We arrived in Paris last Monday afternoon, two days after the close of the hottest September in the French capital since record began in 1900. Bleary-eyed from scant sleep on the overnight flight from New York, my wife, Amanda, and I descended the stairs to the bright, sunlit tarmac of Charles de Gaulle Airport. We boarded the shuttle bus and – after a relatively quick go through customs – made our way to the RER train, the metro and, finally, the apartment where we are staying in the 11th arrondissement.
Just to get it out of the way, I should start by saying how much I really do love it here. I’m experiencing it for the first time with my wife, who fortunately has been here before and speaks more French than me. We are eating well. What could I possibly say about this city that hasn’t been said millions of times by writers both more poetic and more cringingly cliche? It’s like New York, in that you feel embarrassed to even know the stereotypes let alone subscribe to any about a place containing too many contradictions and private worlds to ever be truly knowable. It’s beautiful.
And it’s hot.
Autumn had arrived in New York by the time we left, bringing with it typical rain with atypical results. Floods had inundated the city just two days before our departure. We spent the weekend bracing for our flight to be canceled, either due to complications from the weather or from the government shutdown that Congress had only just averted hours before we headed to John F. Kennedy Airport. Relief at the fact that nothing went wrong only came when the plane took off into the crisp early October air.
We landed back in summer. The first day, temperatures climbed past 85 degrees Fahrenheit – about 28 degrees Celsius. We took refuge in the cool tunnels of the catacombs and relished the open door-sized windows of the apartment. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to open them in the bedroom. Fearing I may break them if I continued to yank, we decided to spend the first few days sleeping on a floor mattress in the living room, the windows ajar to let in the cool night air.
As all the newspapers and chatty waiters here will tell you, Paris is lousy with bedbugs at the moment. The city is undergoing a massive extermination campaign as part of its preparations to host next year’s Olympics. So when we awoke the other morning to a handful of itchy bites, we panicked. That night, however, I identified the culprit hovering plumosely in the yellow light of the reading lamp. A mosquito. The relief was shortlived. We quickly learned that, just last month, Parisian health authorities fumigated parts of the city for the first time ever to kill swarms of tiger mosquitoes carrying tropical diseases like Zika and dengue.
It likely won’t be the last time. October is already bringing another heat wave over parts of western Europe, including France.
Signaux Vert
On a more optimistic note, I have been surprised by the number of electric vehicles I see on the road here. Charging stations are all over the Right Bank, as integral a part of the sidewalk infrastructure as the many bicycle racks on each block. Each time I have noticed a set of them, at least two have been in use.
France has seen a significant increase in electric vehicle sales. Plug-in EVs made up a quarter of new car registrations last December, a record at the time. Local automakers comprise a plurality of sales.
The next month, in January, the French government offered new subsidies to cover up to 27% of the cost, including taxes, of buying a new passenger EV, but the vehicle couldn’t cost more than €47,000 (nearly $50,000), and the bonus was scrapped at €5,000. The government is trying to make it more affordable, vying for a €100 per month EV scheme. While those efforts remain largely unsuccessful, the consultancy Fitch Solutions forecast in June that sales of passenger electric vehicles would grow by 24% this year compared to 2022, ultimately making up about 25% of the French car market.
In Paris, the extensive bike infrastructure seems to negate the need for an automobile at all, at least in the city. Everywhere I go, I see cargo bikes, passenger bikes with safe-looking seats for kids, and eye-catching vintage Peugeot racing models. The roads where I’m staying, near the Bastille Metro stop, have three tiers – the bottom level is for cars, the middle level is for bikes, and just a few inches up is the pedestrian sidewalk. Not only do I not see any cars parking in the bike lane. The cyclists also ride slowly enough to give pedestrians room to walk safely. Such a sensible and effective system is difficult to imagine back in New York, but, man, would it be nice. Yet, as Le Monde columnist Jean Pisani-Ferry noted in a piece this week, the government of President Emmanuel Macron still has a long way to go to plan effectively for this country’s climate future.
Still, the carbon load associated with charging those electric cars and bikes is almost certainly much lower in most places back home thanks to France’s nearly 60 nuclear reactors, which are finally coming back online after overdue maintenance disabled half of the fleet as Europe faced the start of the energy crisis spurred by the Ukraine war. The government-owned utility EDF said last month all the reactors would be up and running by winter. Yet even with the fleet operating at 50%, France ramped up power exports to its neighbors this year, becoming what Bloomberg described in August as “the cornerstone for Europe’s electricity market” as Germany shut down its reactors and threw its own industrial power users into crisis.
Un Amour Atomique
France appears to be taking its nuclear industry much more seriously these days.
It wasn’t long ago that the government here in Paris was angling to follow the Germans’ plans to phase out atomic power. But just last month, French Energy Minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher accused the anti-nuclear Greenpeace of “climate sabotage” in a post on the social network formerly known as Twitter:
Then, this week, the French government vetoed the sale of two local companies to a new American owner. The two small firms – the 80-employee Segault, based in northern France; and Velan SAS, which boasts 280 workers at its offices in Lyon – supply valves for the boiler rooms in France’s nuclear submarines and power reactors.
Both companies are currently subsidiaries of the Canadian firm Velan, which is in the process of selling itself to the Texas-based industrial giant Flowserve Corporation. On Friday, the French finance minister blocked the sale, citing national security concerns.
This comes after the U.S. not only usurped France’s multi-billion-dollar sale of nuclear submarines to Australia – but also beat EDF in a contest to build Poland’s first atomic power station.
Pan’s Panopticon
On Sunday afternoon, Amanda and I made our way to Le Centre Pompidou, a stunning museum that emerges like a giant cube of tubes and glass modernity amid the winding, ancient streets of the fashionable 4th arrondissement.
The museum has two temporary exhibits going on in abutting galleries on the second floor. One, called “Over The Rainbow,” features a wide-ranging history of the struggle for queer civil rights across the West. Its collection of gay poetry and Act Up activist posters, sapphic zines and Riot Grrrl video installations, is liberatory and moving.
It offers a stark contrast to “Political Animal,” an exhibition of work by Gilles Aillaud. The vast, antiseptic warehouse space is lined with white walls displaying paintings, mostly from the 1960s and 1970s, of all kinds of wild animals locked in cages. In some, as you can see below, the creatures are almost invisible, faded depressingly into the prisons of their zoo habitats. Others are putrid, with some animals smeared in their own shit and some swimming in green algal piss water.
Near the end, an elephant walking away into the horizon of a Kenyan savannah would seem to offer some redress for humanity’s cruelties. But knowing the trajectory of the species in the half century since the art was made casts the painting in a different, sadder light. Not a great sentient being escaping to freedom, but waltzing into its newest container, that of human memory as its species’ numbers dwindle.
Thank you as always for your attention. I hope it was earned. If not, perhaps this song will. It’s by Fantasydub, a project of the Israeli-American musician Nativ “Luke” Top, better known as the bassist of the band Fool’s Gold. I heard this song “Déso” playing in a Monoprix department store earlier today, and I’m really enjoying it:
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Signing off in a muggy but rapidly-cooling Paris, where the temperature mercifully drops 20 degrees each night but where Michel Houellebecq’s descriptions of sex — at least in the two novels I’ve read so far this trip (sue me, I’m reading French writers while I’m in France) — certainly get the blood flowing. But not in the way, or to the organs, I think this little creep intended.
