the artists get discovered (and also establish centres in cafes and restaurants), their milieu gets discovered, and seems so much more exciting than the run-of-the-mill. This draws money, draws moneyed people, and we go on from there.
No comments:
Post a Comment