From ‘bistro-mausoleum’ to tech and culture hub: How Paris got its mojo back

This story is part of the June 28 edition of Good Weekend.See all 13 stories.

There he is, the man himself. Curls tumble over an ermine cape, worn like an Oodie. One outstretched hand cups a sceptre as casually as a walking stick. The other rests on a hip, by his sword. The silhouette is bigger than Hyacinthe Rigaud’s 1701 “Sun Portrait” of Louis XIV, from which it is taken. It’s also larger than life, given Louis barely made five-foot-four (1.62 metres) out of heels. Regardless, he commands centre stage with his stance of unchallenged supremacy.

All that’s missing is a face. Where it should be is a hole, which turns out to be what the photo stand-in is doing here in the lobby of Station F, billed as the world’s largest start-up incubator. This former railway station turned tech campus was opened by France’s freshly elected President Emmanuel Macron in 2017 as the mothership of the “start-up nation” he promised to create. Any of its 4500 residents can plant their face where Louis’ once was and have their moment in the sun. It’s a gag of course, created by a street-art collective, says Station F’s 39-year-old director, Roxanne Varza. The Gobelins district of Paris, where Station F occupies a former freight depot, is known for urban art. “It’s really about seeing things differently,” Varza says. “Remembering that we have a very rich history, but we don’t need to take it, or ­ourselves, so seriously.”

In that, Louis 2.0 nails something that has fundamentally shifted about Paris in the past decade or so. “They think Louis is coming back,” my Parisian friend Marc used to joke, rolling his eyes whenever the French got a bit too French, which is to say closed, ­inflexible, imperious. “They think the La Gloire [the historic Glory of France] is about to return.”

As Cool Britannia-era London eclipsed Paris in the ’90s, followed by Berlin in the noughties, the city seemed to teeter like a china cabinet. Once a year, Paris would fling open the doors of unimaginable treasure-palaces, private residences and public buildings for its Journées du Patrimoine (Heritage Days). For the rest, everything was under lock and key in a town that seemed to have a locksmith on every corner. “People saw Paris as a city of ­museums,” Guillaume Piens, director of contemporary art fair Art Paris, recalls of the time. “It was not a place where people would come to experience contemporary art; it was more about celebrating the past.”

Station F, a tech campus billed as the world’s largest start-up incubator.Credit: Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Not any more. As Paris puts the finishing touches on preparations for next month’s Olympics – the biggest thing to hit town since the universal exhibitions that minted landmarks from the Eiffel Tower to the Grand Palais – there’s a lot to suggest it has regained not only some of its former glory, but also its contemporary edge.

These days, the English fret that Paris is cooler than post-Brexit London. The City of Light is a European art centre in a way that hasn’t been true in a century, and its minimalist Olympic plan has underlined how much – from its highly functional Métro to stadia and cultural facilities – is already in place. Nor are the Olympics alone the thing that has made Paris shudder suddenly into focus. It is a symptom of a broader renaissance.

Long before the Games were a glimmer in Paris’ eye, the institutions central to its identity as a city of culture began to undergo vast and costly renovations, from the Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Musée de Cluny and Rodin Museum to the gobsmacking museum of Paris, Musée Carnavalet, and the more-remarkable-still Museum of Hunting and Nature. While no overall figure has been put on the renovations, it runs to billions. The refurbishment of the Grand Palais alone will have cost €500 million ($811 million) by the time it opens for the Olympics, while the Pompidou Centre’s planned five-year make­over from 2025 is expected to cost $580 million.

But as the snap French parliamentary elections Macron called on June 10, after the far-right Rassemblement National (formerly the National Front) dominated EU elections, again reminded everyone: that sophisticated surface hides a deeply divided, profoundly troubled country. “It’s like we have to surf all the time between different waves,” says Emma Lavigne, director of French billionaire François Pinault’s 10,000-work contemporary art collection and the museums that are its public face in Venice and Paris.

Lavigne has watched that swell from a very particular perch. When the Pinault Collection’s Bourse de Commerce opened in 2021, on the central site originally occupied by Catherine de Medici’s 16th-century Queen’s Palace, the museum seemed to put the contemporary back not only in art but in Paris itself. “Sometimes we feel that there is indeed an incredible energy in Paris and then suddenly, everything can be frozen because we have a lot of demonstrations and a lot of social conflict and strikes,” Lavigne says. “There is a kind of tension between those different kinds of waves, one with fantastic energy and the other, something very melancholy.”

The Bourse de Commerce houses billionaire François Pinault’s contemporary art collection.Credit: Alamy Stock Photo

It is perhaps the future wave that has been most ­unexpected in recent years. Almost miraculously, Paris has become a centre for innovation, symbolised by Station F, with Grenoble, 575 kilometres south-east from Paris, France’s deep-tech equivalent of the US’s Silicon Valley or India’s Bangalore. The 34,000-square-metre “campus” has incubated 1000 start-ups a year since 2017. The 2022 crop raised $US1 billion for the first time, compared with $300-500 million in its first years, and included Station F’s first unicorn ­(defined as a privately held start-up valued at more than $US1 billion), the AI platform Hugging Face.

In early May, Ernst & Young declared France the most attractive country for business in Europe for the fifth year running, ahead of the UK and Germany. Barely a fortnight later, Microsoft announced its ­largest-ever investment in France: €4 billion ($6.5 ­million) for “cloud and AI infrastructure, and French tech ­acceleration”, including a complete overhaul of the “AI factory” mentoring program it has run at Station F as a tenant since day one.

Microsoft had also tipped $US16 million into Mistral, the AI start-up founded by 31-year-old French computer scientist Arthur Mensch in June 2023. A late
entrant from left field, Mistral has been hailed as the only real challenger to “what had become a two-way battle between Google and Microsoft-backed OpenAI,” as the UK’s Financial Times noted in January.

If Louis was the face of old France, Mensch is the face of the new. A recent survey showed more than half of France’s young people aged between 25 and 34 wanted to start their own business. Not that all of Station F’s denizens are French: a third have come from overseas since day one, another sign of how much more open and ­desirable the country has become.

AI startup founder Arthur Mensch.Credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images

More than 5500 banking and finance jobs have ­migrated from London post-Brexit, including the likes of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Bank of America, making Paris the “leading post-Brexit continental ­finance centre,” according to Le Monde. The city is also the top destination for millionaires leaving the UK, helped by Macron’s abolition of wealth tax in favour of a flat 30 per cent on investments and income.

It’s one reason, no doubt, that luxury goods com­panies, for which Paris has always been HQ, today slog it out at the heart of the city with a brazenness many find troubling. Like the giant trompe l’oeil billboard on the Louvre’s facade last year, showing the museum being sucked into the gravitational pull of a new Tiffany bracelet. Or the one Louis Vuitton plastered across the facade of the Musée d’Orsay like a sticker in a game of Who Am I?.

Foundations started by the owners of those con­glomerates have been pile drivers in that cultural ­renaissance, from Pinault, whose Kering luxury group spans Gucci, Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga and Alexander McQueen, to LVMH, owned by the world’s second-richest man, Bernard Arnault, which launched its Louis Vuitton Foundation in 2014. The foundations have been key in attracting a welter of international commercial galleries to Paris, including Swiss gallery Hauser & Wirth, which opened last October in a four-storey mansion near the Champs Élysées a week before Art Basel’s booming new fair Paris+ (now known as Art Basel Paris). Coming just a week after a widely panned 20th-anniversary edition of London’s Frieze fair, Paris+ confirmed the heat had crossed the channel, even if London remained a bigger art market.

Nor is it just big private money; the gallery scene has exploded at all levels. Also ­opening last October was Komunuma, an 11,000-square-metre modernist site that includes a former pharmaceutical factory and offices in Romainville, which the foundation of the Fiminco real estate group has turned into a hub for art ventures ranging from artists’ residences to commercial galleries.

A former communist town just outside the Périphérique, the infamous ring road that for ­decades has marked Paris’ contemporary limit, Romainville is a symbol of how fast things are morphing. “Paris is changing also in relation to the new bridges and links with the close suburbs,” Emma Lavigne says. “Komunuma was a new way also to work in a more ­collective way … I am working in a private institution, but I think there is a very dynamic constellation of ­institutions [incorporating those that are privately funded and those] supported by public money.”

Those streams – public and private, left and centre – combine throughout the city. Macron, a former ­investment banker, has been dubbed “the president of the wealthy”, but a quarter of Paris residents now live in public housing, almost double the proportion 30 years ago, largely thanks to the left-wing parties on Paris Council. Even Station F has its equivalent, a ­co-living venture called Flatmates that offers 100 apartments and 600 rooms to battle the single biggest bar its denizens face – the cost of rent.

Nobody had expected the “city of cheese” to come back from the ’90s.

Alongside Station F is La Felicità, a 4500-square-metre food court that pitches itself somewhere between a bazaar and gypsy camp, incorporating Turkish carpets, strung lights and a train carriage. On a weekday, Station F habitués queue companionably with more formally dressed workers from the nearby Rive Gauche business district in Europe’s biggest restaurant.

More broadly, the city is “approaching a new zenith of glorious liveability,” Paris-based Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper declared last December. Still and sparkling water flows from public fountains in every district, thanks to Paris City Hall, which – in the same year it announced the fontaines pétillantes, 2017 – also turned the Georges Pompidou expressway along the right bank of the Seine into a pedestrian zone.

Today, the two kilometres from the Tuileries ­gardens to Bastille is one of the world’s great walks. Particularly on a summer night, with young people spilling out of the open-air bars and restaurants that line it, or picnicking on the banks of the river. Or riding bikes and ­kicking balls in netted soccer spaces, the scene lit, joyous, where there was once only stone, dark water, shadows.

Little wonder the UK Times ­fretted last year that Paris was “now cooler than London”, citing everything from a natural-wine boom to a rash of hip, new restaurants in the 20th arrondissement of which London can only dream, and Paris+, attended by ­almost 80,000 over two editions. Then there was Netflix’s escapist romcom Emily in Paris, which hit a pandemic-assisted 58 million viewers worldwide ­within a month of its 2020 launch. Nobody had expected the “city of cheese”, as The Times dubbed it, to come back from the ’90s, when its youth had fled “the bistro-mausoleum of Paris” for London.

Even the impenetrable waters of the Seine are ­clearing. These days, a reef of abandoned bikes can be seen dumped near the river’s edge. That they’re not bodies, given the well-oiled crowds that gather after dark, is just another of Paris’ miracles.

The old brain drain – to the US, UK, anywhere, really, but hide-bound France – seems to have ­reversed.

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All going well, in four weeks’ time barges will carry 10,000-plus athletes down the suddenly swimmable Seine, a king tide conveniently raising them to eye height as officials, sports lovers and the simply rich cheer from brilliantly coloured spectator seating pitched on banks and bridges. Or not. That picture is an amalgam of various renderings of the Paris Olympics opening ceremony, the Eiffel Tower in the distance, halfway into a 24-carat sunset. And what’s wrong with it sometimes seems to be almost everything.

Artist’s impression of the Olympics opening ceremony.Credit: Google Image

While the Seine has indeed been flooding, it’s so far only caused the cancellation of opening ceremony rehearsals and test swimming events after alarming levels of bacteria were found. Then there’s the less ­literal tide. “Everybody sees the floodwaters of the far-right rising,” Macron said, calling the snap elections on June 10. France was already on high alert due to the Middle East and Ukraine long before a state of emergency was declared in New Caledonia in May.

Such turmoil appears the rule rather than the ­exception on a sunny spring day, a year out from the opening ceremony, at Place de la Nation in eastern Paris. Even in a city of historic spots, this one is ­particularly loaded with significance. In 1660, the Sun King himself sat on a throne here to receive oaths of allegiance, hence its then-name, Place du Trône. During the French Revolution, the throne was replaced with one of the city’s busiest guillotines and it became “Place du Trône-Renversé (Toppled-Throne)”.

The billowing bronze sculpture erected at its centre in 1899 to mark the centenary of the French Revolution, Aimé-Jules Dalou’s Triumph of the Republic, is a surging mass of hammer-wielding smithies and torchbearers on lion-back. Rising above them all is the towering ­personification of revolutionary France, Marianne, balancing on a globe like a circus performer.

People lie around in clusters on grass that’s textured like ’70s carpet, part of a city-wide program that has rewilded manicured parks as part of the “genuine ­environmental transition” to which Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo committed on her election 10 years ago. It’s a major shift for Parisians, who have traditionally ­preferred their nature still, topiaried or on a plate. Signs in public gardens now warn punters to beware of the rats, the main beneficiary of meadow grasses that now sprout picturesquely.

Protesters climb the famous Triumph of the Republic sculpture at the Place de la Nation on May Day this year.Credit: Getty Images

Rodents aren’t the problem today, though. As you approach Dalou’s monument you notice that Marianne is bleeding (it turns out to be red paint). Close up you catch the stickers of Marx on the torchbearer’s leg, the huge red anarchist’s “A” on the blacksmith’s apron, and over his shoulder, in the distance, the blackened eyes of a five-storey modern block on the square that went up in flames. It’s part of the debris remaining from the tide of ­thousands of people that peaked here in 2023, when violence rose during May Day protests calling on Macron to resign or ­withdraw pension reforms raising the retirement age from 62 to 64. Twenty-five police were injured and 111 people were detained in what became the flashpoint for a longer campaign of strikes and protests involving more than a million people. Transport was cancelled; garbage piled up in the streets. Protesters held aloft placards replacing Louis’ face with Macron’s on Rigaud’s portrait and suggesting Macron himself try early retirement.

It’s hard sometimes to fathom the visceral rage the French president engenders among a good portion of his subjects, particularly from a distance, where he can look like the last of the Angela Merkel-style European leaders. But many on the centre-left feel they have been left with no option but to support him, given the spectre of Le Pen.

France only ended up with the Eiffel Tower after commissioners rejected a 300-­metre-tall guillotine, among other proposals, to mark the revolution’s centenary.

Such protests are also performative, part of a time-honoured ritual for which Place de la République across town is a weekly, ­sometimes daily venue, from free-Tibet rallies to the Boomer-era Yellow Vests. Or the 3000 mainly young protesters who chanted “Everybody hates Marine Le Pen”, with middle fingers raised, on June 10, the same day Macron announced the snap election.

After all, France only ended up with that thrusting symbol of progress, the Eiffel Tower, after commissioners rejected a 300-­metre-tall guillotine, among other proposals, for the 1889 Exposition marking the revolution’s centenary. Paris mayor Hidalgo, a socialist, is reviled every bit as much as Macron. She may have been praised by Al Gore as a “visionary leader”, but her environmental initiatives have been vigorously opposed; a January poll put her approval rating at 30 per cent, down 12 points since 2018, and she got less than 2 per cent of the vote in her 2022 presidential campaign,
finishing 10th out of 12 candidates.

After vowing to bring “start-up nation” supremacy to France when elected in 2017, President Macron’s recent election call has rolled the dice on the country’s future.Credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images

Nevertheless, pollution has dropped 40 per cent in the city since 2014 and it now boasts 1300 kilometres of bike lanes. Then there is the wonder that is Paris’ Chemin de fer de Petite Ceinture, which carried travellers between the major stations before the Métro. I still remember my first glimpse of the “Small Belt Railway”, metres below the city street, on a visit to the 20th arrondissement in 2009. The ground-floor restaurant overlooked a section of overgrown tracks and high cement walls covered in graffiti, ending in a tunnel out of a zombie movie. Paris’ last untrammelled green space had become home to the homeless since most of it closed in 1934, together with addicts, dealers and “foxes and various other wildlife”, according to those who ­opposed its repurposing.

Now Hidalgo has opened eight kilometres of the old line, and the result is a combination of New York’s High Line, communal gardens and a long, narrow central park – and there are plans to open another four kilometres by 2026. The bars, cafes, restaurants and music venues that occupy some of its 17 train stations exude the relaxed, young vibe – vintage plates, plants, school desks surrounded by office chairs – usually associated with Berlin. The graffiti has remained, along with foraging gardens, in a city that allows each inhabitant access to less than 10 square metres of green space. “It is one of the last opportunities that we have in Paris, because the city is already almost built,” deputy mayor Christophe Najdovski, responsible for revegetation, green spaces and biodiversity, told me in 2022. “It’s a unique opportunity that exists in Paris. We want to keep it as wild as possible. So, we had a very mild intervention to just open and preserve the biodiversity as far as possible as it is.”

Part of a train line last used in the 1930s, the city’s Small Belt Railway is being revived as green public space. Credit: Alamy Stock Photo

On a summer evening, the outside terrace of Le Passage à Niveau, a bamboo-wood-and-glass restaurant that has grown out of the “Rail Farm” that houses and trains the city’s most vulnerable people, is packed with the same crowd that visits La Felicità. Or work at La Bourse, where young guides wander the floors, looking to engage visitors in contemporary art in the sort of fluent English that simply didn’t exist in Paris even 15 years ago.

The old brain drain – to the US, UK, anywhere, really, but hide-bound France – seems to have ­reversed. Paris has become a young city as much as the country more broadly has undergone what the BBC dubbed “a rejuvenation of French politics”. In January, the youngest president in French history (39 when elected in 2017) appointed the youngest and first openly gay prime minister, Gabriel Attal, 34. “I want to see it as a symbol of audacity,” Attal said at the time, vowing to “free up France’s potential”.

The appointment was also seen as countering the rise of one of right-wing populism’s new stars, the younger-still 28-year-old, Jordan Bardella.

President of the Rassemblement National, Bardella – who grew up in social housing near Romainville – led the European Election Fight and may shortly supplant Attal as France’s youngest-ever PM. Curiously, the two seem to get on. Not only do they use the ­familiar tu with each other, they were seen deep in ­conversation on a flight recently, the sort of generational renewal – and complicity – notably absent in places like the US or UK.

Nor is that rejuvenation just political. New York’s ARTnews described Lavigne’s Pinault appointment in September 2021 as “yet another shake-up at the top of a storied Paris institution”, with new leaders appointed to the Louvre, Musée du Quai Branly, Centre Pompidou, Musée d’Orsay and Musée de l’Orangerie. “There is also a new generation of museum directors now,” says Lavigne. “So there is a new energy.”

No one person or program – Olympic, cultural, presidential or mayoral – has been responsible, but “these kinds of things obviously feed off each other”, Station F’s ­director Roxanne Varza says of the energy that has emerged in Paris, from Station F’s start-up culture to the contemporary art boom. “When you have one thing that starts to attract people, then people think, ‘Oh, I can build something as well.’ I think it’s kind of a domino effect.”

Born in California to Iranian parents, Varza studied French literature at UCLA before working for the French government in the US “convincing American companies to open offices in France. During that time I heard all the clichés – 35-hour work week, strikes, holidays – non-stop,” she says. “After two years I thought, ‘Well, I want to come and see the reality.’

“I arrived from Palo Alto to study and work in ­start-ups in Paris. People were like, ‘What are you doing here? Just go home, there’s nothing to stay for.’ But I discovered this budding ecosystem that nobody was talking about. And that’s what I found interesting, to stay and to build.”

Having watched all that has ensued, Varza is acutely aware that the moment is as fragile as it was unlikely. “We are living in a very exceptional time in Paris,” she says, citing the Olympics as well as the AI summit Macron had announced for early 2025. “I was speaking with someone who worked for [former British prime ­minister] David Cameron when they had the Olympics in the UK [in 2012] who said, ‘Be very careful of this moment because it goes out, but then ­something has to come after.’ I find that we are living in a very exceptional moment [but] I do hope that it continues beyond this year.”

She was speaking in early May, before the latest round of upheavals, from New Caledonia to the EU elections, tilted vigilance into alarm. “It’s dark in the City of Light,” reads a new bit of ­graffiti in white against a black background on a bridge along that Seine pedestrian walk.

Earlier this month, Le Monde reported that Macron had “for several months” had “a small group of confidants” numbering less than 10 working “discreetly at the Elysée Palace” on the “high-risk scenario” of dissolving parliament. He had thought the European vote would be quickly forgotten, swept away by the Olympics this summer and another major celebration, the reopening of the Notre-Dame cathedral, in December. Then Rassemblement National got more than twice the vote of Macron’s coalition.

The lack of a clear parliamentary majority had made initiatives such as pension reform harder to negotiate. The UK Telegraph has speculated that Macron ­calculated he could claw back a small majority – a ­scenario doubted even in his own camp. Or, failing that, he could be setting a trap, allowing Rassemblement “to win control of the French parliament to expose [Le Pen’s] incompetence” ahead of the presidential election in 2027. While Macron himself couldn’t run for a third term constitutionally, the French would be forced to realise what was a stake.

What is clear is that a man famously impatient with old France had reached an impasse – with old France. “I do not want to give [the far right] the keys to power in 2027, so I fully accept having triggered a movement to provide clarification,” Macron said, calling the two rounds of elections for June 30 and July 7. That clarification seems to be as much about which version of Paris and France will prevail as who will lead it.

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