Between France & Morocco: Paris & Saint Denis

May 15, 2018

After years of learning about France and its splendor, I’ve finally made it. Our group arrived at 5am. It was 11pm back home, and we had been traveling for about 16 hours by that point. We were all tired, and the airport was austere. The thirty-minute drive into Paris took us through working-class suburbs and into the 12th Arrondissement, where our hotel was. This journey was a preview to our week in Paris: Seven days of walking tours, museum visits, suburb tours and class discussions to kickstart our program of diversity and inclusion between France and Morocco.

The first couple of days were overwhelming and difficult. I had to adjust to hearing Parisian French everywhere and even though our group was English-speaking, it was often difficult to ignore the mélange of languages and conversations. We fought clouds of cigarette smoke at lunch and dinner. I tried my hand at speaking French, but my hesitation was often met with an English response. No one smiled, and I became (self-)conscious of how loud Americans are compared to other people. Exhaustion from these things coupled with jet lag actually culminated in the best sleep I’d ever gotten. I didn’t realize that I had romantic expectations of Paris until I felt disappointed with the city. I didn’t expect to find romance or cry at the beauty of a historic monument, but I thought I would feel something more. However, after our tour of the Bateaux Mouches and seeing the Eiffel Tower sparkle at the top of the hour, something began to change. After being overwhelmed by Paris’ large-city insanity, I found myself enjoying it.

With my group, I was painfully awkward at first, as I had only known one of our professors. I knew this was part of the experience, but I was still uncomfortable. Thankfully, there were some extroverts who were inclusive and would always ask if anyone wanted to x, y, or z in our free time. When I wasn’t half-asleep at breakfast, I chatted with various people. I got to know my group gradually and we became comfortable with talking about how uncomfortable we were at times. We had to ways to go to adjust to French culture.

By day 4, when we visited the Latin Quarter, I began to daydream about living on the Rive Gauche (Left Bank). I stopped hesitating when I spoke French and used my American accent to strike up conversations with those from whom I asked for help. We visited tourist sites over the first few days: the Louvre, the Bateaux Mouches, the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame de Paris, etc. These sites were historic and showed Paris in all its splendor. We ended our fourth day visiting the Paris Mosque which doubles as a cultural center. The Paris Mosque was interesting, considering that mosques generally aren’t in the center of a city like this. As a cultural center, the public can come in and learn about Islam, and it is closed on Fridays. Due to France’s policy of secularism, mosques also can’t publicly broadcast the call to prayer, though Notre Dame’s church bells can ring throughout the day. This was my first time in a mosque, and I felt more welcomed here than in Notre Dame. Inside were courtyards, a library, prayer spaces, and memorial plaques dedicated to North and Sub-Saharan African Muslims who died for France during the First and Second World Wars. These soldiers served France, a republic, as “colonial subjects” rather than citizens.

When we visited the Quai Branly, Paris’ splendor was overshadowed by a sense of cultural superiority that the museum carried. It was supposed to be dedicated to artifacts from native South American, Asian-Pacific, Southeast Asian, and African cultures. The first thing that was brought to our attention however was the Eiffel Tower looming over the museum’s displays. It was a present-day reminder of France’s mission civilisatrice, its reason behind colonization in the nineteenth century. Many of Quai Branly’s exhibits had no information plaques and the ones who did have them only told the viewer the name and origins of a piece. This, along with Paris Mosque, was a first window into France’s diversity and inclusion. One result of colonization is increased immigration to France from World War I. Immigration brought more religious and linguistic diversity to France, but the French often have difficulty discussing this. This often leads to the exclusion of various communities and militant secularism. The French elite hesitate to discuss colonialization as part of their history and this leads to difficulties in addressing diversity and inclusion, and this became clearer during our tour of the Saint Denis suburb.

When people visit Saint Denis, they usually visit the Cathedral de Saint Denis or watch a soccer match at the Stade de France. Our group visited the Cathedral as well as a working-class neighborhood in the city. The Cathedral was gorgeous, and its stain glass windows told both Biblical and historical stories. Our tour of the working-class district, meanwhile, made me personally uncomfortable. I was pleasantly surprised to find plaques commemorating the Algerian massacres at Sétif on May 8, 1945 and at Paris on October 17, 1961. Our guide mentioned that the French had only recently found out about these events, and you won’t find commemoration of these events in Paris. While our guide was well-versed on the district’s history, he didn’t touch on the current populations living in the suburb. Much of the neighborhood are of Southern European, North African, or Sub-Saharan African origins. People stared at us, probably wondering why a large tour group was walking through their neighborhood. This wasn’t a tourist site, and this wasn’t a part of France the Parisian elite would want tourists to see. This, however, plays a role in the problem of addressing diversity and inclusion in France. Those living in Saint Denis rarely went to Paris, and the suburb was basically cut off by the périph, Paris’ outer belt highway.

While Paris offers beautiful sites, it isn’t all la vie en rose. While it might seem obvious, many Americans tend to view it as a perfect, romantic city, and that’s how I viewed it since I started learning French in middle school. This didn’t ruin Paris for me at all, however. It made me want to return and continue to explore and study its diversity as well as how French national identity could change as a result of increasing diversity. As uncomfortable as our tours of Quai Branly and Saint Denis were, it showed a more realistic France beyond the shiny, touristy spots of the capital. In Paris, one of the only places who discusses immigration openly is the Cité nationale de l’histoire et de l’immigration which was at one point a pavilion in Paris’ Colonial Exposition in 1931. This reluctance to recognize colonialism was similar to Americans’ reluctance and guilt in discussing slavery. This sentiment continued as we studied in Aix-en-Provence, Fréjus, and Marseille.