Paris and its Relation to the Rest of France: A Few Notes

Reading the classics of nineteenth century French literature one quickly gets a sense of just how central the city of Paris was within French life--or at least, those aspects of life to which the more privileged were attentive, the young provincial looking to make a career for himself always seemingly heading to Paris. Thus does, even in that tale of two centuries earlier, Alexander Dumas open the saga of young D'Artagnan with a scene of him making his way there on horseback--while in novels by Balzac such as Lost Illusions (in the story of Lucien du Rubempre another tale of a young provincial going to the capital), or The Two Brothers, it is the case that simply going from Paris to the provinces, or from the provinces to Paris, is enough to rattle a person's standards of beauty, elegance, grace (in Lost Illusions, where Lucien and Madame de Bargeton do not look so good to each other after a very short time sitting in a Parisian opera house, just the beginning of an eventually disastrous train of events).*

The sense of the city's centrality endures today, not least where the composition of the uppermost levels of government is concerned--such persons apt to have been born, raised, schooled and worked their whole lives within a few square miles within Paris, and in the view of their critics, knowing or caring little or nothing of the rest of the country (in the words of Simon Kuper, "treat[ing] the rest of France almost like a colony, inhabited by smelly peasants").

Considering this one may make a comparison with the U.S.. The United States has always had its regional differences, and resentments--North and South, East and West, interior and coast, etc.--but there was never any period in which a single city loomed so large, never mind for so long. Indeed, construction on the palace of Versailles was underway before the founding of the first real American metropolis, Boston, while that city was not very long in being challenged or eclipsed by others--most obviously New York, all as the functions of a national capital tended to be widely distributed. Thus Washington D.C. became the seat of government--even as the United Nations headquarters went to New York. If New York has a stronger standing as the financial capital of the country, Chicago is to commodities what New York is to the stock market. If New York has a status as cultural capital, while it dominates publishing, theater, fashion and the visual arts, Los Angeles is the central location in film and television production (even as that is being diffused about the country), music is even more dispersed (not just a Los Angeles but even a Nashville is a center here), and the most prestigious national university lies outside its boundaries (back in old Boston, even as it has slid below Oklahoma City in population, and Phoenix in the population of its larger metro area). Indeed, even such sneering terms as "flyover country" bespeak the diffusion of the nation's life. If those living in the major urban centers of the East coast have no interest in large parts of the United States, they do acknowledge the existence of important centers on the West coast. By contrast Parisian centrality in French life seems far less qualified--and with it the sharpness of the divide between center and provinces, containing, among much else, frequent reminders that ignorance about the larger world is pretty much a feature of elite life wherever one goes on the planet.

* In The Two Brothers after having journeyed from Paris to Issoudun the painter Joseph Bridau, gazing upon the woman they have come to stop from swindling his uncle out of his fortune, is so taken with her beauty that he declares at once his eagerness to paint her, and then being criticized his relatives for the remark amid a family crisis admits that he "did wrong," then adds (less than diplomatically) "you must remember that ever since leaving Paris I have seen nothing but ugly women."