Putting the suburbs at the centre of modern Paris
TO CYCLE ACROSS PARIS in the first half of 2024 was to pedal through the anticipation of the world’s impending gaze. In a flurry reminiscent of the domestic chaos that precedes the arrival of a dinner party’s first guest, the city has been preparing. Olympic ambition abounds, from the bleachers built on the esplanade between the Alexander III bridge and Napoleon’s tomb in the Invalides to the Games HQ just beyond the boulevard périphérique in the new university neighbourhood of Aubervilliers. As the Financial Times journalist Simon Kuper reminds us in his personal account, Impossible City, Paris is “the birthplace of international sports competitions”. The Olympic Games are coming home again.
As with any homecoming, however, the retrofitting of a twenty-first-century Games to the capital of the nineteenth century raises a number of essential questions. Will the Paris of the Games prove to be the mythic, phantasmagorical navel of the world at the centre of so many imaginations, films and pictures? Or will it be the multicultural metropole of 10 million inhabitants that Kuper describes? And what about “The Zone”, along the périphérique ring road and the suburban areas surrounding it, which will host so much of the Olympics and which Justinien Tribillon places at the centre of his alternative history of Paris?
Both books have been published to coincide with the 2024 Olympics, which, like the history of Paris in the twenty-first century, their authors agree, will be written on a metropolitan scale. Kuper, born in Uganda and raised in the Netherlands, recounts the life he has made with his American wife and children in the centre of Paris. We visit the city as he ages from his thirties into his fifties, taking in his everyday trips to the boulangerie, his wife’s battle with cancer, his children’s football games, his long lunches (which remain entirely acceptable for his ilk in Paris) and his peek into the “tiniest elite”, the exclusive circles of those who graduated from the top French institutions and who, he believes, run the country.
Kuper’s tale of the outsider dissecting, succumbing to and integrating into Parisian life is a centuries-old genre. The book’s charm depends on how the story is told. Kuper has the journalist’s touch of rendering clichés less clichéd and giving the personal a hint of universalism. Yet the reader is struck by how much has changed since a previous journalist-cum-Parisian, Adam Gopnik, published his Paris to the Moon in 2000. The foil to Gopnik’s romantic vision of philosophizin
