By Dan McLaughlin
Saturday, August 30, 2025
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Mont St. Michel at dusk.(Photo courtesy of the author) |
The Eternal France
American conservatives have long scorned the French.
There are sound reasons for this. Conservatism itself, especially in the
Anglo-American world, was born as a self-conscious tradition in reaction to the
French Revolution. French political history is an endless procession of bad
ideas overcorrecting for previous bad ideas. Communism was first tried in
France, in the 1871 Paris Commune, which the French resolved by a general
massacre of the Communards. French foreign policy for centuries has cozied up to
the enemies of liberty in general and the friends of Marxism and Islamic
radicalism in particular. Some of us are old enough to remember “cheese-eating
surrender monkeys” and “old Europe,” or, for that matter, the long French
effort to stand aloof from the Cold War.
For all of that, French society is not all Rousseau and
Sartre. Say what you will of the French, they retain a strong sense of
themselves as a distinct nation with a distinct culture and deep roots in their
own history and soil. Even amidst the twin crises of low domestic birthrates
and mass immigration across the West, there is little doubt that half a century
from now, there will still be a France and it will still be identifiably French
— something one might struggle to say today even of England. It helps that, per
the most recent French census data, even in cosmopolitan Paris, foreign-born
Parisians are overwhelmingly likely to have come from Francophone countries
once run by France (and the biggest exception is Parisians born in Portugal).
If what endures of France is still a culture reflexively skeptical of
Anglo-American mores and systems, it at least is a culture that knows who and
what the French are.
Large areas of France remain stubbornly agricultural even
today, with all that implies of the traditional rhythms of the land. If nothing
else, Parisians remain connected to that tradition by the preponderance of
locally grown food and wine in the Parisian diet. In the Franprix mini-marts
where we shopped, one could find wonderful bottles of Côtes du Rhône for under
$7 (in Euros); in the bakeries, a fresh baguette for less than $1.50. The
countryside in Normandy looks very much as it did in 1944, and is identifiably
similar to how it looked in 1848 when Tocqueville campaigned for office there, still
thick with greenery and full of the famous hedgerows descended from the Viking
system for subdividing plots of land.
The City of Lights
Paris does not feel like New York or London in its
layout. Due in good part to D.C.-style height restrictions that preserve the
sight lines to the Eiffel Tower, the skyscrapers are mostly jammed into the La
Défense business district outside city limits, or in scattered spots well
outside the city center. Only 2.1 million of France’s 68 million people live in
Paris, which has few high-rise apartments or private houses. Another 10 million
or so live in the surrounding metro area — a ratio of city to suburbs that is
more reminiscent of Boston than of the world’s great megalopolises. Moreover,
so much of the city’s population clears out in August that whole neighborhoods
and business districts seem like ghost towns abandoned for tourists to treat
like Paris theme parks.
In spite of its antiquity — the city was legendarily
founded by the Romans in 52 b.c. — the Paris we know today is mostly a creation
of the middle of the 19th century, when Napoleon III and his Prefect of the
Seine, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, tore down most of the old medieval
center of the city (outside of the Latin Quarter near Notre Dame) to create the
city’s famous broad boulevards and uniform apartment buildings. Of all the
complicated legacies of the French Second Empire (1852–70), this is its
greatest monument. The Opera House is still prominently flanked by the
Napoleonic eagle. By contrast, the Latin Quarter is full of very
un-French-themed eateries, from Irish pubs to a place promising authentic
Kansas City BBQ.
Paris is divided into 20 arrondissements, administrative
districts like precincts or wards, except that an American city’s
administrative districts don’t each have their own coat of arms. Until city
limits were expanded in 1860, there were twelve arrondissements; the outer
eight had been suburbs. We rented an apartment in Belleville, a neighborhood in
the 19th arrondissement whose large Chinese population and dense concentration
of Chinese restaurants and Asian food marts made it feel more like Flushing than
like Paris. It’s not like any other place in the city.
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Arts et Métiers Metro Station, Paris (Photo courtesy of the author) |
The Paris Metro is a sprawling system and not open that late (its closing hours were hard to discern and seemed to change by line and by day). One subway line was where we got the authentic French experience of something being on strike (euphemized in a sign as “closed for a social movement.”) And yet, the metro was cleaner than New York’s subway, better maintained than D.C.’s, and more modern than London’s. Most of the cars were air-conditioned, whereas the London Underground cools passengers by opening the windows for the breeze. One of the delights of the Metro was the Arts et Mѐtiers station, which since the mid-1990s has been whimsically decorated like the inside of Jules Verne’s Nautilus.
We never did encounter the legendary rudeness and scorn
of Parisians, even when some of us attempted to speak French. There is, I
confess, something especially civilized about the word “merci” for the
ubiquitous thank yous. The sidewalk cafes lived up to billing, and the
irritating presence of cigarette smoke was nonetheless a stark contrast to New
York — we weren’t enveloped by Manhattan’s ubiquitous clouds of pot smoke
anywhere. Gas prices were appalling, albeit camouflaged at first glance by
being quoted in Euros per liter. The Seine is just a giant party every night;
we even repeatedly saw barges that were hosting wedding receptions.
American fast-food joints have penetrated Paris, but
mostly not in large numbers. I spotted McDonald’s, Starbucks, KFC, Pizza Hut,
Subway, Burger King, and Five Guys. Of these, only McDonald’s and Starbucks
were present on anything resembling a regular basis, and scarcely that.
American cultural products (such as ads for the new Naked Gun movie, a
stage production of the Lion King musical, and Margot Robbie on a
magazine cover) were more common. The main eatery in the park across the street
from the Eiffel Tower is a taco stand.
I didn’t read newspapers or watch TV in France, but even
so, I was pleasantly surprised at the total absence of Donald Trump’s visage or
obsessive anti-Trump imagery. At least some of our obsessions are not entirely
consuming everywhere.
The Tourist’s France
As tourists behind a language barrier (I speak no French
beyond “bonjour” and “merci”), much of what we encountered was official France
— the story the country tells to visitors in museums, cathedrals, and other
tourist attractions, much of it reproduced in English for visitors. Here, at
least, is a France that is not afraid of its profoundly Catholic heritage and
does not apologize for its own history and people. Europeans tend to
overemphasize how young the United States is — our Constitution is the oldest
still in use, and we’re older as a nation than most of the countries on earth,
including Germany and Italy — but it’s striking to be in a country that honors
medieval Catholic saints among its military heroes. The Feast of the Assumption
is still a public holiday in France.
We visited a staggering number of religious sites: Sunday
Mass at Notre Dame, a vigil Mass for the Assumption at Sacré-Cœur, the church
of Mary Magdalene (which contained a borderline-blasphemous mosaic of Napoleon
sitting at Christ’s feet), the Basilica and home of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the
cathedrals of Chartres and Bayeux, and Mont St. Michel, a site established in a.d.
708 While there were still signs of the anti-clerical damage done by the
Revolution in its day, the churches all remain places of reverence, and from
statues in public parks to museums such as the Louvre and the medieval Cluny
museum, Christian art was offered without embarrassment.
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Basilica of St. Therese at Lisieux (Photo courtesy of the author) |
I’d like to report that Mass at Notre Dame said by the archbishop was a transcendent experience, but we were in the back of a stiflingly hot church full of worn-out tourists and impatient children, enduring Mass in a foreign language. Even so, one could not quite escape the enormity of the place – not in size or age alone, but in a sense of how many souls down the centuries had sat through Mass in this same space. By contrast, the 10 p.m. vigil at Sacré-Cœur seemed unpromising: While the church (built to dedicate France to a national spiritual renewal after the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71) commands a staggeringly scenic view from the highest point in Paris, it was surrounded by a partying crowd of people drinking beer and listening to street musicians on the steps. But inside the church was a different story: a 9 p.m. candlelight vigil and procession that streamed back in for Mass with a passionate and notably multi-racial congregation that filled the church to the rafters, fairly clearly most of it Parisians.
We saw many fine history and art museums, including the
must-see Musée de l’Armée (the military history museum that includes the
colossally extravagant tomb of Napoleon), the museum of the Bayeux Tapestry,
the Museum of Paris, the Louvre, and the Musée de l’Orangerie (which is built
around the monumental panels of Monet’s final room-sized Water Lilies). French
history is at every turn presented matter-of-factly, warts and all, but with a
clear and not always subtle celebration of the strongmen of French history —
Louis XIV, Napoleon, and especially Charles de Gaulle. Military disasters and
ill-advised guillotinings are offered as such alongside the great moments of
French history. The war museum didn’t blanch at maybe the grimmest moment of
French military history, when Churchill ordered the sinking of the French
Mediterranean fleet in 1940 to prevent it from being used as a weapon for the
Nazis.
Nothing can prepare a visitor for the labyrinth that is
the Louvre. Its layout is bewildering, its scale massive, its maps inadequate,
its rooms poorly marked, and even finding its exit is confusing. Yet it is a
hoarder’s paradise of art from the ancient to the modern, with things crammed
into every corner in such volume that one could easily overlook, say, the
famous portrait of Louis XIV or the Code of Hammurabi.
Perhaps none of the tourist sites of Paris is less
curated than Père Lachaise Cemetery, which holds luminaries ranging from Chopin
to Jim Morrison to Oscar Wilde to Baron Haussman to the Armenian national hero
Andranik, whose grave is topped by an equestrian monument. There’s a real
dichotomy between the First World War era graves, which bespeak only sadness,
and the Second World War and Holocaust memorials, which bristle with justified
rage and name the Nazis and Hitler all over. The memorials to those deported to
the extermination camps are profound.
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Auschwitz memorial, Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris (Photo courtesy of the author) |
August 2025 turned out to be a prime time to see the
sights of Paris and, particularly, Normandy. Notre Dame is still under
reconstruction, flanked by enormous cranes, but it has reopened. The Bayeux
Tapestry, however, is going off display after September 1, and its museum will
be renovated through 2027 while it is controversially on display in England. The 900-year-old
tapestry is a masterpiece of visual storytelling, supplemented as it was in the
museum by headsets with a narration of its scenes of the Norman conquest. For
me, it may have been the highlight of the whole trip. Its scenes and colors remain
surprisingly vivid after having been handled roughly and nearly destroyed on
countless occasions over the past nine centuries.
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Ranger monument, Pointe du Hoc, Normandy (Photo courtesy of the author) |
Pointe du Hoc is in worse shape. The site of the impossible climb of the U.S. Army Rangers on the morning of D-Day is crumbling due to natural erosion compounded by 1944 bombardment damage and post-1944 trampling by tourists, to the point where the Ranger monument (where Ronald Reagan gave a famous 1984 speech before the Ranger veterans) is fenced off and likely to be removed to a new location soon. Already, the jutting cliff that guided the Rangers that morning is no longer connected to the mainland.
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Cliffs at Pointe du Hoc, Normandy (Photo courtesy of the author) |
What stood out to me about seeing Omaha Beach in person is how wide it is. I knew from histories quite how far the men who landed there had to come, but there’s no substitute for seeing it to grasp how broad the front was on which they landed. Films such as Saving Private Ryan (which was shot on a beach in Ireland) make the battlefield look much more compressed. Of course, the wide mass of men that were thrown onto those beaches — half of them National Guard units — were the only way they were able to overcome the bitter and unexpected German resistance.
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Omaha Beach, Normandy (Photo courtesy of the author) |
France may be more distant from us than England in its literary and political traditions, of necessity, but the depth of its history and the irresistible charms for the tourist of Paris more than compensate.
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