This blog post was originally published to Mike’s Travel Blog in April 2023.

“You can’t escape the past in Paris, and yet what’s so wonderful about it is that the past and present intermingle so intangibly that it doesn’t seem to burden.”

-Alan Ginsberg

What can I say about Paris that hasn’t already been said a million times? The City of Light is probably the single most famous tourist destination in the world. Because visiting Paris is such a pop culture cliché, it was actually not very high on my bucket list of places to travel to. But when I started planning a trip to Amsterdam and Belgium and I discovered that it takes less than an hour and a half to get from Brussels to Paris via high-speed rail (a pretty impressive feat since it takes between 3 and 4 hours to make the same trip by car), I realized that it would be foolish not to add the French capital to my itinerary.

It was not until after I booked my trip that I realized that Paris is currently at the center of a major wave of strikes and protests across France against President Macron’s decision to change the retirement age from 62 to 64. As I started to learn more about the strikes and protests, it actually made me more excited to visit Paris. As a longtime union organizer and supporter, I’ve always wanted to bear witness to a general strike (or take part in one). However, the strikes did impact me a few days before my flight to Europe when I got an email from the transportation company, Thalys, that my train ticket had been cancelled due to the “repercussions of the social movements in France”. I scrambled to figure out an alternative plan to get to Paris and I found out there were a variety of busses and carpool options so I shouldn’t have had a problem. In the end, I just bought a new ticket from the Thalys website for another train the same day–as it turned out, transportation workers would not be on strike that day but rather the day before. The unions had been calling for a national general strike every Thursday. For some people, that meant cancelled flights and hotel rooms. But I was arriving on a Friday and leaving the following Monday. So apart from my original ticket being cancelled, I was not impacted at all by the strike.

In fact, although I saw some unrelated protests in Paris (a Ukraine solidarity march and a rally by immigrants from Senegal in support of detained Senegalese politician, Ousmane Sonko), I saw very few signs of the strike apart from a few flyers and banners in a quiet residential neighborhood outside of the main tourist areas. After walking around the city all afternoon and evening admiring the scenery, serene and quiet apart from the constant low murmur of the crowds of tourists, it was surreal to return to my hotel room and watch video footage of hundreds of thousands of striking workers and supporters battling riot police in the streets just one day earlier. Protesters stormed the Paris office of global finance giant BlackRock, and someone even set fire to Macron’s favorite bistro. Trains in and out of the city were halted and planes were grounded. Popular tourist sites, including the Eiffel Tower, were shut down for the day. That was on Thursday. And the same scenes would repeat themselves with just as much intensity the following Thursday, after I returned home. But on Friday, everything was business as usual, with the streets filled with photo-snapping tourists instead of protesters and tear gas. It reminded me of a recent episode of “Star Trek: Picard” when a character is surprised to learn that the famous Klingon warrior, Worf, drinks chamomile tea and meditates instead of–say–beheading his enemies with a bat’leth. Worf’s reply: “Beheadings are on Wednesday”.

There was a time in Paris where beheadings were not just on Wednesday, but every day, as the streets ran red with the blood of tyrants, aristocrats, and all too often, workers and revolutionaries who happened to find themselves on Robespierre’s bad side that day. While the guillotine has stopped swinging (for better or for worse), protests, strikes, revolts, and barricades have become ingrained in the culture of Paris. Protests are as much of a Parisian tradition as art, wine, and street cafes. The locals have gotten so used to them that shutting down the city once a week and then immediately switching back to the normal routine doesn’t seem to phase anyone. So while I wish I could have reported back to you from the front lines of the general strike, my experience in Paris turned out to be a pretty typical one after all. That being said, I saw some amazing places and still managed to get off the beaten path a little bit.

GETTING THERE

Getting from Brussels, Belgium to Paris couldn’t have been easier. My hotel in Brussels was only a 5-10 minute walk to the train station and the train itself only took about an hour and 23 minutes to cover the 164 miles (264 km) of track between the two cities. Because I had to buy new tickets a week before my trip, they would have already been almost twice as expensive as the original ones I had purchased months in advance. (I was entitled to a free transfer or refund for my original ticket that was cancelled but because I had bought it from the Rail Euro website and they didn’t have a record of it being cancelled, I couldn’t figure out how to get a transfer or a refund. I tried calling Thalys and was on hold forever on an international call, so eventually I just gave up and swallowed the loss.) Because I was going to have to pay more anyway, I decided to upgrade to first class, because it was only $20 more and I wanted to see what the difference was, having already travelled second class from Amsterdam to Brussels on the same line. The difference between first and second class on European trains is typically not as stark as the difference between classes on planes, which is why the difference in price is also not too big. Second class on Thalys was perfectly comfortable and fine. First class was even more comfortable, with a super plush chair, contoured headrest, and extra space, including a little table in-between me and the next seat. I would have been comfortable in that seat even if it had been a 12 hour ride. So the upgrade was worth it, albeit not really necessary, as second class was also more than sufficient for such a short journey. If you take the whole line directly from Amsterdam to Paris or Cologne, I would recommend first class because it’s not much more expensive and the seats really are super comfortable. But if you’re only doing one leg of the route and you want to save a little money, second class is absolutely fine.

“Absolutely fine” would be a bit of a stretch to describe my hotel in Paris. It was…tolerable. The bed was comfortable enough but the carpet was pretty gross, the walls were barren and depressing, and the only windows were tiny and located very high up with no view to speak of. (In my previous post, I mistakenly said that there were no windows. There were, technically, but there might as well not have been.) Nonetheless, my hotel was in a great location. Situated on Bonaparte Street in the St. Germaine neighborhood (6th Arrondissement), it was extremely close to the beautiful and historic St. Sulpice church and the St. Germaine Market, as well as numerous restaurants and bars and two Metro stations. To the north, it was a mere 10 minute walk to the Seine River and the Latin Quarter, and 15-20 minutes to Notre Dame cathedral or the Louvre.

But as I ventured out from my hotel, I instead headed south first, to the lovely Luxembourg Gardens, which was even closer than the Seine. On the way, I stopped for lunch at La Crêperie du Clown, which is exactly what it sounds like: a clown-themed crepe restaurant. Fortunately for the servers, they do not have to dress like clowns, but there are clown statues and pictures in the creperie, which was an…interesting…choice by the owner. The savory Mediterranean crepe I got was good though and 100% clown-free. Before reaching the gardens, I stopped inside the nearby St. Sulpice church. It was a beautiful, historic church but I didn’t stay long because I had a lot more to see.

CARP(E) DIEM

I was blessed with clear weather every day that I was in Europe except for the day I visited Ghent in Belgium, but the first few days it was a bit chilly, more like early March weather for Baltimore than April. I like cool weather, so that was 100% fine with me. But when I got to Paris, the weather got a little warmer. Not hot, but very pleasant Spring weather. That first afternoon, the weather was just perfect for me to enjoy the delightful outdoor space that is the Luxembourg Gardens. It’s a big green park with shady trees, flowers, and meticulously landscaped shrubbery. Scattered throughout the park are hundreds of marble sculptures and several fountains, including the impressive 1630 Medici Fountain. At the center of the park is a large gravel area with lots of nice chairs and benches, some of which are arranged in circles to facilitate conversation. In front of this seating area is a large octagonal water basin, with carp swimming in it (hence the title of this section of the blog post). And just beyond the water is the Luxembourg Palace itself. Built in the early 1600s, it served as the royal residence of Marie de’ Medici, the mother of King Louis XIII. After the French Revolution, the palace was repurposed to house the upper chamber of the national French legislature in the various forms it took over the years (since 1958, that would be the Senate of the Fifth Republic). The whole park is a serene place to relax and enjoy a nice day without spending any money or rushing from sight to sight. It was one of the most peaceful spots I visited in all of Paris.

THE HONORED DEAD

After leaving the park, I continued east to the nearby Pantheon, a former church that now serves as a neoclassical mausoleum for some of France’s most distinguished citizens. Modeled after the much older and smaller Roman building of the same name, construction on Paris’ Pantheon started in 1758 at the behest of King Louis XV, and wasn’t completed until 1790, right in the middle of the French Revolution. Although the more radical de-Christianization campaign of the Reign of Terror would not start for a few more years, the early revolutionaries were taking aim at the privileged status of the elite clergy of the Catholic Church, and the National Constituent Assembly decreed that the building would be a tomb for France’s honored dead instead of yet another ostentatious church built at the public’s expense. Nonetheless, as governments changed back and forth in the years and decades to come, the Pantheon was used as a church at various times but in the end was returned to its role as a mausoleum.

The above-ground portion of the building is stunning with its massive marble columns, its multiple neoclassical domes, and its rich frescoes, sculptures, and mosaics. Beneath this architectural marvel lie the remains of 75 men and 6 women. Since there are so few women, I will name all six:

• Marie Curie (the famed physicist and chemist)
• Genevieve de Gaulle-Anthoniz (member of the French Resistance and niece of General Charles de Gaulle)
• Germaine Tillion (ethnologist and member of the French Resistance who survived a Nazi concentration camp)
• Simone Veil (a prominent politician who championed women’s rights)
• Josephine Baker (American-born dancer, singer, and actress and first black woman to star in a major motion picture)
• Sophie Berthelot (wife of chemist Pierre Eugene Marcellin Berthelot who is also buried in the Pantheon–Sophie was the first woman to be buried in the Pantheon, as her family had requested that she be buried alongside her husband).

Three of these women died this century, with Madame Veil (1927-2017) being the most recent. The rest, apart from Madame Berthelot, were transferred to the Pantheon long after their deaths, beginning with Madame Curie in 1995. Of the men, some names that caught my attention include:

• Louis Braille (inventor of the Braille system for blind and sight-impaired people)
• Pierre Curie (physicist and husband of Marie Curie)
• Alexandre Dumas (author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo)
• Felix Eboue (first black man appointed to a high post in the French colonies)
• Victor Hugo (author of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Misérables)
• Jean-Paul Marat (journalist of the French Revolution who was famously assassinated)
• Jean-Jacques Rosseau (Enlightenment philosopher/writer)
• Voltaire (Enlightenment philosopher/writer)
• Emile Zola (Nobel Prize winning writer)

There is also an inscription honoring the leader of the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint Louverture (who is not buried in the Pantheon). The inscription reads:

IN MEMORY OF TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE

FREEDOM FLIGHTER, ARTISAN OF THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY

DEAD HAITIAN HERO DEPORTED TO FORT-DE-JOUX IN 1803.

Louverture was tricked into being imprisoned by Napoleon Bonaparte under the guise of a diplomatic meeting. He died in a prison cell in Fort de Joux in 1803 and was buried in the chapel there, which was later demolished. His bones are now somewhere in a mass grave near the fort.

ARRIVING ON THE SEINE

Désolé for all the bad puns. (Pardon my French.)

Departing from the Pantheon, I now made my way north to the banks of the legendary Seine River and crossed the bridge to the Île de la Cité, home to Notre Dame Cathedral, Sainte-Chapelle, the Palace of Justice, and other notable sights. The famous Notre Dame has been closed for repairs/restoration ever since the fire that took place there four years ago. It’s expected to re-open in 2024. However, you can already get fairly close to it now and there are bleachers set up in front of the church from which you can see a mostly unobstructed view of the exterior.

Beyond Notre Dame lays the complex of palaces, fortifications, and government buildings that make up la Cité. This citadel is the the oldest part of Paris, dating back to ancient Roman times. When I passed through the complex, there was a protest taking place there in support of Senegalese leader Ousmane Sonko, who many people in Paris’ Senegalese community consider to be a political prisoner. The protest was very peaceful with lots of drums and melodic chanting.

On the western side of the island is the stained glass marvel of Saint-Chapelle. Built in the 1240s, at the same time as Notre Dame, this smaller church is known for one thing and one thing only: its massive wall-to-wall stained glass windows. The whole church is basically one big collection of colorful stained glass with just enough other materials to hold it together. During sunrise and sunset on a clear, sunny day, the interior of the church is lit up with unparalleled brilliance. I was not able to secure tickets for sunset, and it was partly cloudy at the time that I arrived, but the windows were still incredibly beautiful. The following night, an orchestra was to perform Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” there at sunset, and I really wish I had known about it early enough to buy tickets to that.

After Saint-Chapelle, I walked north across another bridge that took me to the Right Bank and the medieval neighborhood of Marais. I turned East to reach the historic Hôtel de Ville. As a history teacher, I had known for many years that the Hôtel de Ville was Paris’ City Hall and had been the scene of plenty of drama in the many twists and turns of the French Revolution and the barrage of governments that followed in its wake. Yet it wasn’t until this trip that it dawned on me that the name “Hôtel de Ville” is literally just French for “City Hall”. Pretty much every City Hall in France and other French-speaking parts of the world is called l’Hôtel de Ville. So that was a facepalm revelation for me, but this particular Hôtel de Ville was indeed something special, both for its exquisite architectural style and its colorful history. I don’t have time to go into detail about that history right now, but you can read more about it on your own, if you’re interested.

Next, I went a little further north to the Pompidou Center, a large modern building that houses a museum and a huge library. It also offers one of the best completely free views of Paris. After riding up 6 flights of escalators in a giant plastic tube, the rooftop offers a sweeping view of the city and its many monuments. Outside the Pompidou, a Ukraine solidarity march snaked its way through the streets, stopping to perform a die-in with sound effects of explosions, bullets, sirens, screams, and even Russian patriotic music (played to be ominous like the Imperial March you hear when Darth Vader approaches in Star Wars).

By now, it was getting dark out, and I was tired and hungry, so I got a seat at an outdoor cafe overlooking the Seine and tucked into a delicious pizza which I washed down with a tasty glass of Bordeaux. Both of the pizzas I had in Paris were very good, with wide, flaky crusts. In France, you eat pizza with a knife and fork. I felt silly doing that while school groups of American teenagers passed in front of me and probably judged me pretty hard, but I figured when in Paris, do as the Parisians do.

THE MARTYR’S MOUNTAIN

The next morning, I took the Metro to the popular Montmartre neighborhood. The name means “Mountain of the Martyr” and is named after France’s patron saint, St. Denis, who was decapitated on the hill here in 250 AD/CE. It’s also the site of the Paris Commune of 1871, which had plenty of martyrs of its own. The hill in question is now a pretty park, with an ostentatious white church at the top. After grabbing a Nutella crepe from a stand, I rode a funicular up the hill. I would soon be glad that I saved my feet. At the top, there is a platform where you can get a great view of the city. But this is not the best seat in the house. For that, you need to ascend 300 very narrow steps to the top of the bell tower of Sacré-Coeur Basilica. The church itself is free to visit, although you do have to stand in line. But they charge a fee to go up the tower.

The church is rather famous, appearing on many postcards, magnets, and other souvenirs alongside the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, the Louvre, and the Arc du Triomphe. However, this church is neither the oldest nor the most beautiful in Paris, and I was somewhat underwhelmed by the dark interior. The church has a pretty reactionary history too. Constructed in 1875, Sacré-Coeur was the brainchild of Felix Fournier, the Bishop of Nantes, who claimed that France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War was a divine punishment for the moral decline of the country since the French Revolution. According to my friend, Nathaniel Miller, who used to live in Paris, the church was built using the forced labor of the survivors of the Paris Commune. (More about the Commune later.)

Despite my misgivings about the church, the view from the tower was spectacular, although reaching it was brutal. Unlike the Belfry of Bruges, there were no little rooms to step into on the way up the stairs to break up the journey. The passage is tight and there are people going up and down constantly. But if you persevere through these challenges, you are rewarded with a 360 degree eagle eye view of Paris. This view is definitely better than the free view from the Pompidou Center. To get a feel for the experience, search for Sacré-Coeur on Google Maps and let your mouse rest over the location pin. It will show you a 3D spinning aerial view that includes the surrounding area. But if you want to have an authentic experience, you need to walk up 300 steps without a break first.

Just across the street from Sacré-Coeur is a much smaller, much older, and much less crowded church called Église Saint-Pierre de Montmartre. Nathaniel recommended that I visit this church, but I think I would have found it on my own anyway. The current building dates back to at least the 12th century, but there has been a church on the same site since at least the 600s, possibly much earlier. According to Church lore, it was founded by St. Denis himself in the 3rd century, although there is little archeological evidence to support this claim. My favorite thing about this church is the way the light from the stained glass windows creates a colorful pattern on the floor, like looking through a kaleidoscope.

On the other side of Saint-Pierre, in the center of the Montmartre neighborhood is Place du Tertre, a famous square lined with cafes and bistros and dozens of artists plying their trade and hawking their creations. It is a very pretty area and it would look like it was pulled straight from an Impressionist painting if it wasn’t for the horde of tourists overrunning the narrow streets. This was by far the most crowded place I visited on my entire trip to Europe, even more crowded than the room in the Louvre that houses the Mona Lisa. My instinct was to get away as quickly as I could (which wouldn’t be very quickly at all), but by that time I was pretty hungry, and there was a restaurant that was just opening and thus had plenty of available outdoor seats while the others were full. These seats were just far enough away from the street that I wouldn’t be bombarded by the crowds. This is where I had my second Parisian pizza, with roasted vegetables, and a glass of wine. While I was eating, some of the artists and vendors hassled me to buy their products. One guy started cutting up a piece of paper in front of me (I think he was going to make a cut-out figure and try to get me to buy it.) After about three or four forceful “Non, merci”s, he left me alone. Then another guy came along and wanted to draw my caricature. I tried the same “Non, merci” but he responded with “OUI, merci!” and then in English, “Why not?”. I politely told him I was eating and he said, “So what? You are here in Paris and you have the privilege of speaking with me!” At that point, I stopped saying anything and just looked down at my food as I ate, and after a while he sighed loudly and trudged off in disgust, real or feigned.

After lunch I walked around the less crowded (but still heavily touristed) parts of Montmartre and sat for a while in a small park that seemed to be mainly used by elderly locals. There were some nice historic buildings in Montmartre, but if I’m being honest, I thought the neighborhood was over-rated. Maybe I just didn’t go down the right streets. Visiting the area was worth it for the view from the top of Sacré-Coeur and the inside of Saint-Pierre, but there were way too many tourists and street vendors and the neighborhood was not nearly as charming as its reputation would suggest. I also wish that more historic sites had been preserved from the Commune, but sadly its enemies ensured that that would not be the case.

NAPOLEON’S ARCH

I should have cleansed my palette by going somewhere far away from the tourist traps, but instead I did the exact opposite. I was closer to the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower than I planned to be on following day (which would be my last day before I flew home), so I decided to go ahead and see them. I took the Metro to the Arc de Triomphe, noting on the ride that there was a Metro stop along the Champs-Élysées named after Franklin Roosevelt and a street named after Woodrow Wilson, the U.S. Presidents during World War 2 and World War 1, respectively. (There’s also a Metro stop and a plaza in Paris called Stalingrad, which surprised me.) As soon as you walk up the stairs from the Metro, the arch is right there. Modeled after the Arch of Titus in Rome, the Arc de Triomphe was built beginning in 1806 to commemorate Napoleon Bonaparte’s victory at Austerlitz. It has since become a monument to all of France’s military victories (of which there have been many, contrary to the sneering American trope of the constantly surrendering Frenchman), as well as to the liberation of Paris from the Nazis towards the end of World War 2. There are various monuments, plaques, and inscriptions in honor of French soldiers and resisters. You can also climb to the top of the arch to see what is arguably the best view in all of Paris. However, after having just climbed the 300 steps of Sacré-Coeur, I really did not feel in the mood to wait in line in the sun for an hour, pay more money, and climb 284 more steps to get a photo that I can easily find on Google in a few seconds.

THE METAL MONSTROSITY

After about 20 minutes at the Arc de Triomphe, I headed back down to the Metro and caught a train to the mother of all tourist traps, the Eiffel Tower. I had seen it several times now from a distance, but there are two places to see it up close and personal: Trocadero Gardens on the Right Bank, which overlooks the tower from across the Seine, and the Champs de Mars, on the Left Bank, which directly borders the tower from the south. I started at Trocadero, then crossed the river and walked past the tower to the Champs de Mars.

When the Eiffel Tower was first constructed for the 1889 International Exposition, most Parisians hated it. They saw it as an ugly modern art eyesore and worried that it would fall down and crush everyone and everything in its path. While it is definitely more elegant than most 21st Century modern art sculptures, I can definitely see where they were coming from. At the end of the day, it’s just a giant piece of metal, and there are so many more interesting and more beautiful things to see in Paris. What struck me the most about it was how big it is. At 1,083 feet tall (1,024 without the antenna, which was added later), it truly is a tower, especially in comparison to the mostly flat landscape around it. You can pay to go up the tower (and unlike the other places I mentioned, there is an elevator) but you have to book it in advance or wait in a very long line and hope it doesn’t sell out before you reach the front. I didn’t try. I did enjoy all the open plazas and green spaces around the tower though. On the Trocadero side, there’s a viewing platform and then benches in the tree-lined park below. On the Champs de Mars side, it’s mostly a big open plain (with trees on the sides) where people sit or lay on blankets on the ground. It’s a popular place for picnics.

SHIPS IN THE NIGHT

After taking in the view for a while, I hopped on a bus to get back to my hotel. Riding the bus instead of the Metro was interesting because I got to see a lot of places along the way that I would otherwise have missed. After resting in my hotel and charging my phone, I set out once again, this time back to the bank of the Seine near the Île de la Cité, where I had gone the previous day. My intention was to take a sunset cruise, but the boat filled up to capacity when I was three people away from the front of the line to buy tickets. So instead I bought a ticket for the night cruise, which turned out to be an even better idea. While I waited for it to be time to get on the boat, I ate a bowl of vegan pho at a Vietnamese restaurant overlooking the river, then got a glass of wine outside a nearby brasserie. The night tour was a lot of fun. I had never been on a boat after dark before except for the ferry from Vancouver to Victoria, British Columbia, where I couldn’t see a damn thing outside the boat. By contrast, the entire route our boat took along the Seine Reiver was beautifully illuminated. They don’t call Paris the City of Light for nothing. We started by going east past the nearby Notre Dame and l’Hôtel de Ville, then we turned around and headed west. Our guide told us where to look and gave some brief historical information and fun facts as we sailed past the Louvre, the Orsay Museum, numerous palaces and gardens, underneath historic and ornate bridges, past party boats, floating restaurants, and luxury yachts where people in tuxedos and evening gowns sipped champagne, past someone proposing with candles that spelled out “MARRY ME”, and eventually to the Eiffel Tower, now glowing brightly with thousands of yellow lights. As the clock struck 10:00, the lights on the Eiffel Tower started sparkling, which they continued to do for a full 15 minutes as we slowly started to head back the way we had come. We arrived back at our port and disembarked, and I walked back to my hotel in the cool night air.

PALACE OF ART

My last full day in Paris was Easter Sunday. Before I started this trip, I didn’t know what would and wouldn’t be open on Easter, so I decided to schedule that day to visit a place that’s open 365 days a year: The Louvre Museum. Built in the 16th century on the site of a medieval fortress, the Louvre served as a royal palace for the kings of France until the flamboyant Sun King, Louis XIV, built an even fancier palace at Versailles and moved there. Even before that, the palace already hosted a growing collection of artistic masterpieces, and this collection expanded after the royal family moved out, eventually becoming open to the public during the French Revolution. Napoleon III lived in the Louvre during the Second Empire period of the 1850s and ’60s, and you can see his lavish apartments on display there.

With 73,000 square meters of exhibition space, the Louvre Museum is the largest museum in the world. If you spent every day in the Louvre from opening time to closing time and stood for one minute in front of each of the Louvre’s 35,000 works of art on display (let’s not even speak of the more than 450,000 works the museum keeps hidden away in its archives), it would take you about two months to see them all. I spent about 4 hours there and visited all three of the main wings, but I definitely missed quite a bit. I had actually booked a small group guided tour of the Louvre but it was cancelled without explanation months before my trip. Then, while I was there, I started getting texts from someone saying that my tour guide was looking for me. Apparently I must have booked a second tour and forgotten all about it before I decided to just buy my own ticket and go without a guide. I never did meet up with that tour guide, but I think it actually worked out better that way. The museum is enormous but it is not quite as confusing and bewildering as I had feared it would be. Everything is pretty well marked, with the main features translated into English, and you can get an audio guide that is also an interactive tablet (using a Nintendo Switch as its hardware) with a built-in map, photos, and information about each exhibit. I was able to find all the main exhibits without much difficulty. While I’m sure a guide would have given me some stories and insights that I missed, there’s always the internet, and the freedom to go when and where I wanted seemed more than worth the trade-off for me.

In the palace of art, the undisputed queen is La Joconde, AKA Lisa Gherardini, AKA Madame Lisa Giocando, AKA the Mona Lisa. This surprisingly small masterpiece by Leonardo Da Vinci is the world’s most famous painting, and the first stop on most visitors’ Louvre itinerary. Encased in glass behind a wooden barrier and a serpentine roped-off line, this is by far the most crowded part of the Louvre. Yet between the reduced number of daily tickets the Louvre introduced during the pandemic and the fact that I bought tickets for the earliest time slot, it really wasn’t nearly as crazy as I expected it to be. I had to contend with far worse crowds at the Vatican Museum in Rome. In fact, many parts of the Louvre were not very crowded at all when I was there, and some rooms were totally empty except for me and a bored security guard. That’s the advantage of being such a gigantic museum; Even though it gets an insane amount of visitors, they are spread out over a very large area, mostly concentrating themselves in a handful of the most hyped sections.

Apart from the Mona Lisa, some of the other A-listers here include the Venus de Milo, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, The Slaves (sculptures by Michelangelo), the Great Sphinx of Tanis, Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss, the Wedding at Cana, and David’s paintings from the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Era, including the iconic Liberty Leading the People. The second and third floor are mostly paintings while the first floor and basement levels focus on ancient sculptures and artifacts. (I wonder how many were stolen, either by grave robbers or the French Empire in its various forms.) The Greek, Roman, and Egyptian sections were all incredible, but my personal favorite was the Near East collection (Sumerian, Persian, etc.). I especially loved the turquoise-colored ceramic tiles depicting lions.

There is a definite cultural bias in the Louvre that is left over from its earlier history when white supremacy was largely unquestioned and taken for granted in Europe. European art takes center stage here, whether modern, medieval, or classical Greek and Roman, with ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian art incorporated into the mix as the precursors to Western civilization. Art from Sub-Saharan Africa, East and South Asia, the Americas, Oceana, and Polynesia are very under-represented. There is one section of the museum where most of the non-Western art is lumped together in one cluster. It’s somewhere in the basement of the least visited wing (the Richelieu wing) and I didn’t manage to find it during my four-hour visit to the museum. This is the Louvre’s biggest shortcoming and I really hope they are working on addressing it for the future. Despite this unfortunate aspect, the rest of the museum was indeed impressive. I can think of few better uses for a palace that was built at tax-payer expense for the private benefit of royalty than to make it into a public temple to art, open to all. In an ideal world, it should also be free, to ensure that no-one is deprived of art and culture because of their financial situation, but they do at least have free entry once a month, and the museum is always free with documentation to all minors, young adults from the EU, art teachers, certain artists, people on income support (i.e. welfare), and disabled people and their helpers. That’s more than I can say for a lot of American museums that have much less to offer and cost much less to maintain.

A DREAM IN TIME GONE BY

The dead feature heavily in the mythos of Paris. I have already discussed the Pantheon. My hotel was also not far from the Catacombs, with its miles of skulls, but I did not end up going there. Instead, I spent my last afternoon in Paris visiting Père Lachaise Cemetery in the eastern part of the city. The cemetery is full of dramatic monuments to the victims of the Nazis, members of the Resistance, and the fallen soldiers of both World Wars, among many others. There are very some well-known people buried in this historic graveyard, including the classical composer, Chopin, the painter, David, and Jim Morrison of the Doors.

But the main reason I took two Metro lines to this quiet cemetery, removed from the hustle and bustle of the city center, is a short, non-descript brick wall, with a simple inscription that reads:

AUX MORTS

DE LA COMMUNE

21-28 Mai 1871

It was here where 166 members of the Paris Commune were executed and dumped in a mass grave. They were just a small portion of the thousands killed during the infamous Bloody Week, when the flame of liberty was extinguished in Paris. I do not have time to give a full explanation of the Paris Commune here. Libcom.org hosts two interesting contemporary accounts of the Commune, one by Karl Marx himself, and another by anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. The short version is that it was a great revolutionary moment in history where the despair of France’s utter defeat in the Franco-Prussian war was transformed by the working class of Paris into a daring experiment in radical direct democracy and bottom-up communism the likes of which the world had never seen. The Paris Commune tragically only lasted for two months before being brutally crushed by government forces, but those two months shook the world. Looking back from our 21st century vantage point, it may seem like only an insignificant blip in history. But until the Russian Revolution came along nearly 50 years later, the Paris Commune was the example that all leftists around the world looked to, both as an inspiration and an object-lesson. Anarchists, Communists, socialists, and liberal democrats all mourned the loss of the Commune. “Working men’s Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class.”, eulogized Karl Marx. Teacher and prominent member of the commune, Louise Michel, recounted, “The Commune, surrounded from every direction, had only death on its horizon. It could only be brave, and it was. And in dying it opened wide the door to the future. That was its destiny.”

A GLIMPSE OF THE “REAL” PARIS

After leaving Père Lachaise, I walked northwest to the neighborhood of Belleville. This historically working class neighborhood was recommended to me by my aforementioned friend, Nathaniel, who also gave me the details on where to find the Communards Wall. Belleville played a central role in the Revolution of 1848 and its residents were also among the strongest supporters of the Paris Commune in 1871. It is now home to a vibrant multi-ethnic community, a historic church, a Chinatown district, a large outdoor market, and a popular park situated on a hill with superb views. Families flock to this park for its tennis courts and nature paths, while young people gather at the top of the hill, playing music or laying on the grass. I’ll be honest: I think I picked my route to the park poorly and the streets that I saw were characterized by drab modern apartments and convenience stores and some sketchy back alleys. However, it was still a nice chance to see a glimpse of the real Paris, not the one created for tourists. I also got to see some flyers and banners advertising the general strike, which I didn’t find anywhere in the tourist areas.

AU REVOIR

As afternoon turned into evening, I took the Metro back to St. Germaine, near my hotel, and bought a few trinkets from the outdoor market there. I had a nice outdoor dinner of pasta at a nearby restaurant and drank my last glass of French wine.

The next morning I took a taxi to the airport and flew back to Dulles. By the time I got home, I only had a few hours before I had to go to bed in order to get up and go to work the next morning. I really needed a second Spring Break to recover. I still do. But I’m still glad I went on this trip to Europe and I already can’t wait for the next one!

It’s already booked too: A two and a half week excursion to Switzerland and Liechtenstein in late June and early July. So stay tuned for that, and I will also probably post something in May as well to tide you over until then. (I might be moving my blog to a new site too, but I will be sure to post a link here if I do.) Meanwhile, be sure to check out more photos from my trip on Flickr. Thanks for reading!