A superior civilisation
John Laughland
Paris, for me, means bookshops. Others may associate the French capital with the Eiffel Tower, the haute couture houses on the Avenue Montaigne or inimitable brasseries like Bofinger or Lipp, but although these things all reflect different aspects of France’s astonishing flair, they are not what makes the country special. In any case, Rome beats Paris when it comes to food and style. Instead, France is distinguished by the fact that it is the only country in Western Europe (I exclude Bohemia) whose capital city is also the seat of an ancient and truly great university.
In the Middle Ages, the University of Paris outshone even Oxford and Bologna, its august contemporaries. The intellectual structure of Christian thought was forged here by SS Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. In more recent memory, the notorious events of May 1968, which fatally sabotaged the Gaullist project, opening the way for the dissolution of France into an EU blob and stamping the mark of the sexual revolution on European society more firmly than even the Beatles had, was sparked off by angry students complaining about single-sex dorms at the University in Nanterre.
This marriage of the academy and the state in Paris produces the best and the worst of France. The worst offspring are the technocrats, darkly impressive men educated at polytéchnique or ENA, the Ecole Nationale d’Administration. People talk of an Oxbridge mafia in British public life, but 6,000 graduates a year leave the quads and courts of those two universities. France, by contrast, is quite literally governed by a tiny clique of powerful men who have all studied at ENA — previously situated in Rue de l’Université before being decentralised to Strasbourg — a college smaller than the tiniest Oxford college, and which awards a mere 80 diplomas a year.
The best result of Paris’s dual status as a seat of government and a seat of learning is its highly charged intellectual atmosphere. Politics in France, like much of French life, is bracingly cerebral: you can almost see the Cartesian logic glinting off the grey slate roofs and shining down the Hausmann boulevards. As a result, it is quite common, say, to sit next to a banker at dinner who can chat intelligently about Hegel — try asking a fund manager in London about the Phenomenology of Spirit — and Paris’s bookshops are correspondingly excellent. Whereas Feltrinelli on Largo Argentina in Rome plays trashy piped music to divert its customers as they browse for the latest detective novel or book of occult cures, and whereas the book market in this country is monopolised by Waterstone’s, whose main rooms are devoted exclusively to cheap fiction and gossipy books about 18th-century wives, you need only step into Compagnie on the Rue des Ecoles or the superb La Procure off Place Saint-Sulpice to realise that France is, quite simply, a superior civilisation.
My typical bookshop walk starts on the parvis of Notre Dame. To the left over the river, on the Rue Saint-Jacques, there is the Librairie Saint-Nicolas, the bookshop attached to the Lefebvrist church, SaintNicolas du Chardonnet, just round the corner. Its selection reflects the rebarbative obsessions of right-wing French Catholics — Freemasonry, the lost monarchy, France’s Christian vocation — but the history, politics and current affairs sections are well chosen. I once found there a slim volume about Jesus’s sense of humour which spent 50 pages or so explaining why the gospels are full of jokes. Just up the road, the book section of the shop in the Musée Cluny — my favourite museum in the world — is also good. It has erudite tomes on mediaeval history — how about A Numismatic History of France during the Hundred Years’ War? — but also amusing volumes about cooking in the Middle Ages. The tower in the courtyard of the museum is stippled with scallop shells but this is not a reference to ancient culinary delights: instead, like the name of Rue SaintJacques nearby, it recalls the fact that this part of Paris was once a starting-point for the Jacobian pilgrimage to Compostela.
Just outside the Musée Cluny, diagonally opposite the Sorbonne and directly opposite the Balzar — an excellent restaurant there is Compagnie, which I always visit to see what has been published recently on current affairs. It is a feature of French bookshops, indeed, that politics and world events feature prominently, whereas in England they are typically relegated to a dingy basement. If you walk up the Rue Victor Cousin, moreover, with the Sorbonne’s heavy façade on your left, and turn right into Place de la Sorbonne, there is even better treasure. Vrin must be the only bookshop in the world devoted entirely to philosophy and its selection is fabulous. It has adopted the laudable practice of stocking secondhand books next to new ones, so you have a good chance of coming across an out-of-print work on your subject by accident. Sheer heaven. Across the square, behind the fountain, there is the bookshop of Presses Universitaires de France, one of the country’s best academic publishers.
Further up the Montagne SainteGeneviève, there is a clutch of law bookshops. This is the quartier for law because the law faculty (Paris-I) is in the imposing buildings opposite the Pantheon. With a strong interest in the philosophy of law, I often find fascinating things in Dalloz, but they are terribly expensive. If you then descend the Rue Soufflot and pass along the top of the Luxembourg gardens, there is a clutch of lovely antiquarian bookshops diagonally opposite the Senate.
A few minutes further on, there is a real goldmine for the conspiratorially minded and the politically marginalised — in other words, for people like me. In an exquisite side street nestling under the shadow of Saint-Sulpice itself, there is the bookshop of L’Age d’Homme, the publisher with strong connections to Serbia and the Orthodox world. All manner of excitement is to be found here, including books by the masterly late student of propaganda, Vladimir Volkoff, and the complete works of Air Marshal (or ‘General’ as they say in France) Pierre-Marie Gallois, flying ace, mural painter, broadcaster, architect of the French nuclear deterrent, and indomitable nonagenarian Eurosceptic.
No trip to Paris, however, would be complete without lunch with my own publisher, in which my walk often culminates. The delightful and extremely intelligent François-Xavier de Guibert is a superb example of a breed which has died out in this country, the one-man independent publisher. He sits in a tiny shop-fronted office in the 6th, surrounded by piles of books three or four feet high, and works with the help of a single assistant. Over three decades in publishing he has built up one of the most fascinating lists in France, on religion, politics, medicine and history. For many years, he published the works of the otherwise neglected great philosopher and exegete Claude Tresmontant. It is a tragedy, though, that Guibert has never written anything himself, for his raspingly funny analyses of the state of the world are jewels which will be lost when he dies. He is also very generous, always inviting me to his cantine round the corner. After lunch, he plies me with four or five of his latest publications and so I stagger off, weighed down by my new acquisitions but deliciously uplifted by the sheer brilliance of France.
Previous page
