Is Paris The City Of Love?

First of all, it is important that we agree on the sheer absurdity of the notion. Love is not something to which any city could or should stake an exclusive claim. There can be a “city of love” as much as there can be a “city of indigestion” or a “city of nosebleed” (although I could list a few candidates, particularly for the latter). Love may or may not be all you need, but it is literally all around – or in the air, depending on your choice of song.Still: if you type “Paris city of love” into the Google search bar, you get 32 million hits. That’s quite a number. Browsing through these 32 million hits, however, is a less than fully enlightening experience. They appear to boil down to the theory that beautiful buildings, somehow, enhance romantic appetites. That is an interesting proposition and raises the question of how the citizens of Oakland muster the energy to procreate at all. On the other hand, I will now forever forego any attempt to ply reluctant female acquaintances of mine with alcohol and just take them to the nearest medieval church where they will simply rip their clothes off in some architecturally inspired frenzy. Life will be much easier from now on. The idea of Paris as the city of love must date from the late 19th century – there is little evidence that Robespierre and Napoleon thought about their capital in this way. The late 19th century was a time when France was already in terminal decline: Britain was the richest country around, Germany the most aggressively youthful one, and on the horizon you could already see the Yankee bear throwing off its slumber and slowly crawling towards its Manifest Destiny.