The 14th and 15th
As far as people-watching is concerned, these are of interest only to someone doing a PhD on the Parisian middle-class family. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Parisian middle-class families, it’s just that they’re not the world’s most colourful tribe. One of the oases of liveliness is the huge traditional brasserie La Coupole, on the boulevard du Montparnasse, where Parisians usually outnumber tourists, and gather to eat mountains of seafood. If you tell the restaurant it’s your birthday, the waiters will troop towards your table chanting, ‘Ça, c’est Paris’, and then they will crowd around you to sing ‘Joyeux Anniversaire’ while you squirm with embarrassment and try to avoid getting your nose burnt by the Roman candle on top of the birthday cake—which is a dummy, by the way.
The 16th
This vast arrondissement is mostly a rather dull blend of grand bourgeois and tacky new money. In the daytime, the parks are crammed with immigrant nannies and the designer shops are full of desperate housewives. In the evening, they’re all either at home or out for dinner in the 7th or the Bois de Boulogne. The deathly gentility is disturbed only on match days, when Paris Saint-Germain football fans swarm to the Parc des Princes for a session of racist chanting. Best place to spot locals in the wild is on the long walk from the métro station La Muette to see the Impressionist paintings at the Musée Marmottan. The 16th is also the arrondissement that spawned what many people see as the archetypal Parisian homme—floppy hair, designer jeans, effortless charm, seen-it-all (but wouldn’t be seen dead in the T-shirt) attitude—though he is more usually to be found bantering his way around the bars and restaurants of the 6th.
The 17th
The 17th is so far away from everything that it’s hard to imagine it’s intra muros. Quite honestly, I have very little idea who lives here. There is an outburst of shopping activity at Ternes and a posh, 8th-style area around the Parc Monceau, with lots of lawyers’ offices, but the only 17th people who have stuck in my mind are transvestites—for a short while, I lived near the Porte de Saint-Ouen, which was a cruising zone for men who like men dressed as ladies, and I once saw a kind of mini Rio carnival as three ten-foot-tall cross-dressers strutted flamboyantly towards their pick-up points.
The 18th
Montmartre is home to Paris’s artists and can-can dancers, and on a good day you will see Picasso out sketching with Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec hobbling after a petticoated lady, begging to paint her portrait. Or maybe not—in reality, Montmartre today is a village populated by Parisians rich enough to have bought houses with fantastic views before the prices went crazy, slightly unconventional middle-class professionals who enjoy walking up hills, and tourists in search of a good photo of the city’s rooftops. Nearby Barbès, on the other hand, is a multi-generational logjam of people from every part of Africa that France ever managed to colonize. To observe l’Afrique française, just walk northwards along the boulevard Barbès on a Saturday afternoon and you’ll go all the way to Senegal. Those in search of more trendy people-watching usually head up the hill to the bars and cafés on the rue Lepic to recapture the feel of the movie Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain.
The 19th
Belleville, with its cluster of big Chinese brasseries, is resisting change, but the rest is getting seriously hip, with artists’ studios and film-production companies herding in. Above Belleville, the Jourdain area is a media ghetto, with about 50 per cent of the population working in TV, cinema or radio. These are the bobos (bourgeois Bohemians)—Parisians trying to pretend they’re not. Their apparent lack of style is a style in itself and make no mistake—that rumpled shirt and ruffled hair were rumpled and ruffled by professionals. All of which means that the café terraces are crowded non-stop because these people don’t work regular office hours. On sunny days, they all go to the Buttes-Chaumont park to try and picnic on the dangerously sloping lawns (downhill-rolling wine bottles and melons are a frequent hazard). Further northwest, the area around the canal basin, the Bassin de la Villette, is not yet inhabited by trendies, and is one of the last poor, mixed-race quartiers inside the city. Blacks, Chinese, Arabs, Orthodox and Sephardic Jews and low-income Whites co-exist in a zone that will be almost entirely lofted over in ten years’ time. Spotting spots: the Buttes-Chaumont whenever it’s sunny, and the Bar Ourcq on the southeastern (sunny) side of the Bassin de la Villette, where young Parisians gather for evening pétanque picnics.
The 20th
Until recently considered as a distant cultural and social wasteland, it’s now a great place for small live-music venues. Apart from that, its location means that it is home to lots of scooter-riding bobos who can afford to send their kids to private schools in better areas, as well as vestiges of poor people who are hanging on in Paris but might be forced to cross over the périph’ to the suburbs if their rents rise any further. Spot two different types of trendies on one stretch of the rue de Bagnolet—rock fans in the Flèche d’Or, an old railway station that has been turned into a cool music venue, and just opposite, much snappier dressers in the bars and restaurants of the Mama Shelter Hotel, which until recently used to be one of the city’s ugliest multi-storey car parks.
How to become a Parisian
The Russian-born French actor Sacha Guitry once said, ‘Être parisien, ce n’est pas être né à Paris, c’est y renaître.’ In other words, to be a Parisian you don’t have to be born here, it’s all about being re-born. People re-invent themselves when they arrive, or at the very least
