The PARIS of the XXIe century

[Karakuri]

You're talking about foreign borns, that is to say real foreigners.
But what I read in this thread is that nobody is 100% French because we all have a forefather born overseas... That is a complete non sense.

[Minato ku]

What I say it is that the majority of French are foreign origin not that nobody is 100% french because French is not an origin but a culture.
Per exemple I am 100% french but I have foreign origin.

[Metropolitan]

Originally Posted by Karakuri

You're talking about foreign borns, that is to say real foreigners.
But what I read in this thread is that nobody is 100% French because we all have a forefather born overseas... That is a complete non sense.

This thread is about cultural diversity and origins, it is not about citizenship or nationality.

Actually, as weird as it may sound, we can be 100% French and still feel we have an Armenian identity deep inside. This doesn't make you less French. The thing is that identities can't be divided in percentage. It is something a lot more complex than that. We can feel fully part of a society, we can identify ourselves to that society, but besides, this doesn't mean that we cannot also feel we belong or have ties with another culture, in a different way.

I'll give you a simple example. When two New Yorkers meet and have a chat. All of a sudden, one of them says that he's italian. Actually, it's been 4 generations that his family live in the US, he's 100% American, he has absolutely no connection with Italy and has never put a single foot in that country. Nevertheleass, he still considers himself, in a different way, as Italian. There's nothing illogical in this at all.

Sorry, I don't know if that's very clear. Anyway, I still hope you've got my point.


To come back to the topic, those districts of Paris have always been poor and they have always been filled of immigrants. Actually, many of them are a lot cleaner nowadays than they were 30 years ago.

[Metropolitan]

Originally Posted by minato ku

What I say it is that the majority of French are foreign origin not that nobody is 100% french because French is not an origin but a culture.
Per exemple I am 100% french but I have foreign origin.

Funny, you've used exactly the same way to explain it than I did : "I am 100% French but I have a foreign origin". And I hadn't read your post before writing !

I think you're right actually. This is somewhere about the difference between culture and identity. Of course, we can feel Portuguese and also have a Portuguese culture, but still have a mainstream French culture and identify ourselves as French !

Anyway, all this to say that it's something very complex, but the fact is that it's not because we're not a 100% pure blood Burgundian that it means we can't be 100% French.

[Karakuri]

I know many many people (including myself) who don't care if they have a forefather who was born in Slovakia or in Somalia in 1567ad. I was born in Lyon, but my family came from Nantes, though I've never been there and don't feel particularly "linked" to that town (even if it's a beautiful one).

I think we'd better consider who we are, than who our family was 200 years ago. For example France has several islands in the Caribbean, and I guess lots of those people on the pics are from these Islands, they thus are 200% French, even if they weren't born in mainland France. Moreover, all those 50/60 year old Northern African people, if they are from Algeria, don't forget Algeria was a French department until the 60's!!!

About Paris culture and Edith Piaf's origins: the violin was invented by copying an ancient arab string instrument, does this mean it's not a typically western instrument? Besides, the famous Herrenchiemsee castle in Germany (built by Louis II) is a replica of Versailles, full of French inspiration; does it mean it's not German's culture anylonger? Do you know that Marie Antoinette was from Austria? And do you know that a French King governed England several years, and that, at that time kings in Europe were always from foreign countries, or married to foreigners?

[Metropolitan]

No one has ever told the opposite Karakuri !

Edith Piaf is 100% French. Who doubt this ? It's not because she had Italian and Algerian roots that she wasn't 100% French. Edith Piaf is a symbol of Paris. All the people I've mentionned were chosen because they are symbols of France.

There's no opposition between multi-culturalism and French culture. The French culture feeds itself of multi-culturalism !

[edubejar]

Originally Posted by Rem

I don't completely agrre with you, what you say is pretty clumsy.



First, we have a proverb in France which says exactly the contrary, it says " Paris is france, if you take Paris you take France"




it's maybe the case of people living in some suburbs of Paris, but there are still a lot of people in paris who have lived in the City for several generations.



Not really, Paris has been a multicultural city since the 70's, and you give the explanation in your second sentence. the first immigration wave, a century ago, concerned the bretons, who left the brittany to work in Paris but we can't talk about multiculturalism at this time, because bretons were like Parisians, they were french, then in the 30's as you said, France needed workers, that's why many italians, polish and spanish emigrated to France. But even in the 30's after this new immigration, we can't say Paris was a multicultural city because these new comers were European, catholic, white, and belonged to the same culture, they learned French etc...

Paris became a multicultural city only in the 60's and 70's when people from our former colonies ( Senegal, Morocco, Algeria, Viet-nam, Cameroun ) came in France with totally different cultures, so you can't compare the xenophobia of the 30's with the situation today. And for your information, I live in the Val d'Oise, which belongs to the urban area of paris, and the Front National (a far-right, nationalist political party ) made one of the highest score in my department during the last presindential elections whereas many black and arab people live here, so as you can see, there's not only "a guy from the French countryside who says he doesn't recognize France in those pictures." People from the area of Paris say the same thing.

I myself thought your first comment was clumsy where you say you showed this thread in some other online forum of France, and that people there were shocked or surprised to see such multiculture, and how if France splits in two, blah blah blah. Rather, I think what Metropolitan said makes much more sense. Why would the majority of France be shocked? There is multiculture in the majority of other major French cities, if which there are several: Marseille, Lyon, Lille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Nantes, Nice, Strasbourg, Rennes and the list goes on a bit further. They all have, more than anything, blacks and arabs, mainly from ex-French colonies and overseas territories, just like Paris, just at a much smaller scale. People watch TV where there is evidence of mutliculture Paris. Just in November 2005, headline news in the entire world showed the riots, which mainly involved youths of black and arab parents. It makes no sense that someone doesn't know about multicultural Paris, unless they are from a very rural town, and even then.

And while Italian, Spanish, and Eastern-European immigrants may not have caused similar cultural clashes than those of the 60s, 70s...up to today...it was all relevant to the time period. For French at that time, Europeans from Southern and Eastern Europe were different and they didn't have today's immigrants to compare them with and say "well, atleast the first ones are European."...they probably never concretely imagined anything "worse" coming along. It's all relative to the time period.

[parisian]

well, look at france, its the middle of europe,
immigrants came from centuries into france romans, germans, celtics, the barbarian invasion fro russia an mongolia, the arabs during the 7th century should i go ahead?
in the last century we had 100 000 polish people that set in the north of france and 100 000 italians and spanisg people came in france to find a better life, that was in the begining of the 20th cenntury.
after that in the 60's and 70's, portuguese 800 000, arabs, chinese, vietnamese and black africans.

[Maxim Prokopenko]

Originally Posted by parisian

well, look at france, its the middle of europe,
immigrants came from centuries into france romans, germans, celtics, the barbarian invasion fro russia an mongolia, the arabs during the 7th century should i go ahead?
in the last century we had 100 000 polish people that set in the north of france and 100 000 italians and spanisg people came in france to find a better life, that was in the begining of the 20th cenntury.
after that in the 60's and 70's, portuguese 800 000, arabs, chinese, vietnamese and black africans.

Is it possible more in detail about barbarian invasion from Russia and Mongolia?

[Nolke]

Originally Posted by Metropolitan

That's wrong.

Proportion of Foreign born population in larger EU countries (source):

• Sweden: 11.2%
• France: 10.7%
• Netherlands: 9.8%
• Austria: 9.3%
• Germany: 8.9%
• Belgium: 8.5%
• United Kingdom: 6.8%
• Poland: 5.4%
• Greece: 4.9%
• Spain: 3.1%
• Hungary: 3.0%
• Italy: 2.8%
• Portugal: 2.3%
• Czech Republic: 2.3%
• Bulgaria: 1.3%
• Romania: 0.4%

But more than these figures, what is important to understand is that France has started a lot earlier than most other countries to welcome immigrants. I mean by that a lot of domestic born French people have actually foreign origins. For instance, only 12% of Americans are foreign born. That doesn't mean that the other 88% have English roots.

This doesn't a lot to do with the matter you are discussing, but I found that data quite interesting, so let me show you the immigration figures for Spain for 2006, which were publicized the last week:

http://www.ine.es/prensa/np447.pdf

you can check it although is in Spanish, but I'll summarize it for you: 9,12% of the total population. The figures you put there are for 2000-2002.

Knowing that the last massive regularizations of immigrants only affected to less than 200.000 people, you may agree with me if I say that it seems worrisome. I've been looking for up-to-date data for some European countries such as France, but couldn't find anything (to be honest, didn't search too much). I'm curious about how has the French population growin in the last years, mainly to see how it has evolved, and how has affected the situation in Spain to its neighbouring countries, because of the Schengen space.

[brisavoine]

Originally Posted by rocky

seriously this type of misrepresentations of paris are almost as annoying than the amelie poulain type of caricatures.

so tonio del barrio calls it "the paris of the 21st century" and purposely chooses pictures with only black faces and asians. whats the purpose, to make people think paris is 80 % black and 15% asian? theires a trend in this forum to take close pictures of non white people just to say "look my city is multicultural"

Don't worry, there are still a lot of "white French" Parisians in town.

[Marek_VF]

Quite lovely moreover

[delirious&zen]

Originally Posted by TONIO DEL BARRIO

CLIGNANCOURT, A FAMOUS POPULAR MARKET

Paris looks like some periferic district of mexico city (I'm from mexico city)

[KAZAN RESIDENT]

La Defense in 80's


La Defense nowadays

[Shezan]

nice urban shots

[christos-greece]

I made a research on this thread, yesterday... it needs some new updated photos, i think

[Cyril]

La Défense has not really changed in 30 years. That's appalling
(ok it might change within 10 years though..)

[Kaiser]

Paris is ugly!

[Indy G]

And U2

[BabaORiley]

Interesting topic and very nice photos ! It's true that Paris has a long history of immigration and that poverty and lack of social ladder can create more issues, divisions and rejections than multiculturalism but can we summarize the current situation with that and compare it to older waves of immigrants ?

I think that the immigration after WW2 in the region of Paris and Marseille is a special case by it's scale (millions), the category of most of these immigrants (poor & uneducated), the history behind it (colonisation), and like someone said the bigger cultural (including religion in some cases) and ethnic gap between France and Africa (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Mali, Congo, etc..) and Asia (China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, etc...) than between France and Europe (Italy, Portugal, Spain, Poland, Belgium, etc...). In one case you had an easy cultural integration/mixing of the population and in the other you have communities (helped by isolation in ghettos) and a multicultural society or a ghetto subculture when the state was hoping for a sort of assimilation.

With the biggest Muslim and Jew population of Europe, lots of French citizen with roots in Africa and Asia, the biggest population of Europe from overseas departments, millions of tourists... don't be surprised to have diversity on your photos from Paris and not a Parisian moustachu with a beret on his bicycle .

Hope other people will post photos from Paris or "Greater" Paris to show it's true face today. I can only participate with a reminder of a time when France was really proud of exposing its diversity.