The pathologies of les banlieues creep ever closer to the center.Įxcept on the Champs-Elysées.

It's ever less 'Parisian', becoming instead a municipality bifurcated between a few very wealthy French natives and the vast army of poor immigrants who serve them. Yet, even without spasms of terror, the city feels in a state of decay. I spent much of last year's summer of terror in France - mainly in the south, but, when I eventually got to Paris, I found it a sad and diminished place, patroled by a twitchy French gendermarie (and military) exhausted after almost a year working permanent 'state of emergency' shifts. But sometimes you're so busy opening up your heart you don't notice that you've lost your mind. 'I stroll along the avenue, my heart open to the unknown.' Every boulevardier wants to live like that in the vibrant multicultural west. And so it's supposed to go in the heart of Paris, too: For us old Greek students, Elysium is a blessed land where compared to anywhere else, as Homer wrote, 'life is easiest for men'. Before they became a pop paean to urban grooviness, the Elysian Fields were what you passed through en route to the hereafter: this week's 'known wolf' appears to have taken the street name somewhat literally, as the intellectually undernourished warriors of Islam are wont to do. It came a couple of days before a presidential election in which four of the five main candidates are competing within margin-of-error territory, an unusually high percentage of voters remain undecided, and nobody knows how the latest jihad spree will impact whose numbers. The body count in Thursday's attack was low, but the symbolic power of a man opening fire on one of the most famous streets in the world was huge. There's everything you want on the Champs-Elysées.Īnd also some things you don't want - like Islamic terrorism. It's actually an obscure English song called 'Waterloo Road' (a very different kind of thoroughfare) that Pierre Delanoë wrote an exuberantly buoyant French lyric for: My dad liked to bellow along with Joe Dassin's monster francopop hit whenever it came on the radio as we were motoring from Paris south, and all these years later I still know every word of it. Il y a tout ce que vous voulez aux Champs-Elysées.

French song urban terror game