Plus ça change

The French have a saying: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

After my visit to Paris three weeks ago, I’d propose a slight alteration: Plus ça change, plus ils deviennent de la même. The more things change, the more they become the same.

I was last in Paris for a few short days in spring 1975, at the end of a seven-month stay in Rouen. The previous fall, I’d spent a month in the City of Lights for orientation. Our group of 30-some undergrads lived and studied in the 14th arrondissement, not far from the artsy Latin Quarter on the Left Bank. Throughout the year, we routinely passed through Paris on our way to other destinations: Rome, Munich, Provence.

No matter how often I visited, Paris never failed to wow me. I was bowled over by how foreign the city felt. Everything was new to me: the food, the shops, the tiny cars, the narrow streets, the art, the book sellers, the museums, the way people dressed. I’d never experienced anything like it. It was all so French!

This time things were different. Somehow Paris didn’t seem so French. I’ve been asking myself: Who changed more, Paris or moi?

I fled my small hometown in Upstate New York and my even-smaller college town in 1976. I spent two years in Manhattan. I've lived in Washington, D.C., for three decades. I've eaten all kinds of unusual foods. I drive a small foreign car, as do my neighbors. I've hung out at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery. I’ve traveled. I’ve seen more of the world.

Now Paris strikes me as just another big city. Has it always been that way for people accustomed to urban living? Or has globalization homogenized it?

I anticipated a promenade up the Champs-Elysées from Place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe as guaranteed immersion in all things exquisitely and expensively French. I was disappointed. First, Tom Hanks glowered from every other corner in ads for “Anges et démons,” “The Da Vinci Code” sequel. On other corners were ads for “Là-haut” (“Up”), the Disney/Pixar film, and Ben Stiller’s “La nuit au musée 2.” (Meanwhile, wall-size posters for the upcoming release of the DVD, “Confessions d'une accro du shopping,” plastered Métro stations.)

Second, the busiest restaurateur on the Champs-Elysées? McDonald’s McCafe, just up the wide avenue from Starbucks. Third, as my husband and I sampled flan and tarte aux framboises at a real sidewalk café, two double-decker buses emblazoned with Mickey Mouse, Pluto and other Eurodisney characters cruised by. For this I left the States?

Yes, we saw chic, expensive retailers: Cartier. Louis Vitton. Guerlin. Sephora. But it felt no different from New York. (Or is it that New York feels no different from Paris?)

“Sadly, the Champs-Elysées — formerly the bastion of fashion and class — has degenerated into a neon strip of fast food chains, banks, airline offices, malls, and cinemas aimed squarely at the tourists,” confirms VirtualTourist.com.

Here's a word about fashion: That's changed, too. In the ’70s, French clothes were prohibitively expensive. French women owned only a couple of outfits and wore the same ensemble day after day. Now with Gap and Esprit -- fashion made in China -- all over the Left Bank, mademoiselles can stock their armoires with 19-euro T-shirts and 25-euro flouncy skirts.

Not that they’d need to. Everyone -- and I mean everyone -- in Paris was wearing jeans. And I don’t mean the tourists. It was incredible. I’d bought new clothes for our trip, hoping I might pass for Parisian. But I could’ve pulled everyday jeans, ballet flats and cardigans out of my closet and fit in just as well.

Another thing about jeans. The French couldn't get their hands on them in the '70s. Levi's was an American phenomenon for which the French were willing to spend hundreds of francs. Now jeans are ubiquitous and the franc is gone.

You know what else? Young people in Paris are nearly indistinguishable from their U.S. counterparts, uniformed in jeans, hoodies and backpacks with iPod wires running down their necks and cell phones at their ears. In some ways, maybe this is good -- I have the sense that, language barriers aside, twentysomethings on both sides of the pond might actually understand each other.

Thirty-five years ago, it was easy for me to tell who was French and who wasn’t. Not anymore -- I’d guess but was almost always wrong. Paris is an international city, just like Washington or New York, an amalgam of cultures, languages and ethnicities.

Am I sorry I went? Of course not. But next time I’ll need to dig a little deeper to find what’s truly French in Paris.

P.S. The mystery actress in my previous post? It's Amanda Plummer, daughter of Christopher Plummer (Captain von Trapp in "The Sound of Music"). I remembered seeing her on "Law & Order." She also was in "Pulp Fiction."

© 2009 by Lorin D. Buck