Berkley Center

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&Ms and Gaps, 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.”