I Didn’t Feel Parisian Until I Escaped Paris
In his 1977 book, ''Liberté, liberté chérie,'' Pierre Mendès-France recounts the various waves of flight that marked the exodus from Paris in the spring of 1940, at the dawn of the German occupation. ''In the early days, we saw fast and sumptuous American cars driven by liveried chauffeurs,'' he writes. These were followed by the ''less shiny, less new'' vehicles of the middle classes, which were in turn followed days later by caravans of jalopies, eventually abandoned by the roadside, ''their owners continuing on foot to the next town, then by train, bicycle, or hitchhiking.'' Next came the cyclists — ''mostly young, often carefree'' — then the pedestrians, ''sometimes whole families, the man with a rucksack on his shoulder, the woman pushing a cart or baby carriage.'' Later came the stragglers, ''overwhelmed, feet bloodied.'' Finally, there were the horse-drawn carriages driven by peasants, ''laden with sick people, children, old people, agricultural equipment and furniture,'' he writes. ''Sometimes livestock walked alongside them, including cows and horses.''
Plus ça change. It wasn't nearly so frenetic, but on March 16 my wife and I, along with our two small children and whatever clothes, books and toys we could think to grab, ordered a taxi across an empty Paris and joined a crush of masked travelers at the Gare Montparnasse. As we idled under the LCD screens, waiting anxiously for the arrival of the trains that would shoot out of the station to various destinations along the country's western reaches, I was aware that we were all of us re-enacting a scene that has played out over and over again throughout this city's dramatic history.
The day we left, after a week of growing alarm over the spread of the novel coronavirus and decreasing freedom in the attempt to limit the contagion, starting with the closure of schools and swiftly followed by the shuttering of all nonessential businesses, President Emmanuel Macron was scheduled to address the nation in the evening. He would, as many expected, soon order total home confinement. The only question for anyone with options was where to go to endure it. We barely had a chance to contemplate our decision.
The day before we ended up leaving, it was our stroke of good fortune to be having lunch with a couple who have their own young children and an acquaintance in government kind enough to give them advance warning. These friends patiently impressed upon us the severity of what was about to happen. We were going to be housebound for the next 15 days, very likely longer. Our friends would be leaving in a few hours for their family home near the Atlantic. Would we like to hunker down with them? At least this way the kids would have a yard to expand into. Once the order was made official, it would be much more difficult to move around the country. I grabbed my friend's laptop and reserved what appeared to be four of the last tickets available to La Baule-Escoublac before confinement, departing the following morning.
Our decision was a common one. Le Parisien reported that ''more than a million residents left the Paris region before confinement,'' based on geolocation data collected by Orange, the country's largest mobile-phone service provider. The company's chief executive estimated that from March 13 to March 20, a staggering 17 percent of the population of Paris and its neighboring suburbs decamped to their country houses, of which there exist some 3.4 million around the nation.
Contemplating these figures and their implications, I was reminded of the architectural historian James S. Ackerman's 1990 classic, ''The Villa: Form and Ideology of Country Houses,'' and its famous description of the significance of the secondary residence in an urbanized society. Noting that the ''basic program of the villa'' has remained unchanged since Roman times, Ackerman offers an explanation: ''It fills a need that never alters, a need which, because it is not material but psychological and ideological, is not subject to the influences of evolving societies and technologies. The villa accommodates a fantasy which is impervious to reality.'' And though it exists as a respite from the city, the villa ''cannot be understood apart from the city'' — its meaning derives from what it is not.
Few, if any, European societies are as centralized as France. Almost a full fifth of the French population lives in the Paris metropolitan area. In terms of cultural and economic dominance, Paris, still Europe's fashion capital, also combines the functions and prestige of Wall Street, Hollywood and Washington — all in one location. Despite various attempts over the years to decentralize the state, the inhabitants of the city lord over the rest of France to an extent that is similar but distinct from the divide between ''real'' America and its coastal elite. Despite extravagantly rich and diverse geographical blessings, from snow-capped Alpine slopes to crystalline Mediterranean shores and the exquisite soils of Champagne and Bordeaux, since monarchical times, the country has principally understood itself along a simple binary: Paris/province. Recently, such cultural and political insolubility has provoked serious societal consequences. First came more than a solid year of Yellow Vest protests and riots, which, in Paris, sometimes had the feel of a furious guerrilla war being waged on the town by the country. Now we have Covid-19, and though France provides a safety net that precludes the spectacular kind of degradation and suffering currently on display in America, few seem to believe that we're truly all in this together.
On top of it all — or as a fundamental aspect of this imbalanced relationship — there is that unusually high proportion of second-home ownership (even if it's worth noting that these homes, while lovely, are typically modest). In times of crisis, whether man-made or the result of the pestilent ''flail of God,'' as Camus so memorably phrased it, Parisians who can are wont to chase their safety to the provinces. Fleeing Paris is a collective, inherited reflex. And as Mendès-France's account lays bare, whatever else they are, such stories of escape are always accounts of privilege — with regard to the position of the capital in relation to the rest of the country, as well as the internal hierarchy of its inhabitants.
As a parisien d'adoption, I am only semicognizant of where I may fit at any given time into the French social fabric. As a foreigner compelled by an epidemic to abandon my home — an exile twice over — it is difficult, if necessary, for me to think of myself as part of this other, overarching dynamic. Traveling through France in regular times, for better or worse, I am simply perceived as an American. But now it's different. My family has inadvertently participated in a larger, possibly exploitative interaction that has sown resentment among some residents of the rural areas we have infiltrated. The locals we've met have been mostly welcoming and generous, though it's hard to say to what degree that's because the fear that Parisians would spread the virus ultimately proved unfounded. In those infrequent but memorable instances in which a neighbor declines a ''bonjour,'' and for the first time I can remember, I think I do detect my wife and friends being perceived the way that I can be viewed — not as natives but as interlopers in this land.
La Baule-Escoublac, the nearby seaside resort we had come through from Paris, counted 10 refugees for every inhabitant during the last mass exodus 80 years ago. As fearsome as Covid-19 is, it is not the Nazis. Still, the mayor of La Baule, Yves Métaireau, estimated that the population had swelled to more than 40,000 inhabitants from 17,000. After nearly a decade of expatriate ambivalence, imagining myself not so much a resident of France as a ''trans-Atlantic commuter,'' to use James Baldwin's phrase — with one foot in this society and one foot out — in exercising this authentically Parisian need to escape, it feels as though, suddenly, I've had my position here solidified. Mandatory confinement is scheduled to expire on May 11, but neither my wife nor I is so inclined to return to the city right away. We take turns scouring the internet for houses in the country to rent — a thoroughly Parisian activity these days. The pandemic is forcing more and more of us to reconsider just where we belong.
On a recent afternoon, as my friend and I were waiting a safe distance behind the next person in line to enter the new organic market and scrolling through work emails, he looked up suddenly and remarked that this time away had put a few things in perspective: Maybe it wasn't all that necessary to live in Paris after all. We'd already laughed at the fact that we'd gotten in the habit of spotting and mentally separating ourselves from the conspicuous new arrivals who flooded the area over the Easter break. A monthlong string of sun-drenched days was still going strong, and at that moment, I tended to agree with him. I wondered how many of the million-plus Parisians scattered around the country were thinking the same thing.
Illustration by Brian Rea.
Thomas Chatterton Williams is a contributing writer for the magazine and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. His last feature was about the director Jacques Audiard. Brian Rea is an artist in Los Angeles. His book "Death Wins a Goldfish" was published last year.
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