Paulina Velasco

Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine had it right when he said that he would always fondly remember the beautiful French capital. Being the absolute center of social and political life in France, Paris best represents the country’s diversity with the variety in its population occupying its twenty “arrondissements,” or neighborhoods. People of various backgrounds, styles, careers, and dreams keep Paris close to their hearts in some way or another, and have made the city into an incredible mosaic much more interesting and complex than its typical postcard-perfect Eiffel-Tower image.

In fact, the subjects broached with such political jargon in Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2009 “Debate over the National Identity” are most clearly and quite simply seen walking through Paris’s diverse neighborhoods. It is obvious that this social commentary of mine is from an outsider’s perspective; however, I find that observations of the people on the streets throughout Paris tell me more about what it is to be French than can the Minister of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Solidarity Development, although the latter characterizes the French bureaucratic tendency quite well.

One of the first things I did upon arriving to Paris was to find Shakespeare & Company, a charming bookstore housed in a slightly inclined old wooden building from medieval times and bursting with all kinds of books and comfy chairs and furniture smelling of humidity and age. There I bought Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, the book he wrote about his life as a young writer in Paris in the 1920s as well as the store’s most-stocked book, and I proceeded to devour its pages and go off on hunts throughout the Sorbonne, Panthéon, and St.-Germain-des- Prés neighborhoods for every café and plaza he so beautifully described.

Nowadays Hemingway’s old apartment lies on a street filled with bars and student nightlife, and the famous Deux Magots café where he wrote The Sun Also Rises is much too expensive for aspiring young writers to go even to drink an espresso. Reading Hemingway got me exploring the Parisian streets and taking note of their diversity and evolution throughout the years.

Call it a melting pot, a quilt, or what-have-you: most developed countries like France and the United States have an immense diversity of cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds among their populations; in Paris I love that this diversity is seen on its streets. The quarter where I live, Le Marais, is at the same time the old Jewish neighborhood and the place to go for gay and lesbian nightlife. You will find the best falafel in Paris along the “Old Temple Street,” run into a transvestite along the same street at night, and discuss these events over coffee with your “bourgeois-bohème,” or “bo-bo,” neighbors the next morning. Haussmann, the Baron who re-created Paris under Napoleon III and is responsible for the typical, gorgeous, balcony-decorated buildings lining Paris’s streets, would have been shocked to see one of the oldest neighborhoods in Paris one day house such diversity.

Right next door is the neighborhood of Les Halles, a vastly interesting one from a sociological perspective because in it you find all socioeconomic classes mixed in a way unique to Paris. The ancient marketplace-turned-shopping-mall at the center best demonstrates this: as you move down the different levels of the mall you encounter different socioeconomic classes, with the richest shopping at the chic boutiques at the top level, middle classes shopping the subsequent H+M’s and GAP’s, and young skateboarders and homeless persons hanging out in the courtyard at the street level. It suffices to turn the corner of a trendy, boutique-filled street in Le Marais to arrive at the less-safe and crowded streets of Les Halles lined with food stands selling kebabs and crêpes, and with this experience the socioeconomic diversity of Paris, which in turn often parallels the diversity of origins in France.

What does it mean to be French? It is a subject often broached in political discourse, but I think it should be a discussion originating from observations of daily life in the various neighborhoods of Paris. And as Hemingway explained in his book, for all of us with our different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds inhabiting Paris either temporarily or permanently: “wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

It is often difficult to discuss France’s politics in terms of their relation to religion considering the fact that “laïcité,” or France’s strict relegation of religion to the private sphere, is tenaciously upheld as a national value, right up there with liberty, equality, and fraternity. France’s “laïcité” is very different from the United States’ separation of Church and State because it is much more skeptical of any and all intrusion of particular religions into national political culture.

Both countries, however, are most definitely not exempt from the influence on political actions and discourse of politicians’ personal faiths or of talk of spiritual-like national objectives. That is to say, there is often a sense of mission and a calling to defend certain values for both American and French political leaders.

I was fortunate enough to attend a lecture here at Sciences Po Paris by the Berkley Center’s Director Professor Tom Banchoff on “the religious dimension of the American sense of mission in international affairs” that made me realize the role of religion in American foreign politics that cannot be denied, and that was greeted with some degree of criticism by the French audience. As Professor Banchoff highlighted, American political discourse is threaded with Judeo-Christian references. The calls to be the “light on the hill” to lead the world in the defense of freedom and individual rights has led to what we now consider a sort of American exceptionalism, which has been appealed to as well as challenged in the past years with the American intervention in the war on terror and recently in Libya.

Professor Banchoff’s speech made me reflect the past few weeks on whether France itself has a similar self-conception of its role in international affairs, considering that it is also a major player on the world stage, as has been seen in the recent discussion on what to do in Libya and Syria. While France denies all reference to religion in its internal and external politics, it has come to my attention that France has still fashioned for itself a role comparable to that of the United States as a defender of human rights.

France’s equivalent in terms of political discourse, at least, is its appeals to the Universal Declaration of human Rights, of which France was a key creator in 1948 within the United Nations, and to its own Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, fundamental document of the French Revolution and of the French spirit, I dare say, and of which I have seen numerous lovely paintings and engravings in almost every museum in Paris. The French, to put it somewhat informally, are all about defending their individual liberty, a value that manifests itself all the way from the pedestrian fighting violently against the driver for his right of way along the Boulevard St. Germain to the French diplomatic discourse on the recent violence in the democratizing African states.

For example, for one of my courses here at Sciences Po, we have weekly assignments where we pretend to be French diplomatic spokespeople while the class poses questions on a particular subject, a task that is more difficult than it seems because we have to stay in character and not give our personal or politically biased responses to very pertinent foreign affair issues. It seems that each time we end up citing “the defense of human basic human rights and liberties” as French diplomacy’s motivations for “sharply denouncing” the violence in Syria or in Libya or in Egypt. It would certainly be interesting to ask where this strong belief in human rights originates, because it may very well be that this deist, Enlightenment concept can be said to be religious at its foundation.

Nevertheless, today it seems to be the distinguishing feature for French foreign political discourse the way “American exceptionalism” based on Judeo-Christian traditions is for the United States. I wonder if I might possibly conclude that the self-constructed “religion” on which France bases its foreign politics, in word especially, is the defense of universal human rights.