So, oui, Parisians and their suburban cousins are aggressive and stressed, but no more than the inhabitants of any big commuter city. And they seem intimidating only because they know how the city works, and therefore get impatient with people who don’t—the tourists and provincials. To Parisians, cohabiting with outsiders is like going fishing with someone who has never baited a hook before. Surely everyone knows you’re not supposed to throw the fishing rod in the water with the hook and line? No? Well, then they must be really, really stupid.
This uncomprehending impatience explains why Parisian drivers’ fists seem to be permanently jammed on their hooter, and why waiters (who more often than not give perfect service, despite seeming to ignore you) can get irritable with their customers. Many diners, especially the non-French and non-Parisians, are mere part-timers in the restaurant game, and the waiters are old hands. They’re simply expressing frustration at being forced to share their territory with untrained beginners.
In short, the Parisians’ apparent unfriendliness is not a deliberate attempt to insult outsiders. It’s just a symptom of their wish to get on with their lives.
On the other hand, the accusations of snobbishness and self-obsession are entirely justified, because right from birth, a sense of their city’s greatness is hammered into Parisians’ heads with a gold Chanel mallet.
Paris is undeniably the centre of the French-speaking universe. It’s only a slightly skewed interpretation on the part of some Parisians to see the city as the centre of the universe, full stop. The top dogs of pretty well every prestigious French institution—cultural, economic and political—have to be based in Paris to stay close to the centralized action, so the crème de la crème are always going to be here, and, being Parisian, will always think that their own particular brand of crème is the creamiest.
And their snobbishness is not only inflicted on outsiders—Parisians weave a tangled web of snobbery amongst themselves. For example, those in the posher arrondissements will look down on their less chic counterparts with a mixture of scorn and pity. Try telling someone from the ultra-snooty 7th on the Left Bank that you live on the other side of the river in, say, the 20th, and a polite grimace will come across their face as though you’d just confessed to an infestation of headlice. And it works both ways—a TV cameraman living in the northern media ghetto of the 19th will think of a blazer-wearing 16th arrondissement banker over in the southwest of the city as a slug-like, brainless slave of philistine capitalism. Meanwhile, someone with a loft in a pleasantly gentrified part of the 11th, but near to a poor neighbourhood, will see themselves as an urban pioneer, living much closer to the edge than a person whose apartment is 500 metres to the south.
The rules of Parisian snobbery are as complex as a 3-D chess game played on twenty boards at once, despite the fact that the city is a rough circle of only about 10 kilometres in diameter. The key thing being, of course, that if you don’t live inside the circle, you’re totally out of the game.
This is not to say that Parisians don’t have their chinks of self-doubt. They can, for example, feel inferior to New Yorkers, San Franciscans, Londoners and the Milanese—in short, to anyone with their own superiority complex. And Parisians are scared of, and therefore a little overawed by, the poorer banlieusards, believing that anyone who can survive life in an ugly apartment block more than a kilometre from a cinema or decent restaurant deserves le respect. And the success of French rap, as well as mainstream films like Neuilly Sa Mère and Tout Ce Qui Brille (in which young Arab banlieusards make fun of absurdly stereotyped snobbish Parisians), have proved that Paris is losing ground in the trendiness stakes—the irony being that as soon as a banlieusard rapper or film star becomes famous, they move intra muros and turn into typical Parisiens.
Parisien-spotting
Paris’s twenty arrondissements contain some 2.2 million people, who can be as different as Champagne and absinthe and yet still remain quintessentially Parisian.
There are as many types of Parisians as there are fish on a coral reef. But what makes them all Parisian, apart from simple geography, is the way they interact. Like the fish, they have to negotiate their way around the reef. The small fry have to steer clear of the sharks; the shrimps have to watch how they cross the open spaces in case a crab runs them over; and for all his or her bright colours, even the most beautiful individual will never outshine the reef itself.
Certain species of Parisian gather in certain arrondissements, and take on the characteristics of the neighbourhood as if trying to camouflage themselves. Of course, there are dozens of subtypes that will have to be left out to avoid turning this book into a sociological encyclopaedia, but here is a run-through of the main species of Parisian you will find in each of the arrondissements, and the best places to see them. And the good news is that you won’t need a mask and snorkel to explore this particular coral reef.
The 1st
So much of the nucleus of Paris is taken up by the Louvre, the Palais-Royal and shops that hardly anyone lives there, except around Châtelet and Les Halles, where you can get a loft with a balcony and exposed wooden beams much more cheaply than in the nearby Marais. Though not many people want to live in an area that attracts all the suburban racaille (the establishment’s insulting name for young wasters) who come in from the northern banlieues on the RER (the suburban métro) and hang around Les Halles, chatting each other up and getting
