The Violence in Paris

The above is the famed 1939 photo of a Frenchman crying on the streets of Paris upon hearing the news that France had fallen to Nazi Germany.  The shock and sorrow expressed in it feels sadly apropos this morning--not that France is anywhere close to surrendering to ISIS or any such nonsense (really, my greatest fear right now is a further increase in European xenophobia, anti-Muslim violence, and a return to the French police state; as Tom Wolfe once said, "the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe").  But the French are still reeling from a similarly devestating act of violence--though one that, as the photo reminds us, is sadly not that foreign to the City of Lights, as though violence were a strange thing to happen there.

It is, after all, the city of the storming of the Bastille, the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror, and Napoleon's Arc de triomphe--which were all in turn precipitated by the centuries of violence perpetrated by the French Crown upon its own impoverished.  A single visit to Versailles in all its stunning grandeur will remind you why the starving peasants revolted in the first place.  And that wealth came on the backs not just of the poor at-home, but abroad: the slavery of Haiti (that required its own violent revolt to overthrow), the bloody partitioning of Africa and the Middle-East with other European powers, the annexation of Vietnam, etc and etc and etc; the wealth and beauty of Paris was built up in part through brutal violence.

Please don't misunderstand, this is not to exculpate the cowardly terrorists who sent themselves to hell last night, nor blame the victims just trying to enjoy a Friday night for once as though they were somehow complicit in their own murders.  Far, far from it.  Paris is one of my favorite cities and, contrary to stereotype, I find the French to be some of the friendliest people I've met; I wish these attacks on no one, but least of all on them.  Rather, this is just a weary reminder that we are all still enmeshed in the same tangled web of history, the French as much as everybody, tragically swept away by events that predate us and remain far larger than all of us (the main thesis of War and Peace by the way--which incidentally is a novel about France invading Russia).  "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake," sighs Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses (a novel also written in Paris), and we all got up this morning no more awake from the nightmare than we have ever been.