Simon Kuper’s Excellent Look At Paris, “Impossible City”

I’ve never been a fan of Paris. To read about Paris is to read about its beauty, charm and sophistication, but when I first visited in 1998, it struck me as rundown, dirty, and way too touristy. Basically a city full of people with cameras (I’m aging myself there) around their necks and ice cream cones in hand. I didn’t get it, and still don’t.

That’s why I was so interested to read Financial Times columnist (and Paris resident) Simon Kuper’s recently released book, Impossible City: Paris In the 21^st Century. A title that includes “impossible” was indicative of what’s true about the book, that Kuper would explain his love affair with a city that was preceded by a fair amount of frustration, dislike, and skepticism.

Kuper was born to South African parents in Uganda, raised mostly in the Netherlands, but was educated in both England (Oxford) and the U.S. (Harvard). Not a Parisian, he seemed to me best positioned to help the skeptic in me grasp what is or isn’t the big deal about a city that so many reflexively rave about. As an outsider with the credentials to know those on the inside, Kuper could perhaps explain what’s inexplicable, and he has. At least I think he has, or maybe he’s just an entertaining writer. Which is a good way to get started.

Up front, Impossible City is excellent. Just a great read. Every chapter is rewarding and informative. If you intend to read just this book by Kuper, do so knowing you’ll soon enough find yourself buying other books written by him. I’ve already purchased two, including one that won’t be released until next year.

Impossible City is Kuper’s “personal view of Paris,” which on its own is something. Just as no one reads the same book, it’s a safe bet that no one sees Paris the same way. That’s because Parisians apparently make Philadelphians seem joyous and inviting. As Kuper puts it, “Parisians rarely initiate conversations with strangers,” or for that matter, with “distant acquaintances.”

It’s a quick way of saying that if you’re trying to learn Paris, there’s no teacher, or book, or welcome to Paris-style individual who will unlock the city’s secrets. Kuper cites a Paris-born and bred friend who can lay claim to ancestors with similar credentials, but even she is afraid to walk into certain places, and this includes public restaurants like Café Charlot in Kuper’s neighborhood. Allegedly well-bred Parisians even turn their noses up to their own.

Which is in a sense a comment on how different Paris is, but also how similar it is to every U.S. city, or any city around the world. Think about it. A local afraid to darken the doors of certain Parisian restaurants? What a snooty place until it’s recognized that the percentage of Americans possessing the courage to walk into all manner of high-end restaurants in Manhattan, Beverly Hills and Malibu would similarly be of the .0001 percent small.

Back to Paris, Kuper writes that “If you are of impossibly high status, or a multigenerational Parisian inside, or are exceptionally good looking,” you can enter the most exclusive of “public” places, plus “you can break rules with impunity.” It all sounds right, but it also makes Paris sound like most any prominent city not Paris?

This isn’t a criticism of Kuper, or his analysis. There’s truth in all stereotypes, and there’s a Parisian stereotype that anyone who has ever visited Paris surely grasps. There’s an officious quality to the city, one that’s disdainful of very American “good morning” and “have a great day” niceties. And it’s not just a quality of the elites.

Notoriously distant or rude restaurant waiters in Paris, though frequently from the “wrong” parts of France themselves, are in the words of Kuper “the guardians of the city’s main public spaces.” As for the locals who largely consume the food brought to them by pompous waiters, Kuper writes that “almost all the customers are food critics.” Kuper, who writes that “lunch may have been the main reason I stayed” in the impossible city, believes that the food-critic quality of Parisian palates explains why the food is so good. And it’s not just the food.

Kuper writes of the abundance of affordable wine, wine so good that as the French put it, is “like Jesus pissing in your mouth.” Kuper wasn’t leaving all the good food and wine, plus Paris fulfilled his ambition “to have a nice flat in the centre of a great city and make my living writing.” The latter wasn’t a possibility in London, but for 2001 arrivals to Paris like Kuper, he got “just under the wire at the last moment before the great cities closed down to U.S. journalists.”

So, what is Paris? To read Kuper and his endlessly great stories is to be eager to give the city another chance, or many more chances, while still wondering what it’s all about.

It’s very crowded, and very diverse, to say the least. Kuper indicates that it’s Europe’s largest nominally Muslim, Christian and Jewish city. Ok, but based on all that human capital, why isn’t Paris the richest city in Europe? The answer to the previous question is perhaps answered by Kuper’s own experiences. He recalls that “I found I was paying about half my income to the French state,” which he suggests was a disincentive to taking on extra work.

Later on in the book, Kuper writes that “the French deal is more or less that people hand over a large chunk of their income to the state, and in return for free education, healthcare, pensions, and even subsidized holidays.” Well, there you perhaps have it. No wonder those running for president in France spend so much time outside of France campaigning. So many of the ambitious have left. Kuper notes that during his 2017 presidential campaign, Emmanuel Macron raised more money from French people in Great Britain than in France’s ten largest provincial cities.

Paris seems to be where people consume, as opposed to producing. Which is no insight, but it’s also telling about the kind of people it would attract. Kuper observes that “Parisians tended to go to London for work, while Londoners came to Paris to play.”

You just don’t get the feeling that if Mark Zuckerberg had come up in Paris, only to attend one of its elite schools, that he would have made Paris or France the location of his enterprise. It’s a not a risk-taking kind of place. As Kuper points out throughout the book, the ultimate destination for graduates of Ecole Nationale D’Administration (ENA) is work for the state, Inspection Generale des Finances to be more specific. It’s government work that best positions France’s alleged best and brightest for nominally private work at businesses with close ties to the government. Once again, is it any wonder the opposite thinkers leave?

Still, to read about ENA, Sciences Po, Ecole Polytechnique, and Ecole Normale Superieure is to be reminded in a sense of just how normal France and Paris are. The schools mentioned are where France’s elite go, and after passing the exams necessary to attend. As Kuper describes it, “the French system is rule by the cleverest, selected through exams.”

It all sounds so bureaucratic and ridiculous, the tests in particular. But that’s what happens in the U.S. too, after which what is a “60 second Harvard man” but an American version of French so eager to quickly let you know where they were educated? Kuper adds that Oxbridge graduates “convey all relevant information through their speech patterns,” which is yet again more evidence that much of what makes France and Paris different is what makes it very similar to the U.S., Britain, and other developed countries.

ENA has produced something like four of the last six presidents, but then Yale and Harvard can lay claim to how many U.S. presidents, including something like three out of the last six for Yale alone? This isn’t to say that there’s something in the water at ENA, Yale, Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge as much as those who look in the mirror only to see a future president tend to choose where they’ll be educated accordingly.

Even the personalities read as similar. Kuper writes of a once on the rise French political type who, while at an elite salon, had a long-winded answer to every political question. Where it becomes comical is that each time after completing his answer, this individual would return to his Blackberry to scan his messages rather than listen to those responding. When Francoise Hollande (ENA) was on the way up, Kuper recalls how the socialist politician arrived two hours late to a gathering of high-end political people. John Kerry (Yale ’66) anyone?

Arguably the biggest difference between the U.S.’s “60 second Harvard men” and their French and British equivalents is that while all of them can’t wait to convey their educational details, American conservatives increasingly pretend that they’re much dumber than their education would indicate, not to mention their pretense that they had to overcome all sorts of indoctrination while suffering in silence at these top schools. And even with the latter, there’s a French equivalent. When Hollande graduated from ENA, he gave up his spot at Inspection Generale des Finances not because he had other interests, but because he felt another elite landing spot would improve his odds of eventually being elected president. True or not, Hollande was elected president in 2012. No doubt there are American conservatives with Harvard and Yale credentials who are now considering State U. for similar reasons.

In an educational sense, arguably the biggest differences between Americans and the French can be found in the K-12 years. Kuper writes that Parisian schools have long “treated parents as intruders, always trying to mess up the Republic’s grand educational product.” But as Kuper’s description implies, parents are inquisitive about what’s going on in the classroom regardless of what the teachers want. Which is probably a sign that back-to-school nights for a rather globalized city aren’t far off, if at all.

Less convincingly, Kuper asserts that “school has also probably helped make the French the world champion of pessimism.” More realistically, the French are pessimistic hence the tone in classrooms. Evidence supporting the previous claim can be found in a Gallup Poll cited by Kuper, and that says the French are the world’s most “morose” people. Their relative misery even exceeds that of the Afghans and Iraqis. It’s a comment that if environment drove attitudes as so many believe, Afghans and Iraqis would be exceptionally more unhappy than the French.

Kuper is clear that “there is a right way to do everything in Paris, and it was probably decided before you born.” These “ruling class” codes are passed down by the elite to the elite. Kuper cites French telecom billionaire (and outsider) Xavier Niel’s description of these high-end networks that define the Paris around which the country revolves as, “’You went to the same school. Your parents knew each other. On all these paths, you’ve been among yourselves. And among yourselves, nobody wants to upset anyone.” Ok, it all sounds so closed off until as Americans we’re reminded of how “birds of a feather flock together” is arguably as old as the U.S. is.

No doubt Americans would rightly and correctly point out just how ceiling-free the so-called glass ceiling is in the U.S., and they would be right. There’s something different about the United States. New York City, which is the U.S.’s Paris, ably vivifies this truth. Seemingly everyone there is an “immigrant” relative to where they began, and this is most notable for those making the “long walk” to Manhattan from the city’s outer boroughs. Still, they make it all the time and either rise as outsiders (including with the accents they bring to Manhattan) or by copying the ways of the established. Maybe this explains the difference between the U.S. and France?

It’s a reasonable argument, but even there we see through Kuper’s description of Paris, its rules, and the hard truth that “the performance of Parisianness never becomes effortless,” that people move up. Kuper describes Jean-Pierre Jouyet as the Parisian who most personifies the city’s incredibly closed-off elitism, but then Jouyet entered the world as the son of a notary in Normandy. Hollande grew up in Rouen before his family moved to the richest of French banlieue (suburbs) locations, Neuilly-sur-Seiene. Telling the endlessly entertaining path of Emmanuel Macron (seemingly “everyone” thought they’d mentored him…), Kuper writes that before being elected president, “Macron was making an ancient French journey: the ambitious provincial remade himself as a Parisian.” Well, yes.

As much I kept looking for differences between France and the U.S., I kept finding positive similarities. Which would have to be. Think about it. The migration of humans is easily the purest market signal on earth. And people migrate to opportunity. While Kuper indicates that England is the goal of Africans and Middle Easterners owing to language similarities (and, at least historically a prosperity disparity that Kuper signals is shrinking all the time), cold, rainy Paris wouldn’t be so dense with people (the author writes that depending on the day, Paris is a “jihadi hellhole” or a “multicultural paradise”) unless it were similarly laden with opportunity.

It’s a long way of revealing my libertarian lean, and the deep libertarian belief in what’s true, that governments have no resources. Governments can only spend, provide, and in the case of ENA elites, shower them with endless perks insofar as someone, somewhere is producing. It must be.

None of this is a defense of the over-taxation that defines life in France as much as it’s a comment that France and Paris can’t be limited to perceptions of people on perpetual vacation, and who take long, wine-fueled daily lunches. About the lunches alone, Kuper is clear that “Parisian diners were also working.” Food is just the way they connect so that they can work.

As for the wine, Kuper reports that even the latter is increasingly a lunchtime “treat,” as opposed to a “staple.” So are 90-minute lunches a thing of the past. In Kuper’s words, “Even in Paris, time has become money.” Put another way, markets always have their say. Which is arguably a comment that France unsurprisingly was familiarized with modern market realities after the U.S., but familiarized it was. Allowing for the truth about stereotypes, “three martini lunches” at one time defined gatherings for business types in the U.S. Now they don’t.

Kuper also disproves not just what Americans imagine about Paris, but also what they use to inform their own pessimism and increasingly, their victimhood. About his arrival in Paris in the early 2000s, Kuper recalls that it “coincided with a wave of anti-semitic attacks.” Kuper adds that a “hyperbolic American media “ also “feeds the perception of rampant anti-semitism in Paris.” The latter isn’t a defense of the here and now, but a reminder to Americans that the anti-semitism they lament is hardly new, nor are their laments new. Kuper himself is a Jew, but also not an anti-semitism denier. Basically he’s a realist. He doesn’t deny its existence as much as he acknowledges it, while pointing out to readers surveys indicating anti-semitism in Paris has declined “to the lowest levels ever measured in the country.”

What about “these kids today”? American conservatives claim “this time is different” on the college campus. Not really. Not even in France. Kuper writes that in 1968, President DeGaulle declared the student “France’s most dangerous scoundrel,” which resembles what conservative Americans and President Trump believe today. Did the French beat us to this opinion, or has it always been the norm in France and the United States? Your reviewer says the latter.

Did Kuper’s endlessly entertaining book change my mind on Paris? The answer is that it’s impossible to say. What he did do is make me want to return to try and see it through his eyes. As “impossible” as the city is, Kuper concludes at the end of a book I didn’t want to end that “I will probably spend eternity in Paris.” I’ll plan on returning at some point with at very least a mind open to understanding why Kuper is so taken.