on foreigners

Looking back at 1925

In 1925, Paris, like its inhabitants, was recovering. The weight of the first World War had begun to settle into the stones. Rising prices, broken leases, inflated money all became symptoms of the same illness Parisians began to feel closing around their throats.

The most important indicator of this struggle, however, was not one of francs or bread or shelter.

It was of arrivals. It was of the people who had never called the city home but who, as the Paris Review observed, “seemed to be coming to live forever.” Americans and British with strong currencies and romantic notions. Artists who could afford to starve beautifully. People for whom Paris was not necessity but choice.

They could afford to stay as long as they wanted. Parisians could barely afford to stay at all.

One hundred years later, the weight of this pattern has metastasized. Paris recovered, shook off the wars, but the logic of displacement it learned – that a city belongs to whoever can pay the most to be there – spread like a beautiful disease. What was once Paris’s singular pain has become the universal condition of desire itself.

The pattern is always the same: the city becomes desirable, the desirable becomes expensive, the expensive becomes exclusive, the exclusive becomes dead. A beautiful corpse, perfectly preserved, utterly empty of the life that made it beautiful in the first place.

But today, at least, the sun is shining on the Seine. The chestnuts are nearly bare. Someone is playing accordion on the Pont des Arts, and it’s probably ironic, but it sounds lovely anyway. A couple kisses by the water. They might be tourists. They might be locals. From this distance, you can’t tell the difference.