A City of Myths

A City of Myths

The history of Paris reaches back to Roman and even Neolithic times. Visitors often have the impression that the city has always been there, and always had to be there. To move from one of its monuments, musea, theaters is to walk through history. Goethe – though he never visited Paris – called it the universal city, and over the centruies the resonances of the place have been rich and varied. Its native sons and daughters have created great, memorable stories, as have the visitors who chose to live there for brief periodes or a lifetime. Contemporary Paris is not just a center of world tourism with a glorious past. It remains a vibrant and modern city whose influence extends through time and space.

How can we have an unique experience of Paris in 2023? Both historically and emotionally? The approach I have taken is to give an account of its myths, a history not of factual events but of the way in which the city has been perceived, conceived, and dreamed – Paris as the capital of creative people who made the art, the music, the films, the fashion, for beauty & consolement of their fellow humans. What can you learn of this city of myths about your own story? The story you tell yourself – about yourself? The great stories of human experience in Paris as springboard to the discovery of the story you live right now.

What are these myths of Paris exactly? Enlightement thinkers generally viewed myth as the (confused) recollection of events that had actually occurred; thus the biblical myth of a great flood was attributed to the hazy rememebrance of some ancient catastrophe. Others have proposed anthromorphic definitions, seeing myth aas the sytlization of lived experience; on this reasoning Apollo is the Greek god of the sun and Chac is the Mayan god of rain because the individual yearns to connect the essential aspects of his daily life and being to such deities, whose good will he can implore and whose deeds and voices can be fitted into vast celestial schemes. The german scholar Herman Blumenberg took issue with Descartes’s view of myths as useless and deleterious prejudice and suggested that they are instead, useful explanatioins of inexplicable mystery. There are also structural explanations of myth. In the writings of Claude Lévi-Strauss, myths are imaginary constructs that enable us to understand what might otherwise seem to defy common sense and lived experience. The myth of Paris as ‘the capital of the nineteenth century’ for instance helps us to “understand” the extraordinary assemblage of talented individuals – poets, novelists, painters, composers, philosophers, scientists – that inhabited the city in those days.

For this purpose I shall view myths as life stories, each of which has a beginning, a plot and a conclusion – stories that are told to elaborate the rise and sometimes the fall of their individual or collective existence. Universality is the primary characteristic of such myths. The story of Romulus and Remus concerns the origin of the entire Roman people; it does not distinguish between the plebs and the equestrian class. Its selfless heroes express the aspirations of the society as a whole. A myth of this type is, in Nietschze phrase, an “orgiastische Selbstvernichting”- a festive and even orgastic self-nullification. For example, in 1871 the Paris Communards understood their lives by placing them in a universal context: their struggle, however local it might have seemed, was that of an ecumenical and enduring proletariat struggling throughout the world to be free. What a dangerous but exciting dream it is, wrote the critic Claude Pichois in 1938, “to find the traces of eternity in the fleetingness of life that Paris offers to those who observe its spectacle”.

Paris is a unique city, unpredicable and mysterious; by wandering through its streets, I believe, the sensitive observer could better read his own hopes and fears. Nineteenth – century Parisians saw myth as a key not just to their dreams but to their lives as well. Roger Caillois has insightfully described this relationship: “From a psychological point of view, mythology … exerts its hold over people by virtue of its ability to explain individually or collectively structured tensions, which it also promises to resolve”. Jules Michelet, too, thought of the history of Paris as his personal history: “I have identified myself too closely with this city… As History universalized my private condition, I have lived through that greater life… I have recognized my own heart in its monuments… I have felt in myself, not its ices, but all of its destructive passions; I have contained its riots in my own heart”.

The city of myths is a history of constant change, restlessness and becoming and might best be termed a quest – a tale of imaginary characters involved in heroic or mysterious adventures. To paraphrase Michelet, the heroic or mythologized history of Paris lies at the intersection between the lives of millions and the salient cultural values of their age – namely modernity and alienation, the primacy of reason, and the crucial centrality of art. I see the modern history of Paris as a universalizing quest with a clear beginning, a middle and a sense of closure. Although Paris is not a blueprint for our life, its myths can expand our sense of self, of our own story, as they did for the Parisians through the ages.