Paris Travel Beyond the Postcards

John Bowie, LawFuel publisher

There’s something magnificently perverse about Paris that means every time I arrive, the city is busy tearing itself apart. In 2018 it was the yellow vests blocking roundabouts and setting fire to things. In 2023, Marseilles was ablaze with riots after a police shooting days earlier in Paris.

And in 2025, Nation, my arrondissement of choice, was thick with protesters raging against some governmental idiocy or other. It’s as if the city has a special radar that detects my arrival and immediately summons the barricades.

Yet the peculiar thing about all this is that none of it matters. Paris shrugs off political turmoil the way other cities shake off rain. Although Paris can struggle on that front, too. The restaurants remain open, the cafés still serve their pricy espressos, and the impossibly chic women, who legend says never get fat, continue gliding along Boulevard Saint-Germain looking like they’ve been dressed by the ghost of Giorgio Armani.

Because Paris is eternal in a way that could almost make Rome look like a flash in the pan. It’s not just old. After all, everywhere is old if you dig deep enough. Paris is also aggressively, unapologetically, exhaustingly beautiful. The kind of beautiful that makes you suspicious. As if the entire city is in on some elaborate joke at the expense of everywhere else.

The gardens are preposterously manicured and managed with Parisian precision, every hedge trimmed with the knife-edge confidence of a neurosurgeon, every flower bed arranged like it’s in a Vogue photoshoot.

And indeed there are Vogue photoshoots as the streets are trod. Walking through the Jardin du Luxembourg feels like trespassing in someone’s living room. You half expect a butler to appear and ask you to leave.

Navigating all this splendor requires either decades of practice or a London-trained offspring capable of wrestling Apple Maps and the Metro system into submission. My son, bless him, served as combination guide and subway savant, sparing us the mental anguish of deciphering the Parisian underground.

Though above ground remains my walking point – taking in the apartments with their lofty, classy architecture and the perpetual theater of Parisian street life, the Metro does however deliver you efficiently to the city’s varied locales.

But walking the long boulevardes remains the personal preference, taking in the apartments with their lofty proportions and giant front doors and their windows shuttered against the world, concealing interiors that you just know are stuffed with inherited furniture, first-edition books, and people who’ve never had to worry about money or taste because they were born with industrial quantities of both.

And walking lets you take The in the perpetual theatre of Parisian street life, which saw the Fitness apps congratulating us with its algorithmic cheesyness, making it sound like we had traversed the entire HexaTrek.

Cordon Bleu

The food, of course, is a performance. Not a meal, a theatrical production with multiple acts and an interval for you to contemplate what you’ve just eaten. The waiters deliver each course with the solemnity of priests at High Mass. The prices are announced without apology, as if charging forty euros for six oysters is simply the natural order of things. I don’t pay that sort of money – mainly because I don’t eat oysters.

Take Le Rubis, for instance, a cheerful, cramped, utterly delightful wine bar just a stone’s throw from where thieves recently deployed a cherry picker for a Netflix-ready Louvre robbery. (The Louvre cherry-picking occurred a month after our departure, so we maintain our innocence.) The place operates on the principle that if you squeeze enough bonhomie and decent wine into a space barely larger than a broom cupboard, nobody minds the lack of elbow room. It’s the sort of establishment where the wine flows freely, the conversation louder, and you might emerge slightly drunk and convinced you’ve discovered the real Paris.

Then there’s Lorette in the 9th Arrondissement, where we committed the holy trinity of French indulgence: snails, duck, and profiteroles. Each course arrived as if orchestrated by someone who takes food far too seriously, which is to say, exactly seriously enough. A food critic might say the snails were garlicky little bullets of butter and umami. I would say earthy – the flavour coming from the rich sauces the French love so much.

And the profiteroles were an architectural achievement in choux pastry and generously poured chocolate sauce, the kind of dessert that makes you temporarily forget you have arterie

But here’s where that Netflix confection Emily in Paris gets it catastrophically wrong. The real Parisians aren’t quirky and approachable and desperate to be your friend. They’re doing something far more interesting. They’re maintaining standards. Keeping up appearances is more like a civic duty than vanity.

Every coiffed head, every perfectly tied scarf, every fluffy pooch being walked on a leather leash is part of an elaborate system designed to remind the rest of the world that they’re doing it wrong.

The city reveals itself differently depending on which neighborhood you’re wandering. Montmartre still trades on its bohemian past, though these days the bohemians have been priced out and replaced by tourists queuing for the Sacré-Cœur. On our visit a ‘fun run’ swelled numbers to something more akin to a sweaty sports day gala.

Taking in the essence of places like Saint-Germain is where Paris keeps its most concentrated essence of Parisian-ness.

The Marais, however, somehow manages to be both historically significant and fashionably current, its narrow medieval streets now home to concept stores and galleries that wouldn’t look out of place in Shoreditch.

The Ritz area downtown radiates that particular kind of wealth that doesn’t need to announce itself. And Saint-Germain, well, we’ve already established Saint-Germain is where Paris goes to remind itself how Parisian it is.

Golden Paris Facades

The weather, naturally, maintains the city’s reputation for dramatic temperament. One moment you’re basking in golden sunshine that makes every limestone facade glow like honey until the rain comes and its indoors. I’ve always said, the best cities have bad, or at least temperamental climates.

If you want bland and sunny, try Brisbane or Bucharest. But even weather vararies seem intentional, as if Paris has arranged the weather specifically to give you an excuse to visit another gallery, buy another coffee or linger in another doorway of yet another ‘name’ boutique while your wife looks for ‘a short-sleeved blouse’ or a pair of ‘casual slacks’ she needs.

I wound up at Petit Bateau like that, and what seemed like a week in Merci, the trendy designer and we-sell-anything store.

The museums, galleries, and monuments sprawl across the city like a civilization’s greatest hits compilation. The Louvre alone could keep you busy until death, wandering its endless corridors past more masterpieces than most countries possess in total, apart from some missing jewels.

The Musée d’Orsay turns Impressionism into an overwhelming assault on the senses. Versailles sits just outside the city like a massive architectural boast: “Look what we built when we were really showing off.”

Louvre Travel Tips

And the Louvre, which we skipped on this occasion because we only had a few days, not the extra lifetime to wend through the endless rooms and corridors. Most visitors underestimate the Louvre’s size, built as a fortress in the 12th century to keep out the Vikings, (but not cherry-picking robbers) is almost a separate Parisian arrondissement. They think, “We’ll just pop in, see the Mona Lisa, and grab lunch.” Six hours later, they’re in the Mesopotamian wing, hallucinating hieroglyphics and weeping quietly into their audio guides. The Louvre doesn’t have visitors so much as survivors, people who make it out blinking into the Paris sunlight, clutching postcards they don’t remember buying.

And then there’s the Seine, that tourist-trap river cruise I’d always dismissed as too naff to contemplate. Except it turns out that sometimes the touristy thing is touristy for a reason. Seeing Paris from the water provides a perspective that walking never quite achieves. The buildings take on different proportions.

The bridges reveal themselves as the architectural statements they were always meant to be. Notre-Dame, even in its post-fire reconstruction, commands the skyline with wounded dignity. It’s the kind of experience that makes you temporarily forget you’re doing something guidebooks recommend, which is perhaps the highest compliment you can pay any tourist activity.

It’s exhausting, actually. London gives you permission to be scruffy, to slouch about in yesterday’s clothes eating something beige out of a paper bag. Paris doesn’t permit such moral weakness. Every street corner is a referendum on your taste, your grooming, your understanding of what it means to be civilized.

And yet, despite the protests and the prices and the perpetual sense that everyone is judging you, Paris works and delivers on its promise. When you’re watching the evening light turn the limestone buildings golden in the Marais, or wandering the bookstalls along the Seine, or stumbling upon some perfect little square you never knew existed, you understand why people have been banging on about this city for centuries.

The Parisians have decided that beauty matters, that standards matter, that the difference between good bread and bad bread is worth fighting over. And while this makes them occasionally insufferable, it also makes them right. Because in an age when everywhere is trying to be everywhere else, Paris remains defiantly, irritatingly, magnificently itself.

Visiting Paris is like visiting a particularly impressive relative. You arrive, you’re dazzled by their house and their wine cellar and their impossibly high standards. You feel both inspired and inadequate. And then you leave, grateful for the experience, relieved to return to somewhere less demanding, and already planning when you’ll come back. Possibly even without the riots and protests.

Because Paris, for all its flaws and its fury and its bottomless capacity to make you feel like a provincial rube, is still the city that every other city is trying to be. Even when it has so much to say about how wrong things are.