Crime-ridden Paris is now the city of nightmares
There was a time when Paris was the city of dreams. A spate of terrorist attacks, and the hideous social problems they signified, diminished but did not manage to entirely destroy its romantic aura. Even its well-publicised problems with litter and dilapidated public furniture, which spurred a viral campaign called “Paris is Ugly” earlier this year, hasn’t kept people away.
But surely it is now impossible to argue that Paris is anything but a city of nightmares, to be avoided or traversed as fast as possible. Last week, the violinist Julie Berthollet, 25, told how she was mugged twice in one day as passersby watched indifferently.
“I no longer want to live in a place where individualism is omnipresent,” she said. But she gives individualism a bad name: the problem isn’t robust selfishness, which is normal, but total moral disintegration; a habit of reaching for violence first (nobody goes for looting and rioting like the French), and a worrying disinterest in other human beings as people.
Berthollet said first, “a young man approached me and tried to steal my phone. Since I have strong hands because of my violin-playing, I resisted. I held tight to my iPhone and I shouted: ‘Are you mad? Coward!’ The individual left.” Nobody cared because “people are so used to thefts of phones and handbags”.
But then a truly gruesome encounter happened. Descending into the metro, a man looked at her “in a bad way, full of hatred. He said: ‘You, with your jewellery!’” before proceeding to grab necklaces off her, including one heirloom, and bracelets off her hand. Again people not only watched indifferently but stepped aside to allow him “enough room to attack me”. She was in tears still when she boarded her train to Geneva and not one person stopped to comfort her.
“I absolutely don’t have the ability to put up with all this ambient violence. In Paris when you say ‘hello’ to someone, they take it as an aggression,” she said. Quel horreur.
London has a lot of problems, but accounts like this of our continental neighbour should make us still feel lucky – we may not be a city of dreams, but we’re not a nightmare quite yet.