Le Vrai Paris

Authentic?Reading MacCannell’s “Staged Authenticity,” I was struck by his ideas about the sight-seeing tourist and traveler in search of authenticity. MacConnell works at dissolving the boundaries between the two, noting that both tourist and traveler set out on a pilgrimage-like search for experience or understanding, and that authenticity, seeking the “true” nature of a place or a culture, is often a construction—that is, not as authentic as we thought, or at least not in the same way.

I think it’s easy to lump all major “sights” or tourist attractions into the tourist category, the antithesis of authenticity; but especially in a city like Paris, or any other huge tourist destination, even these “sights” become an integral part of the city. Of course I’m guilty of scoffing at the big red double-decker buses unloading tourists at the base of the Eiffel Tower; of course the nearby restaurants and sandwich shops are the worst, and priciest, in the city; of course I prefer discovering less crowded, less well-known neighborhoods, where not everyone is taking the same photograph and no one is trying to sell me an Eiffel Tower keychain from a giant ring of them. But that doesn’t make the Champ de Mars, or the Louvre or the Arc de Triomphe, any less real and Parisian than the student-tended garden behind the Cinémathèque Française, or the little boulangerie around the corner from my apartment. These are all just different sides of Paris: the traditional, the grand, the overlooked, the historic, the quotidian, and so on.

Even still, now that I’m living in Paris, I think I’m especially motivated to discover the overlooked, non-touristy corners. I think I expect myself to be an authority on Paris, on the “back regions,” as MacConnell calls them, of the city, the places where visitors for a few days or weeks wouldn’t find. I’m still exploring, but sometimes I wonder if it’s a reasonable goal. Sometimes I feel strange comparing Paris, which I love and which continues to fascinate me, with Copenhagen, where I’ve never stayed for more than a few weeks at a time but which still feels more like my home in Europe… at least for now.

Location