On 25th March 1928 a young American composer arrived in Paris with grand ambitions. He wanted to capture the distinctive atmosphere of the city in a piece of music ... George Gershwin. James Fox, Bright Lights, Brilliant Minds: A Tale of Three Cities II: Paris 1928, BBC 2015
1928 was the high point of an usually creative decade. ibid.
By 1928 there were about 40,000 Americans living in the city. ibid.
You’re getting on that plane with Victor where you belong ... You’ll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but soon and for the rest of your life. We’ll always have Paris. Casablanca 1942 ***** starring Humphrey Bogart & Ingrid Bergman & Paul Henreid & Claude Rains & Conrad Veidt & Sydney Greenstreet & Peter Lorre & Curt Bois et al, director Michael Curtiz
The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi. Fred Allen
In November 2015 Islamic State gunmen killed 130 civilians in Paris. This World: Three Days of Terror, BBC 2016
The war had begun ten months earlier … at the offices at satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Now one year on this is the story of the three-day manhunt for the killers of Charlie Hebdo, and of the first Islamic State attack on Paris. ibid.
It was a very narrow street – a ravine of tall, leprous houses, lurching towards one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse. All the houses were hotels and packed to the tiles with lodgers, mostly Poles, Arabs and Italians. At the foot of the hotels were tiny bistros, where you could be drunk for the equivalent of a shilling. On Saturday nights about a third of the male population of the quarter were drunk. George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
My hotel was called the Hotel de Trois Moineaux. It was a dark rickety warren of five storeys, cut up by wooden partitions into four rooms. The rooms were small and inveterately dirty … The walls were as thin as matchwood, and to hide the cracks they had been covered with layer after layer of pink paper, which had come loose and housed innumerable bugs. ibid.
There were eccentric characters in the hotel. The Paris slums were a gathering-place for eccentric people – people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives that were curious beyond words. ibid.
To be in Paris when you’re young and free – well, there’s not much on earth better than that. Terry Hayes, I Am Pilgrim
Saint-Nazaire May 1st 1967: End of the longest strike of the post-war in Sud-Aviation. Grin Without a Cat aka The Base of the Air is Red, 1977
1967: ‘We feel we had a real movement.’ ibid. striker
‘On April 11th 1968 Rudi was gravely wounded by gunfire while he cycled in a Berlin street. He’d written, We Must Revolutionise Revolutionaries. ibid.
Paris 1962 Metro Charonne: ‘A new attitude in the demonstrations, more aggressive, born from a real need of striking back.’ ibid.
‘This is where the New Left was born.’ ibid.
‘It’s a struggle between rich and poor.’ ibid. Douglas Bravo
May ’68 and all that: ‘For me, May ’68 happened in the Boulevard Saint-Michel. ibid.
‘But never have this authentic courage, this everyday courage, which consists of sacrificing your personality completely to become effective.’ ibid.
‘Indeed, we have occupied the Sorbonne.’ ibid.
Paris Latin Quarter May 6th: ‘At once the State reveals its oppressive side; the one that stays more or less hidden in everyday life.’ ibid.
‘The occupation of the Latin Quarter went fine until 8 p.m. It was the police that set off the incidents attacking us with chlorine grenade-launchers.’ ibid.
‘Birth of a legend. Birth of an image.’ ibid.
‘It’s always the same scene: a few blows and then they arrest them.’ ibid.
‘That time showed us that street violence does not lead automatically to political change.’ ibid.
‘In Saint-Etienne, however, the CGT strikers shunned by their comrades from the other two unions take to counter-attack and attack the CRS with stones, screws and iron bars.’ ibid. Newsreel October 1948
I’m trying to make friends with a gang of street hustlers. It’s not going according to plan. Scam City s2e7: Paris, National Geographic 2013
The most basic scam I’ve come across [string around wrist for contribution]. ibid.
Another artist tries to catch my portrait. ibid.
A French version of the three-card Monte. ibid.
What I thought was a work of art by a genuine French artist may well have come from a sweat-shop in China. ibid.
We ended up running smack dab in the middle of these riots and protests … ongoing for well over a month … Truthstream Media: What’s Really Going Down in Paris? 2018
It was like riding up on a movie set … There’s nothing else to do; everything is closed. ibid.
At least 100,000 [rozzers] in the city, and everywhere they had shields and helmets, and a lot of use of tear-gas. ibid.
Dazzling, talented, carefree, the Roaring Twenties are a magical moment in history. In Paris a whole new era is bursting into flower. After four long years of a terrible war, young French people have just one thing on their minds: to forget about all the tragedy. There’s only one thing for it: to party in the wild hope of inventing a whole new world. A world without war, a world of laughter and fun. And end to old pre-war values, the emancipation of women, an explosion of the avant-garde. These so-called Roaring Years are in fact a true cultural revolution. Paris: The Golden Twenties, Sky Arts 2020
A hiatus of liberties between two World Wars. ibid.
The automobile had taken over the city … There’s a wind of folly blowing through the city. ibid.
In Monmartre, glory means a gold medal in the Boozy Olympics marathon. ibid.
The Roaring Twenties will make Paris the most cosmopolitan city in the world. ibid.
Montparnasse: what Henry Miller described as the Bellybutton of the World. ibid.
The bob is much more than a fashion, it’s a symbol of the Roaring Twenties. ibid.
The jazzmen are black; many of them soldiers who have played in the military bands. ibid.
She’s a black American, and she’s an exceptional artist: her name is Josephine Baker … she’s the darling of the avant-garde … She’s the first black star in history. ibid.
Americans soon become the largest ex-pat community in the Paris of the Twenties. ibid.
In 1900 Paris was capital of the world. A cosmopolitan crowd filled the garden of the Trocadéro … everywhere French innovation, invention and ingenuity … The City of Lights, the freest in the world. Les Aventuriers de l’Art Modern [The Adventures of Modern Art] I: Bohemia 1900-1906, Sky Arts 2020
Off the beaten path and far from this excitement, a little village awoke to the dawning of a new century: Montmartre. ibid.
The [Picasso’s] style reflected the poverty and despair in which the small community of Montmartre had been living. ibid.
A new art-form was taking its first steps: Cubism. ibid.
In Montmartre at the beginning of the last century, hedonist artists lived carefree and tumultuous lives. The Adventures of Modern Art 1906-1916 II: Picasso & His Gang
Picasso had a rival: the painter Henri Matisse. ibid.
Until Les Demoiselles d’Avignon few had criticised Picasso’s works. His studio was like a laboratory where ideas, points of view and innovations were exchanged in an extraordinary spirit of artistic camaraderie. ibid.
The most audacious of the bunch was certainly Marcel Duchamp. ibid.
The Bohemian days gave way to a period of separations. ibid.
Everyone was eager to see the Cubists come to auction. ibid.
In 1911 the Mona Lisa vanished from Le Louvre …. Picasso was called in for questioning. The Adventures of Modern Art III: Paris: Capital of the World 1916-1920
In this hive of artists, [Marc] Chagall lived like an exile before, he worked late, always alone, and received few visitors. ibid.
Modigliani was Jewish: he was even known occasionally to punch an anti-Semite … For a long time Modigliani struggled through his bouts of illness, seeking to achieve his dream – the one and only thing that truly mattered to him – to be a sculptor but stone was too expensive … The dust from striking the stone was making its way into his painful lungs. Modigliani carved and he coughed … His health prevented him from being the sculptor he dreamed of being. So he turned to painting. ibid.