Why, oh why, do we love Paris?

THESE two books about Paris take very different approaches to the history of the city. Alistair Horne's account starts in pre-history, when mammoths first wandered down from the slopes of present-day Belleville; it ends in 1969, when General de Gaulle left the Elysée palace. Mr Horne, a British historical writer, likes sweeping generalisations and confident assertions. In the introduction, Maurice Druon, President Pompidou's last culture minister, calls Mr Horne's book a monument, and it does indeed pay homage to a view that is held by a certain kind of English gentleman. Paris as an ice-cream sundae—high politics and high culture topped with dash and romance.

Patrice Higonnet is more sceptical and more specialised. As current academic jargon would put it, he seeks to study metanarratives rather than construct them. Mr Higonnet is interested in myths and phantasmagorias, which he sees as more modern and more self-consciously artificial myths. He looks at how people, mainly artists and writers, came to see Paris as the capital city of artistic creation, sexual freedom, crime and alienation.

“Paris: Capital of the World” is, in many ways, an insider's account. Mr Higonnet has taught in America for most of his life, but in recent years he has become an important figure in French cultural politics. This book originated in a series of lectures he gave to that most Parisian of institutions, the Collège de France. It contains a very Parisian blend of grand theory (there are dutiful nods to Jürgen Habermas and Roland Barthes) and local gossip (he suggests that the inconvenient layout of the central Paris metro is rooted in the need to avoid running a line under the Palais Mazarin where it might have disturbed the deliberations of the Académie Française).

Mr Higonnet believes that, in the 20th century, Paris lost its cultural hegemony to New York, though he is sceptical about whether, in view of the opportunities offered by the Internet, any city will again enjoy that same primacy. There are several problems with this argument. First, it rests on some peculiar comparisons—saying, as Mr Higonnet does, that Jackson Pollock is the equivalent of Manet is as meaningless as saying that Arnold Schwarzenegger is the equivalent of Juliette Binoche. Second, the cultural power of America in the 20th century has actually served to reinforce certain myths about Paris. As early as the 1920s, American film producers commissioned the Seeberger brothers to take photographs of what they regarded as characteristic Parisian scenes which could then be replicated on Hollywood sets. Where, except New York, would a curator put a metro station in a museum of modern art, and what restaurant could be more self-consciously Parisian than Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles in Manhattan?

Third, the assumption that Paris has been displaced as the cultural capital of the world looks even more questionable if we look east rather than west. Paris still represents culture, freedom and excitement to many in east and Central Europe. Writers such as Milan Kundera and Ismail Kadaré moved to the city as soon as they were released from their native lands. No film evokes the excitement that went with the opening of cold-war frontiers better than Yuri Mamin's “Window to Paris” in which the inhabitants of a St Petersburg tenement find a magic door that lets them out straight on to a Paris rooftop.

Finally, and this is a point that Mr Higonnet makes very effectively, those who grieve for a lost Paris should remember that part of the city's appeal comes precisely from the aching sense of regret for better days that it has always evoked. Those who complain that the city was ruined by Georges Pompidou and Richard Rogers in the 1970s echo those who complained in the 1930s that Baron Haussmann had ruined the city in the 1860s. Though Mr Horne might not agree, perhaps Mr Higonnet is right to suggest that the best testament to Paris is the title that Simone Signoret gave her autobiography “Nostalgia isn't what it used to be”.