Newsmaker: Paris, France

Sifting through the incredible history of the City of Light to uncover periods of darkness that have lent the French capital and its citizens their great spirit of defiance and joie de vivre.

Kagan Mcleod for The National

For centuries she has been the muse of artists, writers and philosophers, inspired and starred in countless songs, books, paintings and films, and played the central role in innumerable love stories.

Not for nothing was Woody Allen’s 2011 film Midnight in Paris, a love song to the city, his first to take more than US$100 million (Dh367m) at the box office worldwide.

As one of his characters says: “That Paris exists, and anyone could choose to live anywhere else in the world, will always be a mystery to me.”

Typecast as the dazzling city of romance, Paris has long made a good living as the heart of Europe, if not the world, seducing a long list of admirers that reads like a who’s who of every artistic and intellectual movement from the 18th-century Enlightenment onwards.

Yet those who fear that La Ville Lumière, already battered by the Charlie Hebdo killings in January, has been forever scarred by last Friday’s attacks forget one thing – Paris is not just a pretty face, fit only for a romantic city break.

Behind the visitor-friendly facades of the museums, the boat rides, the brasseries and the twinkling lights of the Tour d’Eiffel, Paris is Marianne, Delacroix’s symbolic heroine of liberty who led the storming of the Bastille, trampling the Republic’s enemies underfoot in the process.

To the question posed on Tuesday by the International Business Times, among others – “After ISIS attacks Paris, will the City of Light be able to recover?” – Paris might offer a dismissive Gallic shrug and nod in the direction of a history as steeped in blood and terror as it is in art and beauty.

This is, after all, a city whose 650-year-old coat of arms depicts a defiant ship in stormy seas with the Latin motto “Fluctuat nec mergitur” (tossed about, but not sunk), which appeared as flawlessly executed graffiti in the Place de la République shortly after last week’s attacks.

And those who doubt Paris’s steely resolve should recall that the French national motto – Liberté, égalité, fraternité – was not always the T-shirtfriendly slogan that was emblazoned in vast letters across Wembley Stadium for Tuesday night’s football match between France and England.

Forged in Paris in the fires of Robespierre’s bloody revolution, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity came originally with a resolutely determined coda – “Ou mort”, or death.

Paris was born some time in the third century BC, when a Celtic tribe called the Parissi settled on the small island known today as the Île de la Cité, home since the 13th century to the cathedral of Notre Dame. Soon the Romans moved in, followed by the Gauls, Franks and the occasional rampaging gang of Vikings.

Through all the ensuing centuries of swordplay and intrigue, Paris, situated astride the commercially strategic River Seine, continued to grow and, by the 13th century, had become the capital of France.

It was during the 17th century that she began to acquire the physical presence that so dazzles today, thanks largely to the vanity of some of the most powerful men in her life.

Cardinal Richelieu, first minister of Louis XIII, decorated the Seine with a string of beautiful bridges and treated himself to the breathtaking building we know today as the Palais Royal.

To Louis XIV, Paris owes many of its grands boulevards, along which Parisians and visitors alike continue to stroll. Chief among them is the iconic Champs-Élysées.

Whether Paris owes its reputation as the City of Light to the fact that in the 18th century it was at the heart of the revolution in science and philosophy known as the Age of Enlightenment, or to the more prosaic explanation that in the following century it became one of Europe’s earliest adopters of gas street lighting, remains moot.

What is certain, however, is that the Enlightenment’s tenets of individual liberty and the separation of church and state led ultimately to the French Revolution, the bloodbath that watered the roots of the First Republic, and the indignant tenacity of Paris today in the face of any threat to the freedom of her citizens.

It was Paris, it should not be forgotten, that in 1793 gave birth to the concept of terror as a political weapon.

In less than a year the revolution had tens of thousands lose their heads to Madame La Guillotine, starting with Louis XVI and ending with Robespierre, the architect of la Terreur.

Post-revolution, Paris exchanged one type of tyranny for another, a martial dictatorship that filled Europe with dread but whose achievements still fill the French with pride.

Napoleon Bonaparte, crowned as emperor at Notre Dame on December 2, 1804, would leave his mark on Paris, contributing gifts such as the Rue de Rivoli, a brace of bridges and the Arc de Triomphe to enhance her beauty.

His nephew, who later took the title Napoleon III in a coup d’état in 1851, would prove good for Paris, too, ordering the prefect of the Seine department to give the city a major facelift. Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s 15-year renovation demolished slums to make way for the broad boulevards, parks and spectacular apartment buildings we know and love today.

Death and suffering returned to Paris on a grand scale in 1914, when a rapid German advance put the city within range of enemy guns. For a while, with the Germans just 30 kilometres from Notre Dame, it seemed the city might fall, but trains and taxis rushed French reserves from Paris to the front and the danger was averted.

The Second World War was a different story, during which Paris endured four years of Nazi occupation. It was a terrible time of divided loyalties, which had many Parisians working with the occupier. Shamefully, in July 1942 French authorities helped the Germans to round up and deport to the Auschwitz concentration camp more than 13,000 Jewish Parisians.

Retaliatory bloodletting followed the liberation of Paris in August 1944, when the Resistance executed unknown numbers of collaborators.

More shame was to follow in 1961 when, during the last gasp of France’s long and bloody battle to retain control of its colony Algeria, Parisian police attacked a banned but peaceful demonstration of Algerians on the streets of the capital. They killed dozens – some estimates put the toll as high as 200 – many of whom were drowned in the Seine.

However many died, the ghosts of those days have returned to haunt Paris this year, in a reminder that the bitter years of colonialism are not easily forgotten: the Charlie Hebdo killers were of Algerian descent, as was at least one of Friday’s terrorists.

Blood, sacrifice and suffering, in other words, is nothing new to Paris. Indeed, those who wonder if she will cower under the latest blow forget that between 1958 and 1998 terrorism was almost her constant companion. In those 40 years more than 80 people died in dozens of shootings and bombings carried out in Paris by terrorists ranging from Hizbollah and the Armed Islamic Group to the Organisation de l’armée secrète, a right-wing group fighting against Algerian independence.

Through it all, Paris has clung – at times precariously – to the principles of the Republic, reiterated most recently in the constitution of the Fifth Republic, devised by Charles de Gaulle and adopted in 1958. Article One of the constitution enshrines the Laïcité, the concept that ensures there is no link between state and religion and establishes France as a secular “République indivisible, laïque, démocratique et sociale”.

Those who have brought terror once again to the streets of Paris, perhaps under the impression that this absence of an overt religious presence in public life was somehow a sign of weakness, could not be more mistaken.

In fact, Paris’s resolve in such dark days is fortified by a fundamental belief in the individual’s right to freedom of thought, a faith as powerful and determined in its own way as the perversion that seeks to destroy it in the name of Islam.

Will the City of Light recover?

What an absurd question. Paris will merely turn the page of yet another chapter in her history.

At her side stand generations of devoted admirers, ranging from Eurostar weekenders to the cultural icons who over the centuries have made the city their home. Balzac, Baudelaire, Voltaire, Renoir, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Hemingway, and Victor Hugo, for whom nothing was “more fantastic … more tragic … more sublime” than Paris.

Paris is Cole Porter, who loved the city in the springtime and the fall, the winter when it drizzles and the summer when it sizzles. So, too, is she Friedrich Nietzsche, for whom an artist “has no home in Europe save in Paris”, and Gertrude Stein, who once declared that “America is my country, Paris is my hometown”.

Despite the passing clouds that might, from time to time, darken her face, as Humphrey Bogart tells Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca: “We’ll always have Paris.”