This Week’s Final Solution

Call it “art” and vest your hopes in a new and better Dystopia

No one enjoys arguing more than Parisians. Indeed, there is even a case to be made that the history of the city - from the French Revolution of 1789 to riots in the suburbs of November 2005, via the Commune of 1870 and the student revolt of May 1968 - is no more than one long argument. This is, after all, the city where sitting at cafe tables, smoking fags, drinking coffee or booze, and planning to destroy 'society as we know it' was first invented and then made into an art form. I first came here in the Eighties and fell in love immediately with the famous Parisian culture of la contestation (basically an intellectual French justification for having a belting row, usually accompanied by drink) and I have been here on and off ever since, writing books on the city and its people, teaching French (mainly Parisian) literature and always enjoying my immersion into a world where - from the Glorious Revolution to the recent riots - intellectual violence is never that far away from the real thing.

As such, one loony lefty writer has proposed to salve his personal queasiness with the successfully argumentative ”inclusive” multi-culti reprobates by deleting from the most illustrative of European cities the notion of its’ remaining Euro-ness.

As a “cure”.

How to ensure that Europe's beautiful old cities remain vibrant cultural and economic centres for the third millennium? It's a puzzle that has intrigued politicians for years.
One far-left Spanish novelist who lived in Paris has come up with a novel approach to the challenge: "De-Europeanise" the French capital, throwing its portes open to a new generation of immigrants (mostly from Africa) who will "destroy" Paris in order to recreate it for the 21st century.