The history of Paris reaches back to Roman and even Neolithic times. Visitors often have the impression that the city has always been there, and always had to be there. To move from one of its monuments to another is to walk through history. Goethe – though he never visited Paris – called it the universal city, and over the centuries the resonances of the place have been rich and varied. Its native sons and daughters have achieved great things, as have the visitors who chose to live there for brief periods or a lifetime – from John Adams and Ben Franklin to Gertude Stein and James Baldwin, to name a few. And unlike Venice or Florence, contemporary Paris is not just a center of world tourism with a glorious past. It remains a vibrant and modern city whose influence extends through time and space.

How can we attempt to understand Paris both historically and emotionally? ANd how can we write a history of this great city that will not just rehearse material that many fine historians have already made familiar to us? The approach taken here is to give an account of its myths, a history not of factual events buf of the way in which the city has been perceived, conceived and dreamed – Paris as the capital of modernity, or mystery, or tradition; Paris as the capital of art and fashion; Paris as the capital of world revolution; Paris as the capital of pleasure, crime, sex, science.

This choice of method is not without problems, the most obvious being that it is very hard to say what a ‘myth’ might be. It often seems as if the number of definitions bears a direct correlation to the number of scholars who have written on the subject. Enlightement thinkers, for example, generally viewed myth as the (confused) recollection of events that had actually occured; thus the biblical myth of a great flood was attributed to the hazy remembrance of some ancient catastrophe. Others have proposed anthropomorphic definitions, seeing myth as the stylization of lived experience; on this reasoning Apollo is the Greek god of the sun and Chac is the Mayan god of rain because the individual yearns to connect the essential aspects of his daily life and being to such deities, whose good will he can implore and whose deeds and voices can be fitted into vast celestial schemes. Thus the fall of the Bastill, built to defend and then oppress Paris, became a myth because human beings needed – and no doubt still need – this symbol of liberty.

There are also structural explanations of myth. In the writings of Claude Lévi-Strauss, myths are imaginary constructs that enable us to understand what might otherwise seem to defy common sense and lived experience. Hence the myth of Paris as ‘the capital of the nineteenth century’. This compelling idea helps us to understand the extraordinary assemblage of talented individuals – poets, novelists, painters, composers, statesmen, philosophers, scientists – that inhabited the city in those days, especially in the 1840s

Yet the definition of myth that best fits the history of Paris is simpler and plainer. For the purposes of this journey, we shall view myths as life stories, each of which has a beginning, a trajectory and a conclusion – stories that all societies elaborate to explain to themselves the rise and sometimes the fall of their collective enterprise. The story of Genesis served this funciton for ancient Israel, just as the tale of the birth, death, and apotheosis of Christ does within the Christian worldview. All peoples – from the Mayans, with their Popol Vuh, to the Russian Soviets, with their Marxist tracts – have evolved cosmogonic myths of creation, becoming and decline.

Universality is the primary characteristic of such myths. The story of Romulus and Remus concerns the origin of the entire Roman people; it does not distinguish between the plebs and the equestrian class. Its selfless heroes express the aspirations of the society as a whole – they have no private goals or flaws. A myth of this type is, in Nietzsche’s phrase, an ‘orgiastische Selbstvernichtung’ – a festive and even orgiastic self-nullification. In ancient Rome, as anterior founding myths became less and less credible, it was precisely their universality that made possible the shift from comprehensive myths to comprehensive histories of the city. Similarly, the history of Paris in the nineteenth century – or from the middle decades of the eighteenth century to the early middle decades of the twentieth – can be imagined as the universalizing and secularized sequel to collective religious myths that had begun to die.

This definition of myth, derives in no small measure from the work of the linguist and philosopher Roland Barthes. In his view, the purpose of modern mythologies is to deform, diminish and even destroy our understanding of lived experience by altering the expected relation of the sign (any element that represents) to the signified (that which is represented). Contemporary myth, he thought, turns a meaningful sign – which bespeaks an enriching exchange or correlation – into a static, artificial and arbitrary fabrication. Instead of conceptualizing the object or situation it describes, it ignores the origin and true purpose of the signified. The modern myth is deception.

In Mythologies (1957), Barthes clarified his argument with a photograph from a popular illustrated French weekly, Paris Match. The photo showed a very black soldier, dressed in a French uniform and saluting the tricolor national flag. How would average Frenchmen in the 1950s have reacted to this image? They would no doubt have felt deep pride. They would have seen in this ‘text’ yet one more proof – if proof were needed – of France’s civilizing mission and of French culture’s ability to transform potential (or even practicing) cannibals into law-abiding citizens. This cultural musing would have led such viewers to the thought that France’s colonialism was justified: other countries had acquired colonies for profit or strategic gain, but France – or so the photo implied – was more selfless.

More sophisticated viewers, however, might have seen this military image as validating their belief that France, weakened by self-indulgence and a reluctance to endure sacrifice, needed colonial troops to defend itself against envious or malicious neighbors. On such a reading, this carefully staged photograph concealed the true nature of French and European colonialism. Its image was a ‘myth’ in the ordinary sense of that word today – meaning that it was a fabrication, a false rendering of some person or situation. Indeed, as Barthes argued, the photo, like most modern myths, was a conservative or even reactionary fabrication because it aimed to structure the worldview of the spectator: on the one side was Africa, sorely in need of European-style civilizing; on the other was France, modern, generous, internally consistent and homogenous. Whatever differences might have existed within French society were ignored. Such modern mythologies, in Barthes’s sense, are still being created today. They are essentially engineered by manipulative governments and avaricious corporations that wish to foist onto a nation’s citizens many policies and consumer goods they do not need or even truly want.

We seem to encounter a contradiction here: cosmogonic myths are in some deep sense true, but Barthes’s myths are manifestly false. How can the two be reconciled? The answer given here is that they are compatible if properly historicized. Myths – in particular, the myths of Paris – are not uniform over time. The modern phenomenon that Barthes described should be termed not a myth but a phantasmagoria.

A cosmogoic myth explains the profane by reference by reference to what is sacred and eternal. For example, in 1871 the Parisian Communards understood their lives by placing them in a unversal context: their struggle, however local it might have seemed, was that of an ecumenical and enduring proletariat struggling throughout the world to be free.

Phantasmagoria, in contrast, inverts the purpose of cosmogonic myth. It deforms the past in a self-justifying way by drastically siimplifying it to accord with a superficial and even selfish need. This process can be viewed in a positive light, as the Surrealists of the 1920s viewed it when they described phantasmagoria to be a self-deluing and self-indulgent fantasy, shallow and deceptive. “There is no place in the world like Paris, wrote Mozart to his father in 1778; Parisians, he thought’are and alwyays will be assses’. Fashion and appearance mattered more to them than real life, a harsh udgment, no doubt, but one that fits nicely here: whereas myths enable us to understand, phantasmagorias help us merely to deceive. Advertisements therefore often have a phantasmagoric purpose, taking a reference that we know (such as a brand name) and combining it with false promises. In Barthes’s words, the ‘erosion’ effected by such a phantasmagoria is ‘directly proportional to the arbitrariness of its meaning’.

But why use the term ‘phantasmagoria’ rather than the simpler ‘phantasm’ or even ‘fantasy’. First, and most literally because phantasmagorias (although, alas, invented in London) were an authentically Parisian phenomenon. These enormously popular nineteenth-century entertainments consisted of images projecten from a lantern onto a screen, which was set between the lantern and the spectators. The inventor of the process, a professor of physics named Etienne Robert, born in Belgium but buried at Pere-Lachaise Cemetery in 1837, claimed that phantasmagorias were so lifelike that through them it was possible to make the dead speak.

Second and more important, is the metaphorical meaning of the word. Marx, a historian of Parisian politics (all his historical writings relate to Paris), often used the term ‘phantasmagoria’ n a very precise way that is directly relevant here. For him the word denoted an illusion – or better, a self-delusion – that would have us believe that universalist relations of love or equality can exist in a hierarchical society where some people brutally command and others abjectly obey. On this definition, Edmund Burke’s eighteenth – century ideal of noble-minded landowers who cared deeply about their loyal peasants is a phantasmagoria. As is the American South’s antebellum ideal of the benevolent plantation owner who was generous to his slaves and was loved by them in turn.

In Paris, the Pompidou Center, with its fake, neo industrial design is an architectural phantasmagoria – intelligent, quite useful, and intended as a complex, crowd – pleasing phantasagoric joke, both mocking and iconic.