Lazy Days? Parisians Steam, and
Not From the Heat
PARIS "We'll always have Paris," Humphrey Bogart assures Ingrid Bergman in the
last reel of "Casablanca."
.
Easy for him to say. Paris - the couple's locus of what-could-have-been - always
was a simple movie code word for passion and elusive dreams.
.
Did Bogie's screenwriters have to deal with Paris's political hubris producing
monster traffic jams, or 42 of the area's swimming pools being closed for the
summer, or pipe bombs going off in police stations, or the plumbing turning
rotten in the city's shiny new hospital?
.
No. Bogart wore a white dinner jacket in Hollywood's wartime French Morocco of
decent Vichy cops and fat men in fezzes. In that notional world, Paris shimmers
far away, all idealized romance, and Bogart gets to tell Bergman, his hand
holding her chin, "Here's looking at you, kid." Life is tough, but with Paris
memories added to the script, it becomes tinglingly wistful.
.
Such are the movies. In the mostly moist, mostly gray pit of the present (this
summer's rainfall figures here are the worst in 128 years), the fact is that a
blessed piece of the city's genuine grace has seemed threatened.
.
Since the start of French paid vacations in the late 1930s, a magnificent
reprieve from noise and congestion descended on Paris immediately after the July
14th Bastille Day holiday. People left on vacation in increasing numbers and did
not return until late in August. The cars of the stay-behinds zipped where their
drivers wanted to go, Place de la Concorde to the Ile St. Louis, say, in five
minutes.
.
Living turned easy and, in the midst of so much accessible beauty, a city of
legend softened palpably, its cynicism in retreat, its sensuousness a reality
for everyone to feel and embrace.
.
But this summer, the new municipal government decided to close down 4.5
kilometers (almost 3 miles) of a roadway without traffic lights that runs
through the heart of the city along the right bank of the Seine. The idea was to
turn over the expressway to strollers and skaters for a month, but also to
provide the new team of Socialists and Greens with an ideologically laden feat
of social engineering.
.
Except that during the policy's first week, the detours meant that cars by the
tens of thousands filled other streets. They crossed the river to the Boulevard
Saint-Germain, jamming that major Left Bank thoroughfare. They blocked
cross-traffic. They tailed back up the Champs-Elysees. Newspaper pictures, a bit
overdramatically perhaps, showed a single skater on the closed freeway, while
above, cars stood still on the packed quais.
.
Most of all, Paris's Great Respite was symbolically undone. And people got mad.
.
"You can't cut off a road used by 50,000 vehicles a day without creating
enormous traffic problems," said Christian Gerondeau, president of the
Federation of Automobile Clubs. "It isn't a dozen or a few hundred drivers who
are inconvenienced, but at least 100,000 people affected by the consequences of
an absurd and dogmatic decision."
.
On Monday, City Hall said things were clearing up in the sunshine. On Tuesday, a
specially equipped International Herald Tribune test car (working clock on the
dashboard) took 23 minutes to get from Place de la Concorde to the Palais du
Luxembourg on the Left Bank at 6 p.m. That was the equivalent of a mid-November
clocking. Bad stuff indeed. Confronted with the obvious, Mayor Bertrand Delanoe
admitted that the exercise had begun too early, and had not been well enough
explained, but insisted that it would not be abandoned. Pedagogic science in the
service of the masses marches on.
.
This is not an easy context for the sustenance of Paris's great self-regard. It
is, of course, an exceptional city, one of the world's most magnificent, but
surely not the dominating artistic, intellectual and political capital it was
when Picasso or Ho Chi Minh or Hemingway found challenges and comfort here, or
when Bogart and Bergman's screenwriters made it a reference point for
heartbreak.
.
After a very hard try a couple of weeks ago, Paris did not get the 2008 Olympic
Games. In two rounds of balloting in Moscow, it won 33 votes out of 207,
finishing in the end behind Beijing and Toronto. Just being Paris was not enough
anymore.
.
For the French, polls consistently show that young people are ready to work
elsewhere and that the capital's appeal is hard pressed by the lure of more
space and less stress in the provinces. In a new book called "En parlant un peu
de Paris,'' Claude Dubois regrets the passing of parts of the city's street
life, its quick-witted vitality, its slangy, proletarian edge.
.
It is not always certain here, as the road closure suggests, who is running what
for whom. Amazingly, the newspaper Le Parisien reported that in the Paris area
as a whole - more people live in the surrounding suburbs than in the city proper
- 42 swimming pools were being shut down during July and August for repairs and
maintenance.
.
The closed pools may have passed unmissed in the lousy weather, but the summer
quiet, so cherished by people who regard it as a chance to get closer again to
the Paris they love, has been jarred by an undercurrent of unrest and violence.
.
Last weekend, the head of the regional police circulated a warning to police
stations throughout the area to be alert for pipe-bomb attacks against police
stations. There were two such attacks over the July 14 weekend, when 55
automobiles were set on fire in the Seine-St.-Denis district abutting Paris.
There were 14 more car blazes this past weekend.
.
The car fires, and very possibly the pipe-bomb blasts, were thought to be the
work of youth gangs in poor sections where immigrant groups live in high-rise
housing projects. In an effort to stop the violence, service stations in
Seine-St.-Denis were banned Saturday from selling gasoline in transportable
containers, a decision that service station personnel told television
interviewers was absurd - both dangerous to the employees and probably
ineffective.
.
Although no one here had the gracelessness to point it out, Seine-St.-Denis is
where the Stade de France, the marvelous stadium built for soccer's 1998 World
Cup, is located, and where, a bit cavalierly, the French organizers had planned
to build an Olympic Village for competitors at the Games they sought with so
much eagerness.
.
Now, the mayor is not sure Paris will try again soon. Against the cold blast of
so much rejection, he seems a bit taken aback.
.
The vote depressed Jean-Claude Killy, the great skier who was a part of the
French Olympic delegation. "Such little respect for Paris was a kick in the
backside," he said.
.
Paris is so literally at the center of French life that its setbacks send lashes
of pain all over the country. So people winced everywhere in France when,
shortly after its opening in Paris last year, the Georges Pompidou Hospital,
meant to be the standard-bearer of excellence of the French National Health
Service, was affected by an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease.
.
After three deaths, three more cases have been uncovered in recent weeks. Now an
expert with an organization assigned to investigate the hospital's plumbing,
suspected as a cause of the disease, has said it was corroded. The pipes, he
told a reporter, were of poor quality and made of galvanized steel, which failed
to come up to official French norms. The expert concluded that the plumbing was
bought at a cut-rate price outside France.
.
A criminal investigation is under way, but the disclosure fit into a mood of
decomposing public trust that has gripped Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, who
admitted last month that he had lied for years about his political past as a
Trotskyite, and President Jacques Chirac, who on Bastille Day acknowledged, if
obliquely, that before his election he used money from secret government funds
for personal trips. Poll results show ratings for both men on the decline.
.
In the middle of all this, a French writer, Denis Tillniac, who has a close
personal relationship with the president, described "the collective
subconscious" of the French as "very disturbed." They were "traumatized," he
said, because they saw the end of the Chirac-Jospin couple coming with next
year's presidential elections.
.
What clearly most rattled Mr. Tillniac was an ancient French demon, the
replacement by global capitalism - competition, essentially - of old-style
French economic life in which the state arbitrated among protected French
entrepreneurs and ran interference for them in obtaining contracts abroad.
.
More than a E340 million ($295 million) hospital with fatally rotten pipes -
health authorities were warned about them in 1996 - "international financial
capitalism, which has nothing to do with the state-controlled French capitalism
of former times, is humanity's number one enemy," Mr. Tillniac said.
.
Changing the subject, a French newspaper interviewer asked Mr. Tillniac, if he
was following the Tour de France bicycle race, which ends in Paris on the
Champs-Elysees on Sunday. Mr. Tillniac replied that he was disillusioned with
high-level sport, which "money has made rotten."
.
The likely winner of the race is Lance Armstrong, the two-time champion from
Texas who has been jeered during the Tour's first two weeks, perhaps because he
is widely portrayed as too dominant, efficient and business-like. Mr. Armstrong
may take heart, though, if the catcalls continue at finish line: A good part of
them probably come from Parisians mad at the Tour (and its day of street
closings) for knotting the city's summer tighter still.
For Related Topics See:
Europe
Front Page
< < Back to Start of Article PARIS "We'll always have Paris," Humphrey Bogart
assures Ingrid Bergman in the last reel of "Casablanca."
.
Easy for him to say. Paris - the couple's locus of what-could-have-been - always
was a simple movie code word for passion and elusive dreams.
.
Did Bogie's screenwriters have to deal with Paris's political hubris producing
monster traffic jams, or 42 of the area's swimming pools being closed for the
summer, or pipe bombs going off in police stations, or the plumbing turning
rotten in the city's shiny new hospital?
.
No. Bogart wore a white dinner jacket in Hollywood's wartime French Morocco of
decent Vichy cops and fat men in fezzes. In that notional world, Paris shimmers
far away, all idealized romance, and Bogart gets to tell Bergman, his hand
holding her chin, "Here's looking at you, kid." Life is tough, but with Paris
memories added to the script, it becomes tinglingly wistful.
.
Such are the movies. In the mostly moist, mostly gray pit of the present (this
summer's rainfall figures here are the worst in 128 years), the fact is that a
blessed piece of the city's genuine grace has seemed threatened.
.
Since the start of French paid vacations in the late 1930s, a magnificent
reprieve from noise and congestion descended on Paris immediately after the July
14th Bastille Day holiday. People left on vacation in increasing numbers and did
not return until late in August. The cars of the stay-behinds zipped where their
drivers wanted to go, Place de la Concorde to the Ile St. Louis, say, in five
minutes.
.
Living turned easy and, in the midst of so much accessible beauty, a city of
legend softened palpably, its cynicism in retreat, its sensuousness a reality
for everyone to feel and embrace.
.
But this summer, the new municipal government decided to close down 4.5
kilometers (almost 3 miles) of a roadway without traffic lights that runs
through the heart of the city along the right bank of the Seine. The idea was to
turn over the expressway to strollers and skaters for a month, but also to
provide the new team of Socialists and Greens with an ideologically laden feat
of social engineering.
.
Except that during the policy's first week, the detours meant that cars by the
tens of thousands filled other streets. They crossed the river to the Boulevard
Saint-Germain, jamming that major Left Bank thoroughfare. They blocked
cross-traffic. They tailed back up the Champs-Elysees. Newspaper pictures, a bit
overdramatically perhaps, showed a single skater on the closed freeway, while
above, cars stood still on the packed quais.
.
Most of all, Paris's Great Respite was symbolically undone. And people got mad.
.
"You can't cut off a road used by 50,000 vehicles a day without creating
enormous traffic problems," said Christian Gerondeau, president of the
Federation of Automobile Clubs. "It isn't a dozen or a few hundred drivers who
are inconvenienced, but at least 100,000 people affected by the consequences of
an absurd and dogmatic decision."
.
On Monday, City Hall said things were clearing up in the sunshine. On Tuesday, a
specially equipped International Herald Tribune test car (working clock on the
dashboard) took 23 minutes to get from Place de la Concorde to the Palais du
Luxembourg on the Left Bank at 6 p.m. That was the equivalent of a mid-November
clocking. Bad stuff indeed. Confronted with the obvious, Mayor Bertrand Delanoe
admitted that the exercise had begun too early, and had not been well enough
explained, but insisted that it would not be abandoned. Pedagogic science in the
service of the masses marches on.
.
This is not an easy context for the sustenance of Paris's great self-regard. It
is, of course, an exceptional city, one of the world's most magnificent, but
surely not the dominating artistic, intellectual and political capital it was
when Picasso or Ho Chi Minh or Hemingway found challenges and comfort here, or
when Bogart and Bergman's screenwriters made it a reference point for
heartbreak.
.
After a very hard try a couple of weeks ago, Paris did not get the 2008 Olympic
Games. In two rounds of balloting in Moscow, it won 33 votes out of 207,
finishing in the end behind Beijing and Toronto. Just being Paris was not enough
anymore.
.
For the French, polls consistently show that young people are ready to work
elsewhere and that the capital's appeal is hard pressed by the lure of more
space and less stress in the provinces. In a new book called "En parlant un peu
de Paris,'' Claude Dubois regrets the passing of parts of the city's street
life, its quick-witted vitality, its slangy, proletarian edge.
.
It is not always certain here, as the road closure suggests, who is running what
for whom. Amazingly, the newspaper Le Parisien reported that in the Paris area
as a whole - more people live in the surrounding suburbs than in the city proper
- 42 swimming pools were being shut down during July and August for repairs and
maintenance.
.
The closed pools may have passed unmissed in the lousy weather, but the summer
quiet, so cherished by people who regard it as a chance to get closer again to
the Paris they love, has been jarred by an undercurrent of unrest and violence.
.
Last weekend, the head of the regional police circulated a warning to police
stations throughout the area to be alert for pipe-bomb attacks against police
stations. There were two such attacks over the July 14 weekend, when 55
automobiles were set on fire in the Seine-St.-Denis district abutting Paris.
There were 14 more car blazes this past weekend.
.
The car fires, and very possibly the pipe-bomb blasts, were thought to be the
work of youth gangs in poor sections where immigrant groups live in high-rise
housing projects. In an effort to stop the violence, service stations in
Seine-St.-Denis were banned Saturday from selling gasoline in transportable
containers, a decision that service station personnel told television
interviewers was absurd - both dangerous to the employees and probably
ineffective.
.
Although no one here had the gracelessness to point it out, Seine-St.-Denis is
where the Stade de France, the marvelous stadium built for soccer's 1998 World
Cup, is located, and where, a bit cavalierly, the French organizers had planned
to build an Olympic Village for competitors at the Games they sought with so
much eagerness.
.
Now, the mayor is not sure Paris will try again soon. Against the cold blast of
so much rejection, he seems a bit taken aback.
.
The vote depressed Jean-Claude Killy, the great skier who was a part of the
French Olympic delegation. "Such little respect for Paris was a kick in the
backside," he said.
.
Paris is so literally at the center of French life that its setbacks send lashes
of pain all over the country. So people winced everywhere in France when,
shortly after its opening in Paris last year, the Georges Pompidou Hospital,
meant to be the standard-bearer of excellence of the French National Health
Service, was affected by an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease.
.
After three deaths, three more cases have been uncovered in recent weeks. Now an
expert with an organization assigned to investigate the hospital's plumbing,
suspected as a cause of the disease, has said it was corroded. The pipes, he
told a reporter, were of poor quality and made of galvanized steel, which failed
to come up to official French norms. The expert concluded that the plumbing was
bought at a cut-rate price outside France.
.
A criminal investigation is under way, but the disclosure fit into a mood of
decomposing public trust that has gripped Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, who
admitted last month that he had lied for years about his political past as a
Trotskyite, and President Jacques Chirac, who on Bastille Day acknowledged, if
obliquely, that before his election he used money from secret government funds
for personal trips. Poll results show ratings for both men on the decline.
.
In the middle of all this, a French writer, Denis Tillniac, who has a close
personal relationship with the president, described "the collective
subconscious" of the French as "very disturbed." They were "traumatized," he
said, because they saw the end of the Chirac-Jospin couple coming with next
year's presidential elections.
.
What clearly most rattled Mr. Tillniac was an ancient French demon, the
replacement by global capitalism - competition, essentially - of old-style
French economic life in which the state arbitrated among protected French
entrepreneurs and ran interference for them in obtaining contracts abroad.
.
More than a E340 million ($295 million) hospital with fatally rotten pipes -
health authorities were warned about them in 1996 - "international financial
capitalism, which has nothing to do with the state-controlled French capitalism
of former times, is humanity's number one enemy," Mr. Tillniac said.
.
Changing the subject, a French newspaper interviewer asked Mr. Tillniac, if he
was following the Tour de France bicycle race, which ends in Paris on the
Champs-Elysees on Sunday. Mr. Tillniac replied that he was disillusioned with
high-level sport, which "money has made rotten."
.
The likely winner of the race is Lance Armstrong, the two-time champion from
Texas who has been jeered during the Tour's first two weeks, perhaps because he
is widely portrayed as too dominant, efficient and business-like. Mr. Armstrong
may take heart, though, if the catcalls continue at finish line: A good part of
them probably come from Parisians mad at the Tour (and its day of street
closings) for knotting the city's summer tighter still. PARIS "We'll always have
Paris," Humphrey Bogart assures Ingrid Bergman in the last reel of "Casablanca."
.
Easy for him to say. Paris - the couple's locus of what-could-have-been - always
was a simple movie code word for passion and elusive dreams.
.
Did Bogie's screenwriters have to deal with Paris's political hubris producing
monster traffic jams, or 42 of the area's swimming pools being closed for the
summer, or pipe bombs going off in police stations, or the plumbing turning
rotten in the city's shiny new hospital?
.
No. Bogart wore a white dinner jacket in Hollywood's wartime French Morocco of
decent Vichy cops and fat men in fezzes. In that notional world, Paris shimmers
far away, all idealized romance, and Bogart gets to tell Bergman, his hand
holding her chin, "Here's looking at you, kid." Life is tough, but with Paris
memories added to the script, it becomes tinglingly wistful.
.
Such are the movies. In the mostly moist, mostly gray pit of the present (this
summer's rainfall figures here are the worst in 128 years), the fact is that a
blessed piece of the city's genuine grace has seemed threatened.
.
Since the start of French paid vacations in the late 1930s, a magnificent
reprieve from noise and congestion descended on Paris immediately after the July
14th Bastille Day holiday. People left on vacation in increasing numbers and did
not return until late in August. The cars of the stay-behinds zipped where their
drivers wanted to go, Place de la Concorde to the Ile St. Louis, say, in five
minutes.
.
Living turned easy and, in the midst of so much accessible beauty, a city of
legend softened palpably, its cynicism in retreat, its sensuousness a reality
for everyone to feel and embrace.
.
But this summer, the new municipal government decided to close down 4.5
kilometers (almost 3 miles) of a roadway without traffic lights that runs
through the heart of the city along the right bank of the Seine. The idea was to
turn over the expressway to strollers and skaters for a month, but also to
provide the new team of Socialists and Greens with an ideologically laden feat
of social engineering.
.
Except that during the policy's first week, the detours meant that cars by the
tens of thousands filled other streets. They crossed the river to the Boulevard
Saint-Germain, jamming that major Left Bank thoroughfare. They blocked
cross-traffic. They tailed back up the Champs-Elysees. Newspaper pictures, a bit
overdramatically perhaps, showed a single skater on the closed freeway, while
above, cars stood still on the packed quais.
.
Most of all, Paris's Great Respite was symbolically undone. And people got mad.
.
"You can't cut off a road used by 50,000 vehicles a day without creating
enormous traffic problems," said Christian Gerondeau, president of the
Federation of Automobile Clubs. "It isn't a dozen or a few hundred drivers who
are inconvenienced, but at least 100,000 people affected by the consequences of
an absurd and dogmatic decision."
.
On Monday, City Hall said things were clearing up in the sunshine. On Tuesday, a
specially equipped International Herald Tribune test car (working clock on the
dashboard) took 23 minutes to get from Place de la Concorde to the Palais du
Luxembourg on the Left Bank at 6 p.m. That was the equivalent of a mid-November
clocking. Bad stuff indeed. Confronted with the obvious, Mayor Bertrand Delanoe
admitted that the exercise had begun too early, and had not been well enough
explained, but insisted that it would not be abandoned. Pedagogic science in the
service of the masses marches on.
.
This is not an easy context for the sustenance of Paris's great self-regard. It
is, of course, an exceptional city, one of the world's most magnificent, but
surely not the dominating artistic, intellectual and political capital it was
when Picasso or Ho Chi Minh or Hemingway found challenges and comfort here, or
when Bogart and Bergman's screenwriters made it a reference point for
heartbreak.
.
After a very hard try a couple of weeks ago, Paris did not get the 2008 Olympic
Games. In two rounds of balloting in Moscow, it won 33 votes out of 207,
finishing in the end behind Beijing and Toronto. Just being Paris was not enough
anymore.
.
For the French, polls consistently show that young people are ready to work
elsewhere and that the capital's appeal is hard pressed by the lure of more
space and less stress in the provinces. In a new book called "En parlant un peu
de Paris,'' Claude Dubois regrets the passing of parts of the city's street
life, its quick-witted vitality, its slangy, proletarian edge.
.
It is not always certain here, as the road closure suggests, who is running what
for whom. Amazingly, the newspaper Le Parisien reported that in the Paris area
as a whole - more people live in the surrounding suburbs than in the city proper
- 42 swimming pools were being shut down during July and August for repairs and
maintenance.
.
The closed pools may have passed unmissed in the lousy weather, but the summer
quiet, so cherished by people who regard it as a chance to get closer again to
the Paris they love, has been jarred by an undercurrent of unrest and violence.
.
Last weekend, the head of the regional police circulated a warning to police
stations throughout the area to be alert for pipe-bomb attacks against police
stations. There were two such attacks over the July 14 weekend, when 55
automobiles were set on fire in the Seine-St.-Denis district abutting Paris.
There were 14 more car blazes this past weekend.
.
The car fires, and very possibly the pipe-bomb blasts, were thought to be the
work of youth gangs in poor sections where immigrant groups live in high-rise
housing projects. In an effort to stop the violence, service stations in
Seine-St.-Denis were banned Saturday from selling gasoline in transportable
containers, a decision that service station personnel told television
interviewers was absurd - both dangerous to the employees and probably
ineffective.
.
Although no one here had the gracelessness to point it out, Seine-St.-Denis is
where the Stade de France, the marvelous stadium built for soccer's 1998 World
Cup, is located, and where, a bit cavalierly, the French organizers had planned
to build an Olympic Village for competitors at the Games they sought with so
much eagerness.
.
Now, the mayor is not sure Paris will try again soon. Against the cold blast of
so much rejection, he seems a bit taken aback.
.
The vote depressed Jean-Claude Killy, the great skier who was a part of the
French Olympic delegation. "Such little respect for Paris was a kick in the
backside," he said.
.
Paris is so literally at the center of French life that its setbacks send lashes
of pain all over the country. So people winced everywhere in France when,
shortly after its opening in Paris last year, the Georges Pompidou Hospital,
meant to be the standard-bearer of excellence of the French National Health
Service, was affected by an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease.
.
After three deaths, three more cases have been uncovered in recent weeks. Now an
expert with an organization assigned to investigate the hospital's plumbing,
suspected as a cause of the disease, has said it was corroded. The pipes, he
told a reporter, were of poor quality and made of galvanized steel, which failed
to come up to official French norms. The expert concluded that the plumbing was
bought at a cut-rate price outside France.
.
A criminal investigation is under way, but the disclosure fit into a mood of
decomposing public trust that has gripped Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, who
admitted last month that he had lied for years about his political past as a
Trotskyite, and President Jacques Chirac, who on Bastille Day acknowledged, if
obliquely, that before his election he used money from secret government funds
for personal trips. Poll results show ratings for both men on the decline.
.
In the middle of all this, a French writer, Denis Tillniac, who has a close
personal relationship with the president, described "the collective
subconscious" of the French as "very disturbed." They were "traumatized," he
said, because they saw the end of the Chirac-Jospin couple coming with next
year's presidential elections.
.
What clearly most rattled Mr. Tillniac was an ancient French demon, the
replacement by global capitalism - competition, essentially - of old-style
French economic life in which the state arbitrated among protected French
entrepreneurs and ran interference for them in obtaining contracts abroad.
.
More than a E340 million ($295 million) hospital with fatally rotten pipes -
health authorities were warned about them in 1996 - "international financial
capitalism, which has nothing to do with the state-controlled French capitalism
of former times, is humanity's number one enemy," Mr. Tillniac said.
.
Changing the subject, a French newspaper interviewer asked Mr. Tillniac, if he
was following the Tour de France bicycle race, which ends in Paris on the
Champs-Elysees on Sunday. Mr. Tillniac replied that he was disillusioned with
high-level sport, which "money has made rotten."
.
The likely winner of the race is Lance Armstrong, the two-time champion from
Texas who has been jeered during the Tour's first two weeks, perhaps because he
is widely portrayed as too dominant, efficient and business-like. Mr. Armstrong
may take heart, though, if the catcalls continue at finish line: A good part of
them probably come from Parisians mad at the Tour (and its day of street
closings) for knotting the city's summer tighter still. PARIS "We'll always have
Paris," Humphrey Bogart assures Ingrid Bergman in the last reel of "Casablanca."
.
Easy for him to say. Paris - the couple's locus of what-could-have-been - always
was a simple movie code word for passion and elusive dreams.
.
Did Bogie's screenwriters have to deal with Paris's political hubris producing
monster traffic jams, or 42 of the area's swimming pools being closed for the
summer, or pipe bombs going off in police stations, or the plumbing turning
rotten in the city's shiny new hospital?
.
No. Bogart wore a white dinner jacket in Hollywood's wartime French Morocco of
decent Vichy cops and fat men in fezzes. In that notional world, Paris shimmers
far away, all idealized romance, and Bogart gets to tell Bergman, his hand
holding her chin, "Here's looking at you, kid." Life is tough, but with Paris
memories added to the script, it becomes tinglingly wistful.
.
Such are the movies. In the mostly moist, mostly gray pit of the present (this
summer's rainfall figures here are the worst in 128 years), the fact is that a
blessed piece of the city's genuine grace has seemed threatened.
.
Since the start of French paid vacations in the late 1930s, a magnificent
reprieve from noise and congestion descended on Paris immediately after the July
14th Bastille Day holiday. People left on vacation in increasing numbers and did
not return until late in August. The cars of the stay-behinds zipped where their
drivers wanted to go, Place de la Concorde to the Ile St. Louis, say, in five
minutes.
.
Living turned easy and, in the midst of so much accessible beauty, a city of
legend softened palpably, its cynicism in retreat, its sensuousness a reality
for everyone to feel and embrace.
.
But this summer, the new municipal government decided to close down 4.5
kilometers (almost 3 miles) of a roadway without traffic lights that runs
through the heart of the city along the right bank of the Seine. The idea was to
turn over the expressway to strollers and skaters for a month, but also to
provide the new team of Socialists and Greens with an ideologically laden feat
of social engineering.
.
Except that during the policy's first week, the detours meant that cars by the
tens of thousands filled other streets. They crossed the river to the Boulevard
Saint-Germain, jamming that major Left Bank thoroughfare. They blocked
cross-traffic. They tailed back up the Champs-Elysees. Newspaper pictures, a bit
overdramatically perhaps, showed a single skater on the closed freeway, while
above, cars stood still on the packed quais.
.
Most of all, Paris's Great Respite was symbolically undone. And people got mad.
.
"You can't cut off a road used by 50,000 vehicles a day without creating
enormous traffic problems," said Christian Gerondeau, president of the
Federation of Automobile Clubs. "It isn't a dozen or a few hundred drivers who
are inconvenienced, but at least 100,000 people affected by the consequences of
an absurd and dogmatic decision."
.
On Monday, City Hall said things were clearing up in the sunshine. On Tuesday, a
specially equipped International Herald Tribune test car (working clock on the
dashboard) took 23 minutes to get from Place de la Concorde to the Palais du
Luxembourg on the Left Bank at 6 p.m. That was the equivalent of a mid-November
clocking. Bad stuff indeed. Confronted with the obvious, Mayor Bertrand Delanoe
admitted that the exercise had begun too early, and had not been well enough
explained, but insisted that it would not be abandoned. Pedagogic science in the
service of the masses marches on.
.
This is not an easy context for the sustenance of Paris's great self-regard. It
is, of course, an exceptional city, one of the world's most magnificent, but
surely not the dominating artistic, intellectual and political capital it was
when Picasso or Ho Chi Minh or Hemingway found challenges and comfort here, or
when Bogart and Bergman's screenwriters made it a reference point for
heartbreak.
.
After a very hard try a couple of weeks ago, Paris did not get the 2008 Olympic
Games. In two rounds of balloting in Moscow, it won 33 votes out of 207,
finishing in the end behind Beijing and Toronto. Just being Paris was not enough
anymore.
.
For the French, polls consistently show that young people are ready to work
elsewhere and that the capital's appeal is hard pressed by the lure of more
space and less stress in the provinces. In a new book called "En parlant un peu
de Paris,'' Claude Dubois regrets the passing of parts of the city's street
life, its quick-witted vitality, its slangy, proletarian edge.
.
It is not always certain here, as the road closure suggests, who is running what
for whom. Amazingly, the newspaper Le Parisien reported that in the Paris area
as a whole - more people live in the surrounding suburbs than in the city proper
- 42 swimming pools were being shut down during July and August for repairs and
maintenance.
.
The closed pools may have passed unmissed in the lousy weather, but the summer
quiet, so cherished by people who regard it as a chance to get closer again to
the Paris they love, has been jarred by an undercurrent of unrest and violence.
.
Last weekend, the head of the regional police circulated a warning to police
stations throughout the area to be alert for pipe-bomb attacks against police
stations. There were two such attacks over the July 14 weekend, when 55
automobiles were set on fire in the Seine-St.-Denis district abutting Paris.
There were 14 more car blazes this past weekend.
.
The car fires, and very possibly the pipe-bomb blasts, were thought to be the
work of youth gangs in poor sections where immigrant groups live in high-rise
housing projects. In an effort to stop the violence, service stations in
Seine-St.-Denis were banned Saturday from selling gasoline in transportable
containers, a decision that service station personnel told television
interviewers was absurd - both dangerous to the employees and probably
ineffective.
.
Although no one here had the gracelessness to point it out, Seine-St.-Denis is
where the Stade de France, the marvelous stadium built for soccer's 1998 World
Cup, is located, and where, a bit cavalierly, the French organizers had planned
to build an Olympic Village for competitors at the Games they sought with so
much eagerness.
.
Now, the mayor is not sure Paris will try again soon. Against the cold blast of
so much rejection, he seems a bit taken aback.
.
The vote depressed Jean-Claude Killy, the great skier who was a part of the
French Olympic delegation. "Such little respect for Paris was a kick in the
backside," he said.
.
Paris is so literally at the center of French life that its setbacks send lashes
of pain all over the country. So people winced everywhere in France when,
shortly after its opening in Paris last year, the Georges Pompidou Hospital,
meant to be the standard-bearer of excellence of the French National Health
Service, was affected by an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease.
.
After three deaths, three more cases have been uncovered in recent weeks. Now an
expert with an organization assigned to investigate the hospital's plumbing,
suspected as a cause of the disease, has said it was corroded. The pipes, he
told a reporter, were of poor quality and made of galvanized steel, which failed
to come up to official French norms. The expert concluded that the plumbing was
bought at a cut-rate price outside France.
.
A criminal investigation is under way, but the disclosure fit into a mood of
decomposing public trust that has gripped Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, who
admitted last month that he had lied for years about his political past as a
Trotskyite, and President Jacques Chirac, who on Bastille Day acknowledged, if
obliquely, that before his election he used money from secret government funds
for personal trips. Poll results show ratings for both men on the decline.
.
In the middle of all this, a French writer, Denis Tillniac, who has a close
personal relationship with the president, described "the collective
subconscious" of the French as "very disturbed." They were "traumatized," he
said, because they saw the end of the Chirac-Jospin couple coming with next
year's presidential elections.
.
What clearly most rattled Mr. Tillniac was an ancient French demon, the
replacement by global capitalism - competition, essentially - of old-style
French economic life in which the state arbitrated among protected French
entrepreneurs and ran interference for them in obtaining contracts abroad.
.
More than a E340 million ($295 million) hospital with fatally rotten pipes -
health authorities were warned about them in 1996 - "international financial
capitalism, which has nothing to do with the state-controlled French capitalism
of former times, is humanity's number one enemy," Mr. Tillniac said.
.
Changing the subject, a French newspaper interviewer asked Mr. Tillniac, if he
was following the Tour de France bicycle race, which ends in Paris on the
Champs-Elysees on Sunday. Mr. Tillniac replied that he was disillusioned with
high-level sport, which "money has made rotten."
.
The likely winner of the race is Lance Armstrong, the two-time champion from
Texas who has been jeered during the Tour's first two weeks, perhaps because he
is widely portrayed as too dominant, efficient and business-like. Mr. Armstrong
may take heart, though, if the catcalls continue at finish line: A good part of
them probably come from Parisians mad at the Tour (and its day of street
closings) for knotting the city's summer tighter still.
Article fromthe International Herald Tribune July 27, 2001