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00:00Ideas and big violence that have actually made France what it is today.
00:05Throughout its tumultuous history, Paris has been sacked, occupied multiple times and
00:11endured a bloody revolution.
00:13It's got this history of popular uprising from the Middle Ages right through the 16th
00:19century, the front in the 17th century, and the French Revolution, obviously.
00:24Then, the revolution of 1830, 1848, and 1871, the whole of that way through.
00:34You've got these explosions, if you like, of popular violence and resistance.
00:41Egality, fraternity, liberty.
00:44The spirit of the revolution lives on in the city of Paris nearly 250 years later.
00:50But, despite this, much remains of this most creative of cities.
00:55What has survived is treasured and admired, not just by Parisians themselves, but by people
01:02the world over.
01:04Paris, as the fashion capital of the world, is born in the 12th century and becomes known
01:10throughout Europe in the 13th.
01:12Visually, of course, it has never been destroyed.
01:16Like that of the Greeks in the ancient world, the culture of France is regarded with prestige.
01:23Its language became one of international diplomacy.
01:26It is a Polish city, it's the city of culture, it dominates the country in a way that many
01:33other capital cities don't.
01:35France's reputation for high culture has meant even its invaders have regarded its capital
01:41with fascination and awe.
01:43Its contents to be treasured and not destroyed.
01:47Throughout French history, Paris has been at the centre of it all.
01:51It's a city that's been very carefully designed to have a kind of a unified architecture.
01:57And often when foreigners come here for the first time, and this is often called the Japanese
02:00effect because it happens to Japanese tourists, they can't believe when they get here what
02:05they've seen on YouTube or on Instagram, it's all real.
02:08The feeling that France is a great power to be reckoned with is something that never goes
02:12away.
02:19Previously, Paris, in the age of revolutions, saw the dismantling and even destruction of
02:26what had been created over centuries by its Christian kings, the so-called Ancien Regime.
02:33It then reinvented itself again through its reconstruction by the Napoleonic Emperors.
02:40But after their overthrow, the city now faced fresh challenges to reinvent itself again.
02:48Emperor Napoleon III had self-destructed after declaring war on the emerging German state,
02:54which not only defeated his army, but took him captive and then besieged Paris.
03:00It was a humiliating defeat for the French.
03:03They suffered 750,000 casualties, including 140,000 dead against 40,000 for their opponents.
03:13Nearly half a million more French were captured.
03:17Paris was besieged, an old-fashioned siege surrounded by German trenches, bombarded by German cannons.
03:24All of its supplies cut off, including its water supplies, its fuel supplies.
03:30And in the end, people were eating whatever they could get.
03:34Horses largely.
03:36Paris had a lot of horses, of course, pulling buses and pulling carts.
03:40They were largely eaten.
03:42And anything else that was edible, elephants from the zoo, rats from the sewers, dogs and
03:49cats, fish from the Seine.
03:51The only thing they had plenty of, apparently, was Coleman's mustard.
03:56So that was probably quite useful if you're eating rat.
03:59Napoleon III himself was captured and forced to abdicate and then sent into exile to England.
04:07He never returned.
04:09To be associated with such a massive defeat in national memory as this, it really, there's
04:15no coming back for the Bonapartist regime after that.
04:19Well, Paris had been a fairly turbulent city for a long time.
04:23It was France's biggest city, biggest working class population, biggest industrial centre.
04:29And France had been an unstable country.
04:31There was no general agreement on its form of government.
04:34So you could say, well, you know, Paris was a bit of a handful, to put it mildly.
04:38But what really made it disastrous in 1871 was that during the siege by Germany the previous
04:46year, they'd armed the population.
04:48So early in 1871, you had, first of all, 100,000 plus men with guns who couldn't be pushed
04:56around.
04:57And you had a divide, political divide between a city of Paris that was overwhelmingly Republican
05:04and Democratic, and the rest of the country that was overwhelmingly Monarchist and not
05:10terribly Democratic.
05:12So that was a recipe for almost certain conflict.
05:15And as it turned out, a real civil war, with two big armies fighting on each side.
05:24Riots and revolution, known as the Paris Commune, then broke out before being suppressed two months
05:31later.
05:32200,000 Frenchmen who defended the Republic were trapped in the city and were no longer paid.
05:38They went on the rampage.
05:41It was then that the famous Tuileries Palace was burnt down.
05:46The Paris residence of French monarchs for three centuries and a symbol of royal power.
05:51It had been attacked and occupied in the revolutions of 1789, 1830 and 1848.
06:00Now finally, during the Paris Commune's time, this massive palace, part of the Louvre complex,
06:06which dominated the centre of the city, was burnt down.
06:12Fires raged for days.
06:14It was finally demolished ten years later in 1880.
06:21The area west of the Louvre today, which is where it stood, is now a garden, the Tuileries
06:27garden.
06:28The Communades embodied and sought to redirect some of the values of the French Revolution,
06:34empowering rights of the citizen.
06:37Their two-month control of Paris was finally put down by the army.
06:45In May 1871, famously, the so-called Bloody Week, Laissez-Maire and Saint-Glain, the troops
06:51come in, the regular troops come in, sweeping into Paris from the south-west, from the direction
06:57of Versailles, where the government is based, and just go through the streets and start massacring
07:01people.
07:02The last remaining communal, the last remaining sort of rebels on the streets in the Père-Lachaise
07:08cemetery to the east, a cemetery put in place, really, by the first Napoleon, in fact, in
07:14the early 19th century.
07:16And famously, there's the last communal put up against a wall, which is now called the
07:21Munich Federer, and shot.
07:23And this really goes global, goes worldwide.
07:25People see it as a sort of enormously violent and shocking event.
07:34It's really important for the French left.
07:37Every May Day, well, it's still going on, but I think it's declined in the last 20 or 30
07:42years, but certainly well into the 20th century, every May Day, the left, in France or in Paris,
07:50get on the streets and they march to Père-Lachaise.
07:52It's one of the great working class festivities, if you like, of Paris.
07:58And it's obviously important, you know, the Russian Revolution is very, you know, it looks
08:04back to the Commune.
08:06I think it's said that when the first Russian spaceship goes up with Yuri Gagarin, I think he's
08:12got some bit of the Commune in his space capsule, you know, so it's really important in terms
08:17of the left.
08:17On the right, it seems as something that's utterly, utterly shocking, that this violence
08:23of the Commune now, because there is violence both sides, in particular, they shoot the Archbishop
08:29of Paris, who's taken hostage.
08:32This is seen as, you know, the bad side of the revolution, bad side of rebellion.
08:37And it polarises French politics for generations to come.
08:43The uprising and the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War would greatly affect the policies of the
08:50new Third Republic.
08:52To rub salt into the wounds, symbolically the new Prussian leader of a unified Germany, Otto
08:58von Bismarck, would declare the new state at Versailles.
09:04Bismarck decided that they would proclaim a new German Empire, a unified German Empire,
09:10at Versailles, fair enough, but as a special extra humiliation to the French, they'd do
09:17it in the Hall of Mirrors, in Louis XIV's great Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles.
09:24And that's where Germany was proclaimed.
09:26And it was rubbing the French noses in their humiliating defeat, which they didn't forget.
09:32It will mean that the Franco-German rivalry will absolutely dictate European and in a way
09:39world politics for the next hundred years.
09:41It's only in 1945, really, that that chapter ends.
09:45But between 1871 down to 1945, the Axis, France, Germany, and the hostility and the opposition
09:53between these two will really dictate the way in which European and world politics looks.
10:00This is the Pantheon.
10:02Perhaps more than any other building in the city, it represents the changing fortunes and
10:07conflicting loyalties of Paris.
10:10Like many other grand structures here, it looked to ancient Rome for inspiration.
10:16Modelled on the building of the same name in Rome, it was originally a church to the patron
10:21saint, Saint Geneviève, turned into a public building for the people during the French Revolution.
10:28It was restored to a church by Napoleon before becoming a public building once more.
10:35The great writer turned artist and politician Victor Hugo was laid to rest here.
10:44Millions lined the streets of Paris for Hugo's funeral in 1885.
10:49The author of literary masterpieces Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which addressed
10:57the stories of the poor and downtrodden, Hugo was a political creature.
11:02He lived in exile during the reign of Napoleon III, whom he hated.
11:07When he returned to Paris after Napoleon was exiled, he became a member of parliament and sympathised
11:14with the Paris Commune.
11:15The term pantheon comes from, it's based on the Roman pantheone, which is the pantheon
11:19of heroes.
11:21And these are the people who have made a civilisation.
11:23Now, it's very important that this is a secular place because this is a secular civilisation.
11:29There's a division between state and church.
11:32This comes into play more effectively in 1905 with the laws on les Cités.
11:36But in the 19th century, the schism is already there and the schism is already happening.
11:41And Hugo was not a convinced atheist necessarily, but he believed in France as a civilisation,
11:50a new form of civilisation, which went beyond the old Roman model, because Paris was always
11:55in competition with Rome as a religious centre up until the 18th century, the 19th century.
11:59So, the new Rome that Hugo invented was a new Rome where God and the church did not dominate.
12:09It was humanity.
12:10It was the people who made the heroes, and it was the heroes who were the heroes of the
12:14people in the pantheon.
12:16It became the final resting place, not of religious heroes, but secular ones, including
12:22the great philosophers of the Enlightenment, Voltaire and Rousseau.
12:28Before going into exile, Hugo, a Republican, somewhat ironically, lived here on the distinctly
12:35Royal Place des Vosges, a 16th century square laid out by Louis XIII, whose statue still stands
12:43at its heart.
12:46Hugo's apartment was part extravagant, part eccentric, decorated in his own image, displaying
12:54his own works of art.
12:56You could walk through its drawing room and bedroom, recreated as it was when he died.
13:01In the decades after the Paris Commune resurrections, Paris would once again, as it had done before, rebuild
13:10and re-establish itself on the world stage.
13:13You would think, well, the Republic will go against the Napoleon III model, because it's
13:18an imperial model, it's very grand, full of grandeur, etc. It'll be more prosaic, if you like.
13:25But they accept the Haussmann model, and the Haussmannisation of Paris, as we call it, continues
13:31right down to 1914.
13:33In fact, there are more houses and buildings of the Haussmann model, built between 1871
13:39and 1914, far more, actually, than were built between 1850 and 1870.
13:50France's gift for innovation translated into other spheres, notably the creative arts.
13:57It became a very free city. All censorship was abolished. It was much freer than London
14:03or New York, and I guess most, or perhaps all, great European cities. You could write things,
14:10you could paint things, you could do things that you weren't allowed to do in other places.
14:15And that certainly was a big attraction. Impressionism originated with a group of
14:21Paris-based artists, whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and
14:271880s. At the time when Victorian England was buttoned up and prudish, and much of the rest of
14:34Europe similarly conservative, Paris was a bohemian hub, free and easy, and artistic types
14:40and creatives loved it.
14:44In London, you're not allowed to draw nudes. You could draw statues, but not real people,
14:49naked people. And there's a story of a young British woman, art student, who went to Paris,
14:56and the first time she'd ever seen a naked man was in the drawing studio. So she had to rush
15:02out and
15:03go to the loo and be sick. That wouldn't have happened in London, because it wouldn't have been
15:08her experience at the Slade, for example. But in Paris, that was perfectly normal, even for women.
15:15In Paris, you could make a living as an experimental artist, as so many did. It became the centre of
15:21the avant-garde. And I don't think that's imaginable in any other European city.
15:27Today, it's a hugely popular tourist site. Montmartre is home to one of the city's most famous
15:34cathedral's Sacré-Cœur. It was built to honour the French dead in the Franco-Prussian War. From here,
15:41you can gaze out at the city below. Near the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the
15:4720th,
15:48during the Belle Époque, many soon-to-be famous artists lived, worked, or had studios in or around
15:56Montmartre. They included Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec,
16:06Rosario and Vincent Van Gogh.
16:11It's windmill ground flour from its hilltop bakery. Today, souvenir shops pay homage to its artistic
16:18history. The building, which was home to the studios of many artists from this period,
16:24is now a museum. One of the most famous of the early Impressionists, Renoir, designed a garden here,
16:32which proved the inspiration for his paintings Dancing at Le Moulin de la Galette in 1876 and
16:39The Conversation dans le Jardin in the same year. I think the idea that Paris is a very bohemian
16:47place where people come and they want to make a reputation for themselves is there. I mean,
16:53La Boheme, the great opera, which was actually based on a novel, based on real life, if you like,
17:01about the bohemian culture of the Latin Quarter in the middle of the century, establishes this idea
17:06that Paris is where you go to make it and you make it as a painter. It must also be
17:12put in the context of
17:13the educational system which France introduces, particularly Napoleon actually more than anyone
17:19else, really centralises higher education and research on Paris. And so the topmost
17:27rung in the educational establishments relating to painting is the École des Beaux-Arts.
17:34The Impressionists are the first, I suppose, revolutionary art movement in Paris. And I think the reason why it
17:41happens in Paris is because under the Second Empire, and also under previous monarchical regimes,
17:49the whole art world had been pretty strictly regulated. You know, you had to go to certain
17:54schools, you had to produce certain kinds of work, and above all, if you wanted to make a name for
17:59yourself,
17:59you had to win state approval, state patronage, and you had to have your work shown in the annual
18:06official Salon. So all this was kind of regulated by the state. So if you wanted to do something new,
18:14you'd got to, in a sense, be a genuine rebel. So as we know, the first Impressionists set up their
18:22own
18:23exhibition called the Salon des Refusés, the exhibition of those who'd been refused from the
18:29official art exhibition. So because there was an official art exhibition from which you could be
18:34turned down, then you would set up your own. So the Impressionists begin as rebels against the art
18:42system, and some of them as rebels against the whole political system too, like Manet, most famously,
18:49who was seen as scandalous, and whose works had certainly a political overtone too of criticism of the empire.
18:59Paul Cézanne, who participated in the first and third Impressionist exhibitions, developed a highly
19:06individual vision, emphasizing pictorial structure. He is more often called a post-Impressionist.
19:14Several other young Paris-based artists began to develop different precepts for the use of color,
19:20pattern, pattern, form, and line devised from the Impressionist example. They included Van Gogh
19:30and Paul Gauguin.
19:33their work is often known as post-Impressionism.
19:43They turned instead towards symbolic content and the expression of emotion.
19:50These artists also found themselves in the heart of dramatic political societal change. Radical anarchist,
19:59neo-impressionist artists like Maximilian Luce would champion the struggle of the working man.
20:06He produced evocative paintings of the massacres during the Paris Commune riots three decades earlier,
20:13and was even imprisoned, having been seen as an anarchist threat. His sketches of his incarceration were equally evocative.
20:23Works by the biggest and best names of the Impressionist and post-Impressionist art world
20:29can still be viewed today at the Musée d'Orsay. Located in one of Paris's old giant railway terminals,
20:37this museum offers a spectacular setting. The station became the world's first electrified train station,
20:44but it couldn't accommodate the ever-increasing size of trains, leading the French government to the ingenious
20:51idea to fill it with art instead. Among the works from this era displayed in Paris museums are those
20:59of François-Auguste Rodin, who was generally considered to be the founder of modern sculpture.
21:05While living in the Villa de Bruyance in Paris, Rodin used the Hotel Bruyance as his workshop from 1908,
21:14and subsequently donated his entire collection of sculptures to the French state,
21:19in the condition that they turn the buildings into a museum dedicated to his works.
21:26The Musée Rodin contains the Thinker, the Kiss, and the Gates of Hell. Many of his sculptures are displayed in
21:39the museum's extensive garden.
21:45With the new government, an era of economic growth began for the city, symbolized by the decision in 1889 to
21:54build the Eiffel Tower, which would become the worldwide symbol of Paris.
21:59Designed by French engineer Gustave Eiffel, the Eiffel Tower is undoubtedly Paris's most famous
22:07attraction and one of the most recognizable structures in the entire world. An iron lattice tower, soaring to over 320
22:16meters or a thousand and fifty feet in height, is held together by two and a half million rivets and
22:2318,000 metal parts.
22:25It was the tallest man-made structure in the world for 40 years before being surpassed by the Chrysler Building
22:32in New York.
22:33It was during this nation rebuilding period that the Alexander Bridge, the most ornate of the numerous bridges over the
22:41Seine, was constructed.
22:42While on the other side of the Seine, the Grand Palais was built at the end of the 19th century,
22:49and next door, the Petit Ballet, also constructed at the same time.
22:54They were built to hold grand exhibitions promoting France and its global empire, spanning countries from Africa, the Middle East,
23:03Asia, and the Caribbean.
23:05There was a whole succession of world fairs held in Paris, which no other city has ever equaled, I think,
23:12and which were, in fact, to show the world that Paris was back.
23:15So they were willing to spend a lot of money on this and make big efforts, and it did really,
23:20I think, work.
23:21It did re-establish Paris, perhaps even more than before, as Europe's cultural centre.
23:26The two really big universal exhibitions are in 1889, in which the Eiffel Tower is erected, and then 1900.
23:351900 is the exhibition which is most associated with the idea that Paris is the city of light, because of
23:41this extraordinary use of electricity throughout the exhibition.
23:45The exhibitions take place right in the heart of Paris, and they showcase Paris to the wider world in a
23:51way which is extremely alluring and magnetic.
23:55Essentially, the British Empire was about money, and if you wanted to be controversial about it, you could say it
24:01was also about theft.
24:02It was about, you know, making a profit out of the colonies, and predominantly India, for a long period.
24:10The French had a very different conception of what the empire meant.
24:14For the French, it was what they called la mission civilatrice, that they were going to bring a civilizing mission
24:21to the world.
24:23And what they meant by that was that they were going to make the world.
24:26French, we are bringing the highest form of human civilization to you.
24:31You're a grateful colonial people, and you better get used to it.
24:35This noble empire building mission was celebrated with the redevelopment of what became known as the Paris Bourse.
24:42This 18th century building originally had a wooden roof and was the Paris Wheat Exchange.
24:49It now became France's Commodities Exchange, and was topped by a huge glass-domed roof, similar in style to that
24:56of the Grand Palais.
24:58France's greatness, as it tries to project itself to the world, is that of, obviously, Paris is a great city,
25:04but France generally is a world city in which its colonists and its commerce are of signal, you know, tremendous
25:11importance globally.
25:13So, just as the exhibitions showcase Paris, they also want to showcase French power.
25:21So, you'll find the idea coming in in the late 19th century in a number of these exhibitions, but it's
25:26there in 1889 and 1900, of colonial pavilions where particular colonies come and they have a building which is often
25:35in the style of the particular colony, and they showcase goods.
25:39What is also rather sinister as well, and we would not do it today, is they bring in sometimes whole
25:47villages or whole groups of tribes from Africa or East Asia, etc., and put up what historians now call human
25:55zoos, where, you know, spectators walk past and admire their own sophistication vis-Ã -vis these African tribesmen or whatever.
26:04The Bourse's cylindrical walls were decorated with giant murals, reflecting a national pride in the French empire and its civilizing
26:13mission throughout the world.
26:15In the early 19th century, French history is rethought. They want to go back to Roman Gaul, that other great
26:22civilizing imperial power, if you like, and it's always a bit of a joke, but it did happen that the
26:30French history syllabuses always start with,
26:32Our ancestors, the Gauls. That's the way people have to start, you know, school kids have to think about it.
26:40Well, actually, school kids are saying this in Saigon, in Dakar, in Port-au-Prince or whatever, right through the
26:51world.
26:51So there's this sort of centralized model, this cultural model of France, which I think is probably fairly distinctive.
26:58Despite its worldwide colonial reach, in the mid-19th century, only 1% of France's population of 30 million were
27:06immigrants, and European racial stereotype images were common,
27:10whether they were depicting English, Spanish, Turkish, or Persian immigrants.
27:20On shop fronts, black immigrants from French colonies were even used as poster boys for wine stores of the era,
27:28curiously linking lazy French behaviors in the evenings with blackness and the night.
27:37After the end of the Great War, Versailles was the site of the Paris Peace Conference, which ended World War
27:44I and punished Germany, saddling it with harsh reparations.
27:49The peace treaty that ended the First World War, Germany's defeat, was the Treaty of Versailles, and the Germans were
27:56made to sign this treaty in the same room,
27:58the Hall of Mirrors, the Galerie des Glaces, in which the German Empire had originally been proclaimed.
28:04So this was the French saying to the Germans, you did this to us, we're now doing it to you.
28:10In the 1920s, a new generation of modernist artists, bringing influence from the wider world, would call Paris home,
28:19and revolutionize once more the Paris art world with wild, multicolored, expressive landscapes and figure paintings.
28:26Among them were Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Giacometti, Vasily Kandinsky and Modigliani.
28:44After World War I, Paris's flamboyant, sexy image lived on in its garish and entertaining cabaret, the Moulin Rouge.
28:54It's still playing today.
29:18It's still playing today.
29:23The German troops led by a Nazi regime consumed by vengeance.
29:37They made the French sign an armistice, effectively a surrender, in the railway carriage in which the German generals had
29:46signed the armistice in 1918.
29:49So Hitler had this brought, wheeled out, and the French therefore had their noses rubbed in it again.
29:54So they've been rubbing each other's noses in it as much as they can for quite a long time.
30:00Famously, as the collapse of the Nazi regime approached, and the great destroyer Adolf Hitler gave orders for the city
30:08to be destroyed,
30:09the local commandant delayed implementation, and the city and its treasures were saved.
30:16The Allies didn't feel it was strategic enough to actually bomb, and it's only as the Allies approach Paris finally
30:27in 1944 that Hitler gives that order to actually destroy Paris, which even his commander said he wouldn't do.
30:37And by the time any sanctions could have been taken against that commander, the Allies were into Paris anyway.
30:44But the fact is, you know, it was not destroyed in the war.
30:52The history, glory and agony of Paris is symbolized by this, the great city of death, but also one of
31:00the world's largest and most beautiful cemeteries.
31:03Scattered among the two million graves here, you find many famous French men and women, including great writers, Moliere, the
31:12famous Edith Piaf, and the artist Modigliani,
31:15to the Napoleonic war hero Michel Ney, executed by a firing squad after he swapped sides, illustrated in Manet's famous
31:23painting.
31:27Violence and tragedy has been a theme running through Parisian history.
31:32Here too, there are the graves of famous foreigners who ended their lives here.
31:37Disgraced British writer Oscar Wilde, persecuted in Britain for being a homosexual,
31:42and American rock icon Jim Morrison of the Doors, who died in the bath, are among them.
31:48There are monuments and memorials to Nazi concentration camp victims, resistance fighters, and the revolutionary Paris communards.
32:00For the last 80 years, Paris has continued to build, create and reinvent.
32:07In the second half of the 20th century, it was the Pompidou Centre, a futuristic museum of art,
32:14erected in the heart of the historic Marais district.
32:18The unveiling of so-called Grand Projet shows no sign of slowing down.
32:24One of the latest is a total redesign of the old Paris Bourse or Stock Exchange,
32:29redesigned by a Japanese architect for one of France's richest men,
32:34who now uses it to house his massive art collection, which he displays in public in a series of exhibitions.
32:42In the Bois de Boulogne, on the eastern outskirts of the city, where new office towers emerge,
32:49the Louis Vuitton Foundation, part of France's rich luxury goods dynasties,
32:55erected the futuristic modern art gallery designed by Frank Gehry.
33:00What is also striking about Paris is it does accept sometimes really major changes.
33:06I mean, when they put the Eiffel Tower up, people say, my God, what on earth have they done?
33:11They've ruined Paris.
33:12Now we think there's the iconic structure in Paris.
33:15At the time, it was seen as something hideous because it was so un-Parisian.
33:20One of the great writers at the end of the 19th century said,
33:24the place I really like to have my lunch is the Eiffel Tower,
33:27because you can't see the Eiffel Tower when you're actually in it.
33:30Or you look at the Pompidou Centre, that would be another great example.
33:34You look at the Pompidou Centre.
33:36I'm old enough to have seen the Pompidou Centre being built.
33:38I remember when I saw it going up with all those pipes and those colours,
33:42I thought, what the heck is that?
33:45Paris can take a risk, if you like, on its buildings.
33:48Some of the new buildings that have been put up in the last 30, 40 years are very much like
33:53that.
33:53They sort of play against the style rather than go with the style.
33:57And I think that makes Paris a really interesting, unusual place as well.
34:03Despite the window dressing, Paris faces challenges of inequality like all great cities.
34:09Its great colonial mission wasn't so much built on pragmatic, commercial and trading relationships like the British,
34:16but on the noble ambition of making French colonies French, but it hasn't worked.
34:27Paris' multicultural dilemma, its cultural divide, is best demonstrated in its outer suburbs,
34:35an area of soulless shopping malls and impoverished estates.
34:40Well, one of the unfortunate, perhaps unintended, consequences of the French imperial story
34:45is what we see in Paris now, which is the massive division between what we call the Bognes,
34:50which are the suburbs which lie outside of Paris, mainly inhabited by immigrants,
34:54and have been for a long time, and central Paris.
34:56And there is very little connection between the outside and the inside.
35:01Now, in some ways, this is a prison idea that goes back to the Middle Ages,
35:04where they talk about intramuros, within the walls, and extramuros, outside the walls.
35:10And anybody who was outside the walls would be either a bandit, an outlaw,
35:14or would be prey to wolves and things like that.
35:16This barrier between the inner and outer cities goes back to the 19th century,
35:21when a series of forts and fortress walls were built to protect the city from invasions.
35:28Paris was a fortress, I think mainly because another European war was expected,
35:35and indeed it nearly happened in 1840.
35:39And that's when these walls and forts were built.
35:43Paris had not previously been fortified, and therefore it had surrendered in 1814 without a fight.
35:48So the French governments thought, you know, if we are going to be a great power in Europe,
35:52we have to be able to defend our capital.
35:54So the whole city was surrounded by a huge wall with a little railway line behind it to supply it.
36:03And about a dozen or so forts were built on further out in the outskirts of the city.
36:10What is now the Boulevard Peripherique runs where the old city walls were.
36:16And you can see where the city of Paris sort of stops.
36:20But these days, the Bonneux, which comes from the Latin banalierga, outside the limits,
36:27is full of a population that feels disconnected and in some ways very dispossessed.
36:32It's always very disappointed by coming to France.
36:36So there are lots of different tensions.
36:38They're almost like separate micro cities with different cultures,
36:42almost different economies, criminality, delinquency and so on.
36:47You know, I could talk about Marseille, I could talk about Lyon.
36:49But here in Paris, I sometimes feel that if you step out of line
36:53and if you step into the wrong place at the wrong time in the Bonneux,
36:56you're in a very different country.
36:57The rise of the National Front and the immigrant ghettos of Paris outskirts,
37:03a testimony that two faces of Paris survive to this day.
37:08France legislated more than a century ago and imposed, some say, totalitarian secularism.
37:15Because up until the 18th century, up until the Enlightenment,
37:18this is possibly the most religious, the most important religious centre.
37:22In Europe, the Sorbonne was founded on religious principles.
37:25We have Notre Dame, of course.
37:27And the whole city is supposed to radiate the meaning of Christianity
37:30up until that point, and the revolution turns that on its head.
37:34This hardened in 1905 with the laws of what were called laïcité,
37:38which is a very difficult word to translate into English,
37:40but basically means a kind of imposed secularism.
37:44Now, you wouldn't have thought the law of 1905
37:47was still politically loaded in 21st century in France,
37:51but it is because of the high Muslim population
37:54who find that the law of laïcité is impacted on their lives.
37:58And this is one of the reasons they find it difficult to be a citizen or citoyen
38:02and fully participate in French life,
38:04because the laws of laïcité say that you must separate religion and state.
38:09And for many Muslims, that's a very, very difficult, almost impossible thing to do.
38:14In France today, you know, it's illegal to wear the Muslim headscarf,
38:19and it's illegal to flaunt your religious affiliations.
38:24And that goes back to the revolution, it doesn't go back further.
38:27Of course, laïcité was directed above all against the Catholic Church,
38:31but nevertheless, it's a religious principle, or an anti-religious principle,
38:36and when you've got a huge influx of Muslims and practising Muslims,
38:41then, you know, that applies to them technically,
38:44but they take it in a rather different way
38:46from the way the Catholic Church has had to take it.
38:49Hundreds of years ago, this was the countryside.
38:52In the heart of this now impoverished district, you find the Cathedral of Saint-Denis,
38:58where all but three of French monarchs in the course of the last thousand years were buried.
39:04During the French Revolution, the cathedral was, like so many other royal institutions
39:09or seats of power, a target and attacked.
39:12Many of its graves and crypts were sacked.
39:16Nowadays, most graves or tombs no longer contain their royal remains.
39:22During the revolution, the remains of royal dynasties were scattered and lost.
39:27Some still exist, notably the remains of Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette,
39:34both beheaded during the revolution.
39:36This grand location of the kings and queens of the great European empires
39:41tells the story of France and its capital,
39:45a place of high culture, divisive politics and dramatic protest.
39:51The French sense of superiority, you know,
39:56it's a big thing if you want to be French and you ought to do it the French way.
40:05This is where the modern world was created, in lots of ways,
40:10from architecture to art to philosophy to literature.
40:13It's where modern revolution was invented.
40:17It's where freedom was invented.
40:20The Parisians still have plenty of reasons to feel smug and superior.
40:25Their grand city may no longer be the centre of Europe and the world,
40:30but it's the world's most touristed city, even over-touristed,
40:35attracting 30 million visitors a year.
40:39From way back, it's been a tourist city.
40:42When tourism really comes in, in the 18th century, people want to go to Paris.
40:47They want to do the grand tour down to Italy,
40:49but they'll make sure they go by Paris as well.
40:52With mass tourism as well, you get Paris really building itself up,
40:56and Paris then establishes itself as the biggest tourist city in the world.
41:00I think it still is.
41:01In the 21st century, urban planners talk about reinvigorating inner cities.
41:07It's called the 15-minute city,
41:09where the local store, cafe, shops of all types and markets
41:14are all within 15 minutes' walk for everybody.
41:18Paris has been a 15-minute city for the past two centuries.
41:25We talk a lot these days about the 15-minute city
41:27in big cities like New York or Los Angeles or London.
41:31It's an aspiration. Here it's a reality.
41:34And the reality is that, you know, for example,
41:36a little quartier where we're sitting, which is called Père de T, in the south of Paris,
41:40you don't have to go to the supermarket if you don't want to.
41:42You can get your bread around the corner. You can get your wine around the corner.
41:45You can get a good meal here in this cafe.
41:47You can get a roast chicken ready prepared.
41:49You can live like it's the 19th century or the 18th century.
41:52I think it's all very human.
41:54And the quality of the produce is good.
41:57You don't have to eat processed foods.
41:59You can get good cheese, wine, and so on.
42:01This is a cliché about France, but it's also a reality.
42:04And I think for most French people, they would say that's what defines who they are.
42:09It's also the quality of what they consume and the way that they consume it.
42:14It's life lived on the street, cafés, terrasses.
42:18It's a very, you know, convivial, democratic society in that way.
42:22But it's also one which it's more important to, you know, actually participate in daily life.
42:28Daily life is really important here and not be atomized into, you know, apartment blocks and, you know,
42:34off the alienation we find in big Anglo-American cities.
42:38Will Paris become a museum to its grand and beautifully preserved past?
42:43Or will it reinvent itself as before and remain an active, vibrant and contemporary city as it has been throughout
42:51its 2,000 year history?
42:54I walk around and I see, you know, the most amazing fashion stores.
42:59But then I look up and I see a building that's almost 1,000 years old that has stained glass
43:05in it.
43:06And I think of the effort and the talent and the vision of the people who created those spaces and
43:14their endurance today.
43:16And I marvel at the engineering of what Hausmann achieved in the 19th century.
43:23You know, the invention of photography by Daguerre.
43:28All of the science we think of Marie Curie.
43:31And if I think back to the Middle Ages, it's the beginning of how you make a building beautiful.
43:39So I'm interested in how Paris continues to attract ingenuity and especially when it comes to creativity.
43:48We're really familiar with Paris.
43:50There's a very interesting 19th century tourist, an Italian tourist who came to Paris in, I think, the 1870s, 1880s.
43:59And he said, you know, you never see Paris for the first time because you've seen it before.
44:05And Paris is actually one of the most reproduced cities pictorially in the world.
44:11The ability to attract and support thousands of craftsmen.
44:16And there's something of a nice connection here to the present day.
44:20Because if we think about how quickly builders were able to reconstruct Notre Dame after the fire of 2019,
44:26it's almost like the kind of the boom of experimental artisan work all over again.
44:32Paris attracts the best.
44:35And it was ever thus.
44:37One of my favorite words in the French language isn't actually French at all.
44:41It's a very old word.
44:42Arguably, it's Breton.
44:44Bawlish, maybe.
44:46It's the word plouk.
44:46It doesn't sound French.
44:47But if you're a plouk, that means you're a hopeless, hapless outsider to the city.
44:54And what amazes me that, you know, it's probably 2,000 years old.
44:58But it's still used every day now to describe someone who's wearing the wrong socks.
45:02Got the wrong haircut.
45:03Doesn't have to tie a scarf.
45:05Ça fait très plouk.
45:06You know, he doesn't know what the latest books are.
45:09Doesn't know what the latest films are.
45:10Ça fait très plouk.
45:11They all did the wrong thing in a bar.
45:12Plouk, plouk, plouk.
45:14And it sounds nasty.
45:16I've never been called a plouk because I'm a foreigner.
45:18But if I was, I'd be deeply offended.
45:19But it's meant to be offensive.
45:21Plouk.
45:22Get out of the city.
45:49Go.
45:52Go.
45:57Go.
45:58Go.
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