The 2nd
Until about fifteen years ago, this was an area of fascinating contrasts. The Sentier was still full of clothes workshops, while the newly pedestrianized area around the rue Montorgueil was attracting all sorts of intellectuals and their families, just metres away from the rue Saint-Denis, where prostitutes stood in every doorway. Now gentrification is almost complete—the Sentier is getting lofted up, rue Montorgueil has changed from a street market into a hipsters’ food court where you can get mango sushi, and the prostitutes are being squeezed out. The only time you can see residents en masse is on a Sunday morning, when the buggy brigade come out to buy their baguette and grab a coffee before the sushi fans arrive. Local-watching is best outside any café on the rue Montorgueil at eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning.
The 3rd
This comprises the northern half of the Marais, gentrified long enough ago to have achieved maturity. Its remarkably quiet medieval streets house art galleries (thanks to the Picasso Museum run-off effect), tasteful estate agencies, clothes shops and ultra-trendy restaurants, peopled by exactly the kind of staff—young and slightly snooty—that you’d expect. However, the shops and cafés in the rue de Bretagne are surprisingly down-to-earth, and mainly cater to the arty young things who can afford to live nearby. Spotting spot: the Café Charlot on the corner of rue Charlot and rue de Bretagne. The interior is a bit of an ‘Old Paris’ theme park, but locals don’t care because the terrace is so sunny. It’s packed every lunchtime with fashionistas from the area’s showrooms. The same goes for the lunchtime foodstalls in the nearby hyper-hip Enfants Rouges market.
The 4th
Forty years ago the heart of the Marais was a gloomy dump inhabited by people who had been there forever. The hôtels particuliers (urban mansions) were soot-blackened and falling down. This was why the city felt free to unleash the wave of destruction that gave us Les Halles (in the 1st), the Centre Pompidou (known by Parisians as Beaubourg) and the hideous modern Quartier de l’Horloge.* These days, post-gentrification, the Marais’ surviving buildings are all spruced up and it’s almost impossible to identify any residents, except perhaps for the second-home Americans on café terraces on a Sunday morning and the parents watching their toddlers play in the small public gardens. The area does attract some easily spotted Parisian groups, though—gays (along the rue des Archives, where I once heard a little girl ask her dad, ‘Papa, why does that princess have a moustache?’), Jews (shabat in the rue des Rosiers is a veritable falafel-fest) and shoppers. Neither the Jews nor the gays follow the old-fashioned French Tuesday-to-Saturday shopping timetable, so the area buzzes all week long. Spotting spot: the falafel bars and bakeries on the rue des Rosiers, or Les Marronniers, the gay and straight brunch place at the bottom of the rue des Archives.
The 5th
A large but subtly disguised proportion of Paris’s old money is concentrated here. The Latin Quarter used to provide shelter for penniless writers like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, but these days they couldn’t afford to live there, except maybe above a crêperie in the rue Mouffetard. The residents of all but the tiny chambres de bonne (top-floor garrets) dress down so the taxman won’t ask how much their apartment is worth, and these people’s kids try to look sloppy so they won’t get mugged by the youths who come into the area on phone-hunting trips. You see that dowdy-looking middle-aged woman with a baguette and a sprig of parsley poking out of the top of her beaten-up shopping bag? She’s a property millionairess, and one day she’ll leave her fortune to those schoolkids who are huddling around a café table making a coffee last for hours and smoking their cigarette as though it cost them all their pocket money (which it will do if Papa finds out they’ve been smoking). The locals shop for food in the rue Mouffetard, despite the heavy presence of tourists, and some of them sit in the sun at the place de la Contrescarpe, though they all retreat to their country houses in high tourist season.
The 6th
A lot like the 5th, except that the people here are more ostentatious, and the youngsters feel freer to show off their Lacoste polo shirts, Rolexes and vintage Vespas. Look out for ’80s throwbacks with knotted pullovers around their shoulders, and girls with the kind of free-flowing hair and perfect teeth you see only on billboards. This is also home to the most intellectual publishing houses, so cafés attract a concentration of loud pontificators, old guys sharing a drink with their pile of manuscript paper, and sophisticated smokers on the lookout for a woman who’ll be impressed to know that she’s meeting a part-time poet. Spotting spots: Les Éditeurs, the book-lined café at Odéon, where writers and publishers gather to talk loudly about book prizes. Also the café Bonaparte, on the corner of the rue Bonaparte and the place Saint-Germain des Prés. Here you can sit amongst lunching locals and watch the hyper-trendy and those with limitless expense accounts heading for La Société, the hot restaurant behind the discreet door diagonally right as you look out from the Bonaparte’s façade.
The 7th
Saying that you’re moving to the 7th is a bit like admitting, “Well, I’ve thought it over and I now realize that I do deserve that Rolls-Royce I’ve always wanted.’ Either that or ‘I’ve been made director of the Musée d’Orsay.’ The people there are posh and they know it. To spot the poshest of the lot, go to La Grande Épicerie, the grocer’s shop next to the Bon Marche department store, and look out for the kind of person who has to tell their friends, ‘Naturellement, I always buy my Earl Grey from La Grande Épicerie.’ Another excellent spot is Le Concorde, at 239 boulevard Saint-Germain, the closest café to the Assemblée Nationale, the lower house of France’s Parliament. Before debates, politicians huddle here to talk amongst themselves or dictate notes to their glamorous assistants, the sexiest politics students in the country.
The 8th
The only Parisians who live here full-time are rich old ladies who wear a fur coat as soon as the temperature drops below 20 degrees centigrade, along with their ancient, ex-playboy husbands, and the newly very rich who need a large underground garage to park their 4WD BMW. Other than that, it’s mostly offices, shops, theatres and fashion houses, with the Champs-Élysées running through the middle. I used to work in this part of town, and for me, the most fascinating people-watching was outside L’Avenue, the posh café on the corner of the rue François Premier and the avenue Montaigne. It is so essential to be seen there that in the middle of winter you will spot a full row of facelifts late-lunching outdoors on the terrace when everyone else is rushing back to their office to get out of the cold. If you actually want to sit in comfort and eat, wander up François Premier to L’Antenne, the café on the corner of the rue de la Trémoille. Here, office workers and media types from Europe 1 radio station gather at lunchtime for an unpretentious break from the daily grind.
The 9th
Until very recently, the area between Pigalle and the Galeries Lafayette was where people moved when they couldn’t decide which arrondissement they liked best. Nowadays it’s going the same way as the 2nd. The internet is killing both the sex shops and the guitar shops, and the neighbourhood is becoming breathlessly trendy. Drab cafés are being made over as ‘traditional bistros’, where carpaccio de boeuf has replaced jambon-beurre (ham baguette) on the menu, to cater for the new clientele of artfully unshaven men, and women who use Ray-Bans to hold their hair in place. You can still see a few old-style occupants of the neighbourhood—sex-shop owners and ageing prostitutes—in the small cafés just south of the place Pigalle. But beware, if an underdressed girl in a foreign accent comes up and says hello as soon as you enter a bar—you’re in for a very expensive drink. To see the biggest concentration of trendy newbies, head for the Hôtel Amour’s restaurant in the rue de Navarin.
The 10th
This is a bit of a no-man’s-land. Around the Gare du Nord and along the boulevard de Strasbourg, it’s as sordid as it ever was, though the Sri Lankan community to the north of the station is now settling in and cleaning it up, and incidentally providing some of
the best and cheapest ethnic food in the city. At Château d’Eau métro, touts for the African hairdressers hustle women to come and get their locks braided or straightened. Fifteen years ago, the canal zone in the east of the arrondissement was the hippest area in Paris, and it still attracts plenty of night-time revellers, either crowding into the laid-back restaurants and bars or sitting along the waterside, watching the drunks stumble into the murky water. My favourite spotting spots are the Sri Lankan cafés near La Chapelle métro station, where Tamils gather for an early dinner or after-work chat, or one of the bridges over the Canal Saint-Martin when the summer-evening picnics are in full swing. And just for a taste of the really seedy side of Paris, a quick dash over the Strasbourg-Saint-Denis crossroads will take you past cheap Chinese streetwalkers and all the lowlife that these cruelly exploited new immigrants attract.
The 11th
Bastille, formerly a furniture-making area, has become a big-brand shopping ghetto, but beyond the rue de la Roquette and the rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, this is still a lively, varied arrondissement, with gentrifiers living alongside Arab corner-shop owners and ordinary Parisians who will struggle if you ask them the way to Père Lachaise cemetery in English. The Oberkampf area is still one of the best venues for bar-crawling, and attracts slightly rough-edged crowds from the late teens to forty-somethings practically every night of the year. For cooler, terrace-based people-watching, it’s best to head for the Pause Café on the corner of the rue de Charonne and the rue Keller, in the area made famous (to other Parisians, at least) by the 1996 film Chacun Cherche son Chat (also released under the English title When the Cat’s Away).
The 12th
This is a far-flung arrondissement inhabited by a mix of middle-class people who wanted a cheaper alternative to the 11th, and poor edge-of-towners. The most interesting spots are the Coulée Verte (‘green flow’) gardens heading out from Bastille along the old railway track, and the hub of activity around the place d’Aligre. This is a densely packed Sunday market that makes your mouth water and your toes hurt, as you jostle to buy cheap food and get stomped on by the hurried locals. It’s Paris at its democratic, people-watching best, with rich and poor vying elbow-to-elbow to get served, and stalls selling Spanish strawberries at suspiciously low prices just metres away from the old market hall where you can buy hand-picked, organic, individually boxed French varieties that cost as much per kilo as a second-hand Renault.
The 13th
This is home to Paris’s biggest and most Chinese Chinatown, with some startlingly authentic restaurants and a real colonial feel near the Porte de Choisy. It’s also home to the Butte aux Cailles, the hilltop village of lanes and low-rise houses that is the southern Parisians’ alternative to Montmartre. I used to think that the name ‘Quails’ Hill’ was cutely rustic until I was told that caille was an old word for prostitute. These days, there are no brothels, but you might see some Chinese masseuses taping their phone numbers to lampposts. In the evenings, the Butte is a young people’s party zone, with student types bustling around in front of the bars and waiting patiently for a table at the incredibly popular Café Gladines, the cheap and cheerful Basque restaurant at 30 rue des Cinq Diamants.
The 14th and 15th
As far as people-watching is concerned, these are of interest only to someone doing a PhD on the Parisian middle-class family. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Parisian middle-class families, it’s just that they’re not the world’s most colourful tribe. One of the oases of liveliness is the huge traditional brasserie La Coupole, on the boulevard du Montparnasse, where Parisians usually outnumber tourists, and gather to eat mountains of seafood. If you tell the restaurant it’s your birthday, the waiters will troop towards your table chanting, ‘Ça, c’est Paris’, and then they will crowd around you to sing ‘Joyeux Anniversaire’ while you squirm with embarrassment and try to avoid getting your nose burnt by the Roman candle on top of the birthday cake—which is a dummy, by the way.
The 16th
This vast arrondissement is mostly a rather dull blend of grand bourgeois and tacky new money. In the daytime, the parks are crammed with immigrant nannies and the designer shops are full of desperate housewives. In the evening, they’re all either at home or out for dinner in the 7th or the Bois de Boulogne. The deathly gentility is disturbed only on match days, when Paris Saint-Germain football fans swarm to the Parc des Princes for a session of racist chanting. Best place to spot locals in the wild is on the long walk from the métro station La Muette to see the Impressionist paintings at the Musée Marmottan. The 16th is also the arrondissement that spawned what many people see as the archetypal Parisian homme—floppy hair, designer jeans, effortless charm, seen-it-all (but wouldn’t be seen dead in the T-shirt) attitude—though he is more usually to be found bantering his way around the bars and restaurants of the 6th.
The 17th
The 17th is so far away from everything that it’s hard to imagine it’s intra muros. Quite honestly, I have very little idea who lives here. There is an outburst of shopping activity at Ternes and a posh, 8th-style area around the Parc Monceau, with lots of lawyers’ offices, but the only 17th people who have stuck in my mind are transvestites—for a short while, I lived near the Porte de Saint-Ouen, which was a cruising zone for men who like men dressed as ladies, and I once saw a kind of mini Rio carnival as three ten-foot-tall cross-dressers strutted flamboyantly towards their pick-up points.
The 18th
Montmartre is home to Paris’s artists and can-can dancers, and on a good day you will see Picasso out sketching with Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec hobbling after a petticoated lady, begging to paint her portrait. Or maybe not—in reality, Montmartre today is a village populated by Parisians rich enough to have bought houses with fantastic views before the prices went crazy, slightly unconventional middle-class professionals who enjoy walking up hills, and tourists in search of a good photo of the city’s rooftops. Nearby Barbès, on the other hand, is a multi-generational logjam of people from every part of Africa that France ever managed to colonize. To observe l’Afrique française, just walk northwards along the boulevard Barbès on a Saturday afternoon and you’ll go all the way to Senegal. Those in search of more trendy people-watching usually head up the hill to the bars and cafés on the rue Lepic to recapture the feel of the movie Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain.
The 19th
Belleville, with its cluster of big Chinese brasseries, is resisting change, but the rest is getting seriously hip, with artists’ studios and film-production companies herding in. Above Belleville, the Jourdain area is a media ghetto, with about 50 per cent of the population working in TV, cinema or radio. These are the bobos (bourgeois Bohemians)—Parisians trying to pretend they’re not. Their apparent lack of style is a style in itself and make no mistake—that rumpled shirt and ruffled hair were rumpled and ruffled by professionals. All of which means that the café terraces are crowded non-stop because these people don’t work regular office hours. On sunny days, they all go to the Buttes-Chaumont park to try and picnic on the dangerously sloping lawns (downhill-rolling wine bottles and melons are a frequent hazard). Further northwest, the area around the canal basin, the Bassin de la Villette, is not yet inhabited by trendies, and is one of the last poor, mixed-race quartiers inside the city. Blacks, Chinese, Arabs, Orthodox and Sephardic Jews and low-income Whites co-exist in a zone that will be almost entirely lofted over in ten years’ time. Spotting spots: the Buttes-Chaumont whenever it’s sunny, and the Bar Ourcq on the southeastern (sunny) side of the Bassin de la Villette, where young Parisians gather for evening pétanque picnics.
The 20th
Until recently considered as a distant cultural and social wasteland, it’s now a great place for small live-music venues. Apart from that, its location means that it is home to lots of scooter-riding bobos who can afford to send their kids to private schools in better areas, as well as vestiges of poor people who are hanging on in Paris but might be forced to cros
s over the périph’ to the suburbs if their rents rise any further. Spot two different types of trendies on one stretch of the rue de Bagnolet—rock fans in the Flèche d’Or, an old railway station that has been turned into a cool music venue, and just opposite, much snappier dressers in the bars and restaurants of the Mama Shelter Hotel, which until recently used to be one of the city’s ugliest multi-storey car parks.
How to become a Parisian
The Russian-born French actor Sacha Guitry once said, ‘Être parisien, ce n’est pas être né à Paris, c’est y renaître.’ In other words, to be a Parisian you don’t have to be born here, it’s all about being re-born. People re-invent themselves when they arrive, or at the very least evolve so that they will fit in.
And the good news is that it’s really not too difficult to become a Parisian. There are no painful tattoos or initiation ceremonies to go through, just a change of look and attitude. And most Parisians have had to undergo this acclimatization process, because a very large proportion of them weren’t born that way. They came here from all over the world, including other parts of France, and have battled their way through the city’s obstacle course of manners to arrive at the finishing post as fully fledged Parisians. Even I, who was terrified of driving in Paris for the first five years, am now capable of swerving, swearing and hooting with the best of them.
Appropriately, it took a non-Parisian writer to define the process of Parisianization (Parisians don’t have time to do such a thing). In 1938, the Swiss writer Charles Ferdinand Ramuz published a book called Paris, Notes d’un Vaudois (Vaud is a Swiss canton), in which he said that:
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