The romance and reality of Paris, the Olympics’ host

PARIS LIFTS the soul, and then exasperates. It expresses reason in its orderly layout and tugs at the heart. The City of Lights mixes magic with the mundane: it is a place of bridges in the moonlight and harshly lit RER underground stations; zinc rooftops and brutalist tower blocks; fine dining and fury on the streets. As the host of the Olympic games, which begin on July 26th, Paris is more than ever a showcase, set to dazzle and delight the world. But the French capital’s often-hidden complexity and paradoxes are also part of its richness. This selection of non-fiction books—most of them by outsiders who have adopted Paris in some way—convey the character of a city that is both familiar and mysterious.

Agnès Poirier’s chronicle of the city’s modish past is a stylish feast. It reveals the small literary world of turtleneck-wearing philosophers, who swapped theory, cigarettes and bed mates on the rive gauche—the left bank—of the Seine in wartime and post-war Paris. Centred on a tiny quarter, the account brings to life the anti-bourgeois and radical-thinking circle that formed around Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and the Café de Flore on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. The café was the group’s “university”, and the centre of avant-garde intellectual life. De Beauvoir rented an unheated room on the rue de Seine, a step away; Sartre on the rue Bonaparte, just around the corner. Besides relating telling details—de Beauvoir used the Flore as her letter box—the book emphasises the cramped geography of public intellectual life at the time, which in some respects persists to this day. Read our full review of “Left Bank” from 2018.

Simon Kuper confesses to the narrowness of his own experience of Paris on page one: “I’m a well-off white man, a native English-speaker, writing from inside dinky Instagrammable Paris.” But the author and Financial Times journalist at least recognises that the capital does not stop at the périphérique (ring road), which divides the city from its multicultural banlieues (suburbs). Taking his children to football training beyond the ring road, and learning from the Arabic-infused street talk they pick up at school, opens the author’s eyes. His account roams from the terrorist attacks of 2015 that floored the city’s morale to the gilets jaunes revolt that started in 2018 and to the happier story of the city’s cycling revolution. If “Impossible City” cannot quite make up its mind about what it is—memoir, anatomy of the French elite or guide to Parisian social codes—it is nonetheless a lively read that captures many of the capital’s contradictions.

This is a sideways glance at Paris that captures both the essence of the city and some of its hidden stories. It is a journey along the river Seine, from its source on the Plateau de Langres, in Burgundy, to the estuary at Le Havre. Elaine Sciolino, a correspondent for the New York Times, meets river policemen, bateliers (bargemen) in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, rowers in Chatou and many others as she pieces together a history, literary picture and sociological study of the capital. Along the way she discovers some of the city’s unsung heroes. Among them is François Jousse, who for more than a quarter of a century was the city’s chief lighting engineer, illuminating the capital’s monuments and bridges with subtlety and drama.

Eric Hazan, who died on June 6th 2024, is considered France’s pre-eminent left-wing social historian of Paris. Most recently he published “Paris in Turmoil” (translated into English in 2022), a collection of vignettes about the city’s evolution, as high rents and organic food shops chased out poorer residents. His real tour de force is now more than two decades old. “The Invention of Paris” is a “psychogeography” of his native city. Hazan describes the changes in each quartier he visits —a new luxury store, a closed café—as well as the historic legacy of walls, boundaries and barricades, which both reveal something about the city’s past and point to its future. His book is partly a lament about the “museumification” of Paris and partly an indignant chronicle of the way the “dangerous classes” have been pushed ever farther out of the city over the decades, and indeed centuries.

This deeply affectionate memoir was first published in 2000, but holds its own today. Its gaze is narrow: it rarely strays from the elegant boulevards around the Jardin du Luxembourg and historic Paris. Yet Adam Gopnik’s account of moving from New York to the French capital, raising a son there, and navigating a city whose assumptions, codes and obsessions fascinate him, remains a captivating read about a place on the cusp of change. The author, an essayist for the New Yorker, examines the small things that say something big: a battle to save one brasserie, the Balzar, from takeover by a chain; Parisians’ attitude to going to the gym, or rather their lack of interest in doing so. Their struggle with bureaucracy is exercise enough. “Parisians emerge from the government buildings on the Ile de la Cité” in the Seine, he writes, “feeling just the way New Yorkers do after a good workout: aching and exhausted but on top of the world.” Grim, angry Paris this is not; but it encapsulates part of the city as it once was, and in some respects still is.

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We asked whether the snap parliamentary election in June and July 2024 threatens the revival of Paris as a commercial centre. We’ve written about how the Olympics are reshaping the city’s geography. Paris is challenging London as a centre of the art market, in part because of Brexit. In the city of Christian Louboutin, women are dispensing with high heels. We review an affectionate tribute to the Paris Metro. Our Paris bureau chief has written a biography of France’s president, “Revolution Française: Emmanuel Macron and the quest to reinvent a nation”. ■