Fabb
August 25th, 2004, 07:51 PM
60 years of memory: Paris of myth, Paris of reality
Mary Blume IHT
Was it really possible to be that happy and to believe you would be that happy again and again? In Paris, on the 25th day of a pleasantly hot August 60 years ago, the answer was an exuberant yes: the Germans were gone and the city was again free. "Paris outraged! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated!" General Charles de Gaulle proclaimed that evening in the Hôtel de Ville.
(...)
That Paris survived mostly undamaged explains in part the immense importance given to the Liberation, an importance far outweighing its military significance. The weeklong battle of Paris was not as strategic as Stalingrad or as tragic as the hopeless Warsaw uprising, fiercely going on as Paris was freed. Some 20,000 members of the Polish underground died after holding out for 63 days, almost twice as long as the 1940 battle for France.
.
Amid the destruction, the City of Light became a beacon of hope. In Virginia, the French-American writer Julien Green toasted the Liberation with a friend who said, "We must speak not of the fall of Paris, but rather of the rise of Paris."
.
If the city had survived so, people believed, had the civilization it embodied, the ideas that had informed the Western world for almost two centuries. The lessons learned from the recent past would ensure a better future.
.
Like most futures it didn't turn out as expected, but even today the fabric of the city remains remarkably unchanged compared to other capitals. Fred Palacio, if he were with us, could still find a bench to sit on and murmur his old man's memories of August 1944.
.
Paris, like most mythic places, had perhaps always represented more than it was, and foreigners these days dismiss it as outdated while at the same time hunting out its latest bistros and boutiques. The foreigners say Paris isn't what it used to be, and Parisians say Paris sera toujours Paris - Paris will always be Paris. The two clichés finally balance each other and perhaps cancel each other out. As Sybille Bedford says, maybe Paris represents more than it is, but it is still a great deal.
.
The Harvard historian Patrice Higonnet traces what he calls the mythic status of Paris to about 1830 and says that by 1860 it was commonplace to view Paris as the world capital of modernity, science, liberty, the center of sensual pleasure and the arts. The puissant image remains, a permanent show easier to decipher, Higonnet maintains, than, say, London, Moscow or Berlin.
.
If foreigners look wonderingly at Paris, Paris also looks adoringly at herself. Any movie that shows a lovely Paris scene will get the same gasps of admiration from those in the audience who live in its midst as it would in Peoria, Illinois. In the 1937 film "Pépé le Moko" there is a wonderfully erotic scene in which the homesick gangster Jean Gabin, holed up in Algiers's casbah, is visited by a glamourous Parisienne who is slumming. Seated head to head, they simply murmur to each other the names of Paris Métro stations - La Gare du Nord! l'Opéra! La Chapelle! - reaching a climax with the words La Place Blanche, although the actual subway stop of that name is rather drab.
.
If everyone has his or her own Paris, arguably the city is most important to Americans who, unlike older civilizations, came to it unlumbered by history, tradition or fancy lifestyles of their own. Even Ben Franklin took up flirting in Paris in order to be à la mode; others studied science or political theory, wrote books or just loafed, moving eastward, as Malcolm Cowley wrote, into new prairies of the mind.
.
It cannot be claimed that Paris welcomes foreigners, distrusting the Other as it does, but in ignoring them it tolerates them; it is accommodating in its indifference.
.
"I have a feeling that there's a voice saying take it or leave it, kid," said Mavis Gallant, who has gladly taken it. "I have lived half my life in Paris," Gertrude Stein said. "Not the half that made me, but the half in which I made what I made."
.
One thing Americans liked from the start about Paris was that while they fully enjoyed its sensual pleasures they felt they had retained their native virtue. "We have not as much refinement, but more of everything that is good," a New Yorker wrote to his son in the mid-19th century.
.
This moral self-satisfaction persists. Parisians, for the most part, don't think a lot about high-minded ideas, these having been resolved by the heavy thinkers memorized in the lycée. Americans trumpet moral views and find them, especially to their cost today, hard to enact. Americans want to do the right thing, not realizing it can be plural. Parisians want to do things the right way; that is, with precision and style. This can require more discipline than many realize: being Parisian is not a free ticket to indulgence.
.
The Parisian is deeply superficial, the American superficially profound. This should balance out, but the French are more complicated than we are, as Henry James noted in a letter telling a friend not to be put off "by what I might call the superficial and external aspect of the superficial and external aspect of Paris."
.
New Yorkers are merely self-absorbed but Parisians are world-class narcissists. This is a city made for preening, and the endless public grandstanding, physical and intellectual, may shock Americans, but in our innermost hearts wouldn't we love to gaze at ourselves in the mirror with unabashed delight and let fall from our lips a well-timed and irresistible mot juste?
.
The differences are endless, the similarities often more than skin-deep. Maybe we all need a Paris. What Paris is, and not just for Americans, is wishful thinking come true, whatever the wish.
.
Sixty years ago, the wishes ranged from the most basic (more meat) to the most lofty (peace forever). Many agreed that the thing they had most missed was the freedom to speak. "Paris is fighting today so that France may speak up tomorrow," Camus said. Speaking up meant daring to hope out loud. "Peace," Camus said "will return to this disemboweled earth and to those hearts tortured by hope and memories....Happiness, tenderness will have their moment." He was surely speaking to the dead as to the living.
.
Salut, Fred.
.
International Herald Tribune
Complete article here (http://www.iht.com/articles/535530.html).
Mary Blume IHT
Was it really possible to be that happy and to believe you would be that happy again and again? In Paris, on the 25th day of a pleasantly hot August 60 years ago, the answer was an exuberant yes: the Germans were gone and the city was again free. "Paris outraged! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated!" General Charles de Gaulle proclaimed that evening in the Hôtel de Ville.
(...)
That Paris survived mostly undamaged explains in part the immense importance given to the Liberation, an importance far outweighing its military significance. The weeklong battle of Paris was not as strategic as Stalingrad or as tragic as the hopeless Warsaw uprising, fiercely going on as Paris was freed. Some 20,000 members of the Polish underground died after holding out for 63 days, almost twice as long as the 1940 battle for France.
.
Amid the destruction, the City of Light became a beacon of hope. In Virginia, the French-American writer Julien Green toasted the Liberation with a friend who said, "We must speak not of the fall of Paris, but rather of the rise of Paris."
.
If the city had survived so, people believed, had the civilization it embodied, the ideas that had informed the Western world for almost two centuries. The lessons learned from the recent past would ensure a better future.
.
Like most futures it didn't turn out as expected, but even today the fabric of the city remains remarkably unchanged compared to other capitals. Fred Palacio, if he were with us, could still find a bench to sit on and murmur his old man's memories of August 1944.
.
Paris, like most mythic places, had perhaps always represented more than it was, and foreigners these days dismiss it as outdated while at the same time hunting out its latest bistros and boutiques. The foreigners say Paris isn't what it used to be, and Parisians say Paris sera toujours Paris - Paris will always be Paris. The two clichés finally balance each other and perhaps cancel each other out. As Sybille Bedford says, maybe Paris represents more than it is, but it is still a great deal.
.
The Harvard historian Patrice Higonnet traces what he calls the mythic status of Paris to about 1830 and says that by 1860 it was commonplace to view Paris as the world capital of modernity, science, liberty, the center of sensual pleasure and the arts. The puissant image remains, a permanent show easier to decipher, Higonnet maintains, than, say, London, Moscow or Berlin.
.
If foreigners look wonderingly at Paris, Paris also looks adoringly at herself. Any movie that shows a lovely Paris scene will get the same gasps of admiration from those in the audience who live in its midst as it would in Peoria, Illinois. In the 1937 film "Pépé le Moko" there is a wonderfully erotic scene in which the homesick gangster Jean Gabin, holed up in Algiers's casbah, is visited by a glamourous Parisienne who is slumming. Seated head to head, they simply murmur to each other the names of Paris Métro stations - La Gare du Nord! l'Opéra! La Chapelle! - reaching a climax with the words La Place Blanche, although the actual subway stop of that name is rather drab.
.
If everyone has his or her own Paris, arguably the city is most important to Americans who, unlike older civilizations, came to it unlumbered by history, tradition or fancy lifestyles of their own. Even Ben Franklin took up flirting in Paris in order to be à la mode; others studied science or political theory, wrote books or just loafed, moving eastward, as Malcolm Cowley wrote, into new prairies of the mind.
.
It cannot be claimed that Paris welcomes foreigners, distrusting the Other as it does, but in ignoring them it tolerates them; it is accommodating in its indifference.
.
"I have a feeling that there's a voice saying take it or leave it, kid," said Mavis Gallant, who has gladly taken it. "I have lived half my life in Paris," Gertrude Stein said. "Not the half that made me, but the half in which I made what I made."
.
One thing Americans liked from the start about Paris was that while they fully enjoyed its sensual pleasures they felt they had retained their native virtue. "We have not as much refinement, but more of everything that is good," a New Yorker wrote to his son in the mid-19th century.
.
This moral self-satisfaction persists. Parisians, for the most part, don't think a lot about high-minded ideas, these having been resolved by the heavy thinkers memorized in the lycée. Americans trumpet moral views and find them, especially to their cost today, hard to enact. Americans want to do the right thing, not realizing it can be plural. Parisians want to do things the right way; that is, with precision and style. This can require more discipline than many realize: being Parisian is not a free ticket to indulgence.
.
The Parisian is deeply superficial, the American superficially profound. This should balance out, but the French are more complicated than we are, as Henry James noted in a letter telling a friend not to be put off "by what I might call the superficial and external aspect of the superficial and external aspect of Paris."
.
New Yorkers are merely self-absorbed but Parisians are world-class narcissists. This is a city made for preening, and the endless public grandstanding, physical and intellectual, may shock Americans, but in our innermost hearts wouldn't we love to gaze at ourselves in the mirror with unabashed delight and let fall from our lips a well-timed and irresistible mot juste?
.
The differences are endless, the similarities often more than skin-deep. Maybe we all need a Paris. What Paris is, and not just for Americans, is wishful thinking come true, whatever the wish.
.
Sixty years ago, the wishes ranged from the most basic (more meat) to the most lofty (peace forever). Many agreed that the thing they had most missed was the freedom to speak. "Paris is fighting today so that France may speak up tomorrow," Camus said. Speaking up meant daring to hope out loud. "Peace," Camus said "will return to this disemboweled earth and to those hearts tortured by hope and memories....Happiness, tenderness will have their moment." He was surely speaking to the dead as to the living.
.
Salut, Fred.
.
International Herald Tribune
Complete article here (http://www.iht.com/articles/535530.html).