Paris I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down

    Not a year goes by, it seems, without a memoir of an American in Paris; about the hostility of the people, the mysteries of the food, the shock of the conversational habits, the weather, the health, the streets, the other foreigners. Into this swamp of great misadventures and failed sojourns steps Rosencrantz Baldwin, a writer and self-described Francophile, on his first trip to Paris. I’ll spoil the plot for you, he ends up disappointed.

    One of the most prominent themes throughout the book is the perception of French speech as rudeness. At the advertising agency where Baldwin gets hired, he finds himself the butt of lewd comments from every colleague. Every single time he talks to a coworker, they make some stupid remark about his private parts. So, what does he do? He looks at a coworker who just spilled water on himself and makes a joke about that. The coworker is seriously riled. Let this be the first lesson for the American in Paris; they’re French, you’re not, and the two of you are not equal.

    On the subject of love and sex (what book about France could be complete without it), Baldwin finds that the French dislike the recently-elected Sarkozy for that reason. He publicly declares his love for his paramour, and in the eyes of the French, that’s a sign of weakness. There’s nothing as un-French as letting the woman you love get in your way, so when the diminutive President announces she’s the love his eyes, the people at the office roll their eyes. As for the treatment of immigrants, the author probably gets a better deal because he’s White and American. On the flip side, the Africans are not well treated, which he sees firsthand at a mandated seminar for foreigners. Almost all the students are African Muslims, and the tension is obvious; all of them have jobs, all of them work without a safety net, and all of them have no extended family in the country to fall back on. They’re the people that have it the hardest, and they’re the people that you don’t see. Yet here they are, having a pampered twenty-something tell them how to behave, talking down to them. The “teacher” implies that these grown men and women aren’t behaving well enough, and the “students” probably want to say “who do you think cooks your meal when you eat out?” The immigrants have become the new lower class. It’s the part of French life that the American in Paris wouldn’t normally see.

    Rosencrantz Baldwin does a great job of writing without bias, but in the end, it’s a depressing story. He starts out fascinated by the French, and ends up depressed, fed up, and resentful. What begins as the adventure of a lifetime ends up as a “Dear John” letter to Paris. Perhaps the problem is that he expected far too much? Or maybe he would’ve been happier in another part of the country, like Marseilles or the Breton Coast? I’m told that outside of Paris the French aren’t fond of the Parisians; they view them as overly bourgeoisie and snobby, and nobody likes the high cost of living there.

   Baldwin isn’t the first American (or Englishman) to not enjoy Paris. George Orwell lived there on a loaf of bread a day, and Adam Gopnik (in his memoir Paris to the Moon) found it tiresome. Going to live in Paris can be one of two things; either you love the experience, or it goes with a bang into the grave of idealism.