Paris Dreaming

by Katrina Lawrence

  The concept of the good old days had taken hold in the political and popular cultural discourse in recent times. My father always pointed out that they weren’t really that good in the first place. Still, the modern era of globalisation seemed to scare many, in France as in other Western countries, who reacted by yearning for the supposed simplicity of the past, for a time when borders were more defined, and identity more clear-cut. France, until recently, had not been considered an overly patriotic nation. Proud, sure. But jingoistic, not so much. One theory is that this shirking from displays of flag-waving can be traced back to the Second World War, which showed France the horrors that nationalities can inflict upon one another.

  The fabric of French society has dramatically rewoven itself since the war, with new threads of colour and patterns of religious belief. Up to ten per cent of the population of this traditionally Catholic country is now Muslim, one consequence of the collapse of France’s colonial empire, which saw many Muslim Algerians flee to France during that country’s war of independence. The demographic trend reached a tipping point in 2004, when the government updated its laws on laïcité — the concept of secularism formulated in the late nineteenth century to curb the powers of Catholicism — to outlaw, in schools, such symbols of religious affiliation as the Islamic veil, which is a particular pet peeve of the National Front. Nationalists are often accused of racism, but it’s not so much a race as a very specific religion they mostly take issue with.

  For lunch, we’d booked at a new brasserie in the renovated Les Halles complex, the old food markets site dubbed the belly of Paris by author Émile Zola. True to the sauce-laden heritage of French cuisine, Champeaux serves up such Gallic staples as vols-au-vent, soufflés and escargots, which Andy ordered to the boys’ disgust as much as fascination.

  ‘Eww, slimy snotty snails,’ they yelled, falling about laughing, when the waiter placed Andy’s plate in front of him.

  ‘When am I going to get my perfect French children?’ I sighed, looking a little longingly at the next table. A Parisian couple, on one side, was sharing a charcuterie spread and bottle of burgundy, while their three sons sat opposite, playing quietly with toy soldiers as they neatly made their way through their steak-frites. My sons, meanwhile, were squirming around in their seats, faces scrunched up, pretending to be snails. I ordered another glass of wine.

  The French love their escargots so much they eat almost a billion of the slugs each year, but the country’s tastes are slowly inclining to the exotic, with couscous consistently voted one of France’s most popular dishes. You really sense the spicy melting pot that is modern France at Les Halles, which sits atop a station that sees several RER regional train lines constantly transport Parisians from extra muros to intra muros, giving a multicultural flavour to the inner city.

  It’s places like this where you feel that social change is not just inevitable, it’s actually happening. Still, some believe that France won’t truly be multicultural until it accepts people’s differences. The official immigration policy is assimilation, which basically requires wearing a conventional French identity along with your stripy top.

  ‘I’d be so honoured to have the chance to live here,’ I reflected. ‘I’d probably end up acting more French than Catherine Deneuve.’

  ‘Well, that would be easy for a Francophile like yourself,’ pointed out Dad. ‘Also, you’re Catholic, albeit shockingly lapsed, so it would be fairly seamless to meld your world outlook with that of France, which is Catholic in so many ways, despite officially being a secular state.’

  Many French citizens say that they simply don’t feel French. The problem with assimilation is that its opposite is ghettoisation, as it’s all too easy to see in the outer suburbs of Paris, where so many disenfranchised youth live in a perpetual state of poverty and resentment. The various Paris attacks might be forcing France to admit to a social problem, one it has denied for so long. Not out of maliciousness or neglect, I believe. France simply doesn’t have the cold, hard statistics to make such a case. The French state is not legally allowed to collect personal information about ethnicity and religion, which has been the case since the end of the Second World War, in order that the types of atrocities carried out by the Vichy government against French Jews can never occur again. So this belief that everyone can and should be equal, even if it has proved tricky to enact in practice, and even if it is going to require a rethink for modern times, comes, I believe, from a good place.

  All French children are expected to learn the French language to grammatical perfection. School is the factory for moulding, polishing and turning out ideal citizens. The curriculum is standardised across the country, so that everyone is literally on the same neatly lined and penned page when it comes to thinking à la française. Just as school kids are dished up three-course cuisine at the canteen, they’re also taught to appreciate culture from a young age. On many a museum visit, I’ve watched school groups listen intently to curators speak about the brush stroke techniques of Impressionism or the marvels of sculpting in marble. Kids are encouraged to make a regular activity of museums, which are free for students under the age of twenty-six.

  We decided to spend the rest of the afternoon at the nearby Centre Georges Pompidou, France’s National Museum of Modern Art. ‘Pompi-poo!’ yelled Otto, over and over, like some crazed mantra, all the way there. ‘It looks like a big Meccano building,’ remarked Noah, adding: ‘Actually, I think I’d rather go back to the apartment and play with my Lego.’ I sighed once more. This wasn’t boding well as a highly cultural experience.

  But Pompidou was never meant to be taken seriously, which explains the irreverent inside-out architecture: the colour-coded ducts and pipes and plexiglass tubes of people movers hanging off a metal framework that would look more at home in an oil refinery. The museum opened in 1977, which is not generally a high point in the history of architecture. What’s more, time hasn’t softened Parisians’ general disdain for the design, so at odds with the usual classically minded allure of the city’s monuments. Still, it’s one of the most visited of the city’s museums, proof perhaps that Paris can be as open to modernity as history.

  After only an hour, we admitted defeat in our mission to instil in the boys a love of contemporary art — they were more interested in racing along the escalator tubes than perusing the actual exhibitions — and we set off for home. Before long Notre-Dame loomed over us, and we stopped to try out a history lesson. Noah had only just started studying history at school, and was having trouble grasping the concept. ‘You mean they’re all dead?’ he’d ask, eyes welling, whenever we’d speak to him about, say, the gladiators of Ancient Rome or the kings and queens of Versailles. ‘Are they in heaven?’

  Noah had also begun to take Catholicism classes. To our disappointment our local public school didn’t offer general religion as a subject, but required students to identify with one faith, and we had decided to go along with the Catholic concept of heaven. To Noah, the world was a rainbow-filled bubble, and we wanted the dream-state of innocence and wonder to last as long as possible. But heaven, as lovely as we made it sound, was something we preferred him not to dwell on too much, which is why, when his budgie died, she didn’t go to the place with the gilded gates and marshmallow clouds; instead, she had flown to Paris for a holiday and ended up staying (she sent a postcard to explain herself). Paris is heaven in a way, as I said to Andy, crossing my fingers that Noah wouldn’t think to ask for a rendezvous when we finally made it to Bluey’s new home. Fortunately, he had forgotten poor old Bluey by then.

  Notre-Dame was built at a time — from the 1160s to 1340s — when Parisians feared the afterlife. Its Gothic style — as it was dismissively named in the modernity-minded Renaissance, in reference to the savage tribes of the Dark Ages — perfectly suited the heavenly aspirations of the era, with pointed arches and spindly spires straining skywards, as though in perpetual prayer. Paris is the birthplace of Gothic, and Notre-Dame one of its finest examples. The ca
thedral has come to dominate this city physically, but it also soars over the country spiritually, because it’s the official heart of France, from where all distances are measured. As my father had pointed out, France remains an intrinsically Catholic country, where clans still ritualistically gather on a Sunday to celebrate life, if not actual Mass, as we ourselves had just done.

  But no religion exists in a vacuum in the modern world. Even when the framework of Gothic architecture was being forged, the inspiration came from the East, after the First Crusade opened up trade routes that brought back not just exquisite wares of glass and gold, but also new ways of scientific and mathematical thinking. Have a look at the pointed arches and rib vaulting throughout Notre-Dame. They echo profoundly with Islamic influence, which surely shines a new, bright light on religion in a multicultural society and interconnected world.

  ‘It almost doesn’t look real,’ commented Andy, as we stood staring at the frontispiece, with its ornamental tiers and towers. ‘Like something designed for Disneyland.’ It’s true. Preservation efforts have spruced up Notre-Dame, scrubbing its stones of dirt and the patina of history. Some authenticity seems to have disappeared in the freshening process, but then again the past in Paris is often not what it appears, being constantly reimagined for a new audience.

  Notre-Dame, so scorned and scarred in Revolutionary times, was once a symbol of an autocratic age when royalty and religion ruled in cahoots. Then along came its saviour, in the form of writer Victor Hugo, one of the first French nostalgics and a lover of all things Gothic. His 1831 book The Hunchback of Notre-Dame had all the ingredients for a Romantic blockbuster: a character with a dark past, oodles of heart-stirring sentiment and a strong underlying social message — not to mention the beautiful gypsy dancer Esmerelda and a misunderstood freak. Parisians swooned, falling in love with the modern fairy tale, along with their city’s past. But Notre-Dame was the real damsel in distress, and she was promptly placed at the top of the restoration list. Architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc didn’t so much resuscitate as reinterpret Notre-Dame, ramping up the Gothic drama with faux medieval masonry, an ornate new spire, and a motley crew of ghoulish beings who lurk up top, along with the old gargoyles, like evil beings from foreboding fairy tales themselves. Viollet-le-Duc has been accused of Disneyfying Notre-Dame and so it’s little surprise that the cathedral has actually become a legitimate Disney movie star. ‘Quasimodo’s house’, as Noah calls it.

  A few days later, we returned to march the boys’ little legs up to Quasimodo’s old haunt, around a seemingly endless twirl of time-worn stone steps that resonate with the thud of thought written in stone, as Hugo described Gothic architecture. Noah and Otto, having not yet developed a love for olde-worlde ways, were most unimpressed by the absence of a lift. By the time we reached the parapet connecting the two towers, they were practically as moody as the brooding cluster of horned, winged and hooked creatures that call Notre-Dame home. Perched upon the ledge of the balustrade, these chimeras stare stonily over the mere mortals below, in disdain for the square that was once a bustling medieval quarter before Haussmann razed it in the name of modernisation.

  Parisians — like the Gothic guardian sculptures of Notre-Dame — might seem to fear the future, to yearn for the golden days of the past, yet the Eiffel Tower proves that they can also set their minds to forward thinking. Erected in 1889 as the gateway to the Exposition Universelle, which celebrated a new technological age, the tower immediately stood out in a city of classic stone. Gustave Eiffel, a cutting-edge engineer, believed that iron was the future of building, and that medieval cathedrals had taken their medium of stone as far as it could go. His tower was nothing short of a sky-high icon for the industrial age, with its mass-produced prefabricated metal parts assembled on site and secured by 2.5 million hand-hammered rivets. Therein lies the real allure of the tower, because it was a work of the machine but also the hand, melding technological mastery and artisanal elegance. No wonder the effect is both weighty and ethereal, masculine yet feminine.

  The tower was intended to stand for only twenty years but wily Monsieur Eiffel proved his creation’s long-term value as a communications instrument. To this day, the tower beams radio and television across the city and is still a steeple and shrine to technology. And perhaps that’s why children intuitively love it so much, because it’s a tower that is open to the world, that shoots for the sky — and, of course, that has lifts. ‘Whoah,’ cried Noah, as we whizzed by the lattice girders and trusses. ‘How cool — another big Meccano building.’

  I hadn’t bothered with the Eiffel Tower for years — it felt too done, too touristy. But the joy of travelling with children is that you get to polish up memories dulled by time, and see things shiny and fresh once more, as the jaded filter comes off and the rosy glasses go back on. And you can’t help but regress to a state of childlike amazement as you step onto the top level of the Eiffel Tower, into a near mystical realm. There are no sullen kids or gloomy chimeras, only communal wide-eyed wonder at the city spread like a map below. As I sipped a glass of champagne (rose-tinted, of course), I watched my boys watch the world with awe, and tried to recall what it was like, when I went up there as a young girl, looking down and seeing how small we are, and yet how collective, how we cross one another’s paths like the metal parts in the Eiffel Tower, yet how we also interconnect, riveted by the glue of humanity. It’s when you step away and look at the big picture that you can get the best perspective on life. When you zoom out — so that the clothes you wear or the colour of your skin blurs to insignificance — you see that we’re all just human beings, trying to make our way in this world as best we can.

  I finally had a day to myself, which I wholeheartedly devoted to fashion, and searching for something to wear to my father’s birthday dinner. Clothes shopping in Paris can be an overwhelming experience and the only way to stay sane, and solvent, is to shop within very clear boundaries. I usually only look for dresses, and even then there are set guidelines: there must be some kind of a sleeve, for instance, and the hemline can never, ever drift north of the knee.

  I’m sometimes told I’m small, but I’m actually not. I can always do with losing five kilograms. My trick is to wear dresses that play down any of those bits that would otherwise take a few months of gastronomic deprivation or yogic exertion to deal with, dresses cut to allow for the occasional pastry or chocolate. I don’t wear short bandage frocks, in other words, even at the risk of looking unfashionable some seasons. But it’s not only the lazy girl’s way to keep in shape. I’m just not cut from sheer or tight fabric. It’s like I have an in-built modesty rating monitor that lets me size up, at first glance, what will suit me not only physically but psychologically. Like the dress I ended up buying that day: a button-through maxi shirt-style design, with long sleeves, and nifty vertical stripes to create a leaner look, along with a ribbon-belt to cinch in the illusion of a smaller waist.

  I’ve always found my favourite dresses in France, where the word for fashion, la mode, is derived from the Latin word modus (manner) — just as is la modestie. Which means that fashion here is historically and intrinsically modest. French women, you might interject, have a reputation for flirty dressing, along with behaviour — but I’ve always seen this as mostly a clever marketing ploy to make the world fall in love with les françaises (and buy their perfumes and lipsticks while they do). In reality, most French women dress themselves as discreetly and demurely as they do their daughters.

  At the time of our holiday, la mode pudique was the hot fashion topic. Pudeur is a nuanced synonym for modesty in France, defined in the eighteenth century as a fusing of purity and shame. It was all shiny on the surface in its virtuousness, yet had a dark underlining because it suggested that every woman had the potential to come morally undone. You’d think pudeur might have gone the way of corsets and chastity belts, but a 2009 poll had 88 per cent of French women calling themselves pudiques. But I get this, because the term pudeur isn’t as loaded anymore
, having morphed from a quality of virtue to one of conservative comfort. I’d describe myself as pudique, but I make no judgement against women who wear mini skirts — in fact I’m rather envious of their ease in such clothes. And most Parisiennes still cherish having the right to bare skin, even if they don’t flaunt it; after all, they live in a city populated with statues and paintings of near-nude nymphs. They believe in retaining a little mystery (remember those secret gardens of theirs — which probably contain a few sexy nymphs, too), but try to take away their right to wear less, and they’d surely take to the streets in indignation.

  La mode pudique, however, is getting political. An increasing number of fashion brands have released modesty collections to appeal to Muslim customers, prompting some French identities and intellectuals to accuse this fashion sector of social control and misogyny. So that means I can assert my freedom of sartorial expression by walking down a boulevard in my modest new dress — but a Muslim woman beside me, in her designer abaya, will be death-stared for her supposedly demeaning submissiveness. She would, in fact, be considered more socially provocative than the Parisienne strutting by in a tiny bandage frock. Similarly, I can wrap on an old scarf to hide a bad hair day, but a Muslim Parisienne in a head veil, no matter how gorgeously coloured or patterned it might be, will be scorned.

  I get it: the laïcité factor. Fashion, in France, is meant to be secular. And don’t forget, fashion was originally a tool of conformity there. The Sun King well knew this when he established the industry in the first place, using fashion to bring his rebellious subjects to heel. And yes, on the whole there remains a distinctive French look: the dark jeans, the striped top, the white shirt, the beige trench and so on. If you wanted to assimilate seamlessly, this would be how you’d do it (along with perfecting your subjunctive and learning to love snails). And it’s a great look, but the problem is that fashion is no longer a uniform in our globalised society, only altering by the season. It’s an ever-changing mode of expression and one of the ways we find our place and personality in that world. That’s why some of us dress modestly, and others not, for whatever reason: cultural, religious, psychological, perhaps all of the above. And at any one time, in any one shop, you will find everything from mini skirts to maxi dresses; that’s what keeps the fashion industry ticking and the world evolving and us experimenting. After all, we want our kids to have the freedom to dress up when they’re little, to try on different costumes and personas — and then surely to grow up with choice to be whoever they want to be. Even Parisians, who know the value of conforming, are also well aware that we’re all individualistic rebels at heart.