Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light (33 page)

Closer to home, I toured the Marais’s newest pocket-size pedestrianized areas, my eyes on the peacocks’ tails and Whitman’s Samplers of cobblestones, not to mention the dalles and
dallettes
. Most of the Marais was gentrified in the 1980s and ’90s without the help of cobble-ification—exception made for streets and squares like Place du Marché Sainte-Catherine. But it took the recent repaving and semi-pedestrianization of the old Jewish neighborhood on and around Rue des Rosiers, and on Rue Saint-Antoine, to complete the process. The boutiques stand cheek by jowl and real estate prices have spiraled up, apparently unaffected by the Great Recession of 2008–’10. So far, some longtime residents have held on, anchored by religion, family, and culture. More walkers and bikers than ever crowd in, yet complaints about increased noise are few: the street was always chaotic.

After months of jackhammering and snarled traffic, another semi-pedestrianized zone was born in 2008 on Rue Saint-Antoine, fronting Saint-Paul. If architect Yann Le Toumelin is right, rues des Rosiers and Saint-Antoine are the way of the future. They’re part of Réseau Vert. Instead of a citadel with piston-bollards—which often malfunction, damaging vehicles—other means will be used. They include easy and cheap traffic signals, 15-kph signage, cobbles, and traffic cops to bar the unauthorized. Sidewalks have been widened and lowered, and the poles that keep cars at bay—but hinder strolling—have been removed. No parking is allowed—in theory. Civic sense is key and plainly doesn’t always work. The Saint-Paul experiment and the Réseau Vert in general often feel like war zones, with frustrated drivers facing outraged bikers and pedestrians. Perhaps war is part of the process.

New-generation cobbled areas can only work in tandem with car-hostile roads flanking them, and bikes are essential. The Vélib’ rental scheme—in which riders pick up and drop off bikes at dozens of parking areas—is astonishingly popular, peaking at more than a hundred thousand users a day. With armies of walkers and bikers, drivers will have to yield—or so the theory goes. War?
Aux barricades, camarades!

Cobbled, semi-pedestrianized areas continue to crop up around town, from Rue Cler in the 7th arrondissment to Rue de la Forge-Royale in the 11th and Rue Cavallotti in the 18th. If—a big “if”—it is fully implemented, the Réseau Vert roadway network will link these green islands. Much depends on who sits in the mayor’s office. Another irony is, were the whole of Paris to be de-Haussmannized as Mayor Delanoë plans, the first generation of pedestrian citadels might morph back toward normality. They would be absorbed into a saner, gentler, less car-clogged cityscape. No one expects real estate prices to go down within them, or
bobos
to move out. Once the oldtimers have left, they do not return. Meanwhile, investors are watching to see where the cobbles—and bike lanes—are headed next.

Philosophy au Lait

Yesterday it was Jurassic Park; tomorrow will it be Homo-Sapiens Park?

—Budding philosopher at the Café des Phares

think, therefore I drink,” quipped my studious-looking neighbor at the Café des Phares, the so-called Philosophy Café, whose terrace spills onto Place de la Bastille. “One
petit crème
for the
petit
Descartes,” chuckled a nearby jokester as the waiter turned to me.

“Monsieur?”

I wrung my memory for a clever
mot
—from Plato perhaps—with which to order my late-Sunday-morning coffee. “An
express
to raise me out of the Cave of Illusions,” I said, blushing. The waiter moved off without batting an eye. As always, the café’s small round tables were elbow-to-elbow, a blue fog of cigarette smoke hovering over the terrace. The day’s newspapers hung from sticks. Mirrors quivered with humanity. It was the archetypal Paris café scene, of the kind abhorred by those who wish the city and its residents would stop living with one foot in a sepia photograph. I glanced outside and couldn’t help smiling at the beehive formation of latecomers thronging the sidewalk, trying to get in.

The Café des Phares’s name means “lighthouse” or “beacon” and the symbolism of its storming-of-the-Bastille location is lost on few. It is the mothership that spawned dozens of
philocafés
in Paris, the provinces, and abroad (in Europe, Japan, and America).

The concept—an open-mike, improvised public debate on philosophical quandaries—was the brainchild of the late Marc Sautet, a would-be professor alienated by the French university system. His goal was to make philosophy accessible to everyone, highlight its cathartic and therapeutic value, and earn a living. Predictably when the perma-tanned, blue-eyed Philosopher King took the Bastille by storm he was savaged by the press, and by mainstream philosophers (“nonsense propagated by a sophist …”), few of whom could be troubled to participate in his eleven-a.m. Sunday salons. Undaunted, Sautet published the book
Un café pour Socrate
and, perhaps inspired by Lucy and Snoopy, hung his shingle on a
Cabinet de Philosophie
at a chic Marais address. Soon dozens of philo-moderators, some with impressive academic credentials, were leading enthusiastic if motley groups of apprentice philosophers across the country.

Sautet’s apotheosis came in 1996 when he and best-selling philosophy writers Jean-Luc Marion, André Comte-Sponville, and Luc Ferry were guests on culture arbiter Bernard Pivot’s then-popular TV show
Bouillon de Culture
. Philosophy is a perennial favorite in France: high school students study it and their
Bac
graduation exam questions make front-page news. Radical-chic, telegenic Nouveaux Philosophes such as Bernard-Hénri Levy—BHL for short—have even made “philo-films” (BHL’s credits include
Le Jour et la Nuit
, widely considered one of cinema history’s all-time dogs).

To academe, though,
philocafés
remain suspect, a plebian Collège de France (where distinguished professors lecture, free, to the rapt and reverent, most of them retirees). Instead of welcoming the maverick Sautet and his adepts, France’s legions of savants began lacerating themselves over the
succès de scandal
of the
phénomène philocafé
. Was it, they asked earnestly, because the Age of Ideology died in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall? Or could it be a manifestation of “collective despair” linked to globalization, waning family values, and chronically high unemployment? Perhaps it signaled a fin-de-siècle crisis of the spirit, the conjugation of lost piety and the advent of the Second Millennium, or a revolution against “Anglo-Saxon values” embodied in commercial TV, the movies, and the Internet?

Strangely, few French intellectuals asked themselves whether the popularity of philosophy cafés could be put down to the simple fact that they offer good, ribald fun, in keeping with the best Parisian café tradition. That is precisely what you sense on a Sunday morning at the Café des Phares, still the city’s liveliest
philocafé
after two decades of tongue wagging. The ritual pecking of cheeks and passing of cigarette packs starts at ten a.m., when several dozen regulars show up to make sure they’ll find a spot inside, near the bar. That’s where the action is. A hundred or more casual participants ebb and flow between the bar and the sidewalk terrace, where they hear the debate through loudspeakers. Cellular telephones and other handheld devices disappear as budding philosophers brandish their notepads and reference books—everything from Plato’s
Republic
to Heidegger’s
Sein und Zeit
, Sartre, Foucault, Camus, Baudrillard, the Larousse dictionary, even the Bible.

At the appointed hour a philo-moderator rises to his feet, tests the mike and, in consultation with a roundtable of regulars, sets about finding the theme of the day. It’s like a college-town literature workshop and a Quaker meeting rolled into one, with a pinch of karaoke and a splash of pop-psych.

“Yesterday it was Jurassic Park,” suggested the first speaker, “tomorrow will it be Homo-Sapiens Park?” The theme was met by baffled groans.

“Nothing is to be hoped for, everything is to be experienced,” offered another speaker. More grumbling from the peanut gallery.

“Could it be that unemployment isn’t a problem, but rather a solution?” asked a provocative old hippie. This quandary, too, was discarded. Political.

Meanwhile coffee and beer were floating by on trays, and a
philocafé
regular had begun squeezing among the tables, hawking a stack of
Philos
, a monthly newsletter justly celebrated for its turgid, impenetrable prose. “All roads lead to Rome,” warbled the moderator’s disembodied voice through the mike. “How about considering the real meaning of this ancient saying?”

The question seemed genial enough so was accepted as the theme of the day.

“Because of the Paris marathon,” began an eager woman, “it took me two hours to get here this morning, and I thought to myself, traveling toward an objective is sometimes difficult, so perhaps the hidden meaning in ‘all roads lead to Rome’ is that if you try hard enough you can reach your goal.…”

“Rome meaning the seat of all power?” asked someone.

“The Vatican? The church? A symbol of oppression?” questioned a second.

“The incarnation of totalitarian moralism, the first manifestation of religious globalism …”

“This evokes the schism of the popes in Avignon, and is anti-papal …”

“Nonsense! The quote is much older, it refers to Imperial Rome!”

Soon the debate was rolling along, the mike passing from hand to hand. Sitting on the terrace a pipe-smoking professor with wrinkled trousers had his say, then a bird-boned sophisticate wearing an Hermès scarf. “All roads lead to infinity,” quipped a youngster hidden by the cigarette and pipe smoke, “Rome is finite, therefore the saying isn’t valid!”

The permutations of this millennial cliché turned out to be manifold. Roads are experience and all experience is valid. Roads are the ways of the Lord, and they’re unknowable. Rome is shorthand for beauty, love, art, and death, and all roads lead to death, preferably via sex. The road to knowledge passes through sin, Rome is sin, therefore.… A bookish man quoted sixteenth-century chronicler Montaigne (“By different means we arrive at the same end”) while an irreverent wit paraphrased Jorge Luis Borges (“If you put a monkey at a typewriter for eternity sooner or later he’ll write Shakespeare’s entire oeuvre”). Things were beginning to spin out of control. Someone I couldn’t see started a convoluted philosophical argument but lost his train of thought, stuttering and spluttering like a motorcycle out of gas. Amid cruel mocking the mike passed to the next apprentice philosopher.

“All roads lead to sex,” said a Rabelaisian man in his thirties, picking up the libidinous subtext abandoned earlier.

“All roads, or just sex-tions of them?” teased a voice. “Errantry or Eros?”

“In the dark, all women are beautiful!”

“And all men are desirable!”

A handsome young fellow in a tweed jacket made eyes at the soulful-looking young woman across from him. She rewarded him with a coy smile and a riffle of her notepad. Several other potential couples chatted away, oblivious to the debate. Eventually the moderator’s voice of reason intervened to put things back on track. My neighbor leaned over and remarked, “Isn’t this silly and pretentious?” Before I could answer a gaunt intellectual leaned over me from the other side and sniffed, “It lacks rigor, it isn’t philosophy at all.” Just then a middle-aged woman with a blonde bouffant pushed by, loaded with groceries from the Boulevard Richard Lenoir outdoor market whose stands I could see across the square. The smell of ripe cheese wafted up as she reached for the mike. “She’s been haggling over chickens and eggs,” quipped my jocular neighbor, suppressing hilarity. Suddenly a roller-skating teenager slalomed past, crashing into a table before being rescued by her philo-mom.

Finally an authoritative voice with a distinctly Italian accent began thundering through the microphone like an opera singer. “So far the lesson,” he sang, “seems to be that any sentence can lead us all anywhere!” A collective guffaw went up, and by the time I managed to flag a waiter, several couples had been formed, strangers had laughed, argued, triumphed, and failed together, and lots of drinks had been sold. At their worst
philocafés
are innocuous, I decided. Posturing or spouting pretentious philo-babble never hurt anyone, after all. At their best they can be stimulating and fun. In any case they’re money-spinners.
“Ça tourne rond,”
beamed my waiter as I paid for two distinctly upscale espressos. The babble is good for business.