A few years ago, Eric Rohmer made a movie about the mayor of a village in the Vendée who decides that what his picturesque hamlet needs is not a new library but a médiathèque, an untranslatable word for a fashionable multimedia boondoggle.
A médiathèque building must be erected, which means bringing in an architect and setting aside space for parking lots and handicapped ramps and the right municipal lighting. In this particular village, it also would mean cutting down the venerable and pleasant tree near the house of the “baba cool” village teacher.
The teacher, not surprisingly, is against the whole project, as are related other stock characters in this curious movie: the newspaper editor, the muckraking freelance journalist, the mayor’s good-looking girlfriend, all for their own reasons. But it is the teacher who sums up certain things best: he has always been against the death penalty, he says, but he is in favor of restoring it, for architects.
Parisians could be forgiven for sharing the spirit of that line. The last twenty years have seen a new dimension in the destruction of Paris, not only for the large projects of François Mitterrand like the Opéra Bastille and the Très Grande Bibliothèque, but also in the spirit of what the French call urbanisme, where large parts of poorer neighborhoods are razed to make way for the steel and glass concoctions of real estate promoters and fashionable architects, in the triumph of vulgarity, greed,
