A Tale of Two Cities Becoming One

Near the Lycee Charles de Gaulle, Loic and his pals fire up Gauloise cigarettes, sip thimbles of jet-black coffee and argue about the day’s headlines in Le Monde, happy in their preferred suburb of Paris: London.

A morning’s train ride away, across the Channel, English kids knock back pints of bitters and debate the merits of Liverpool’s soccer team at the Frog & Princess Pub in Saint-Germain-des-Pres.

In the 19th century, Charles Dickens contrasted the two great metropolises, rivals for 2,000 years, in “A Tale of Two Cities.” These days, it might be A Tale of One City.

Cliches are out the window. Terrific food, even frogs’ thighs and garlic-laced snails, may be had in London. Parisians are likely to smile in sympathy at a visitor’s fractured French and respond in polite English.

Staid old London swings in ways Queen Victoria would not have liked at all. Paris seems tamer, a trifle confused over its diminishing world role as the capital of glitz and glory.

And as the cities draw closer together yet keep their separate characters, London seems to have developed far the stronger pull.

As jobs grew scarce at home over recent years, perhaps 250,000 Frenchmen moved across the Channel. With an undersea tunnel, they could commute between cities in three hours. The European Union freed them from immigration and customs.

Paris, rich in beauty, is more stylish. It is still better able to electrify the world with a frisson of grandeur on such occasions as a millennium change when those lights danced around the Eiffel Tower.

But London feels more dynamic, more full of life, and more fun until the pubs shut down. The venerable 11 p.m. closing time is about to be abolished, and in the meantime, partying goes on in private clubs.

“For me, the difference is that London is real, alive,” said Trevor Wheeler, a financial consultant with no particular bias. “Paris is like a city in aspic, lovely in its way but somehow just sitting there.”

Chantal Jaouen, a professional designer of fancy banquets, agrees. “I am French, but I’ll stay in London,” she said. “When you have the energy to do something, it is just too hard to get it done over there.”

Loic Lhopitallier, 16, a student at the prestigious French high school (lycee), came to stay in 1986 with his father, one of many French bankers who work in the City, London’s Wall Street.

“What do I miss about Paris?” he reflected. “Nothing. Paris is not green enough. I hate the people. They depress you all the time. I love it here.”

There is, of course, the other view. Loic’s friend Julie Lenoux moved to London two years ago and can’t get home fast enough. “I think people laugh more in Paris,” she said.

In fact, no one’s generalities carry much weight anymore. London and Paris, with their striking new similarities, defy the old descriptions.

Britain’s unemployment, less than 5%, is still half of France’s, but now jobs can be found in Paris. Many Frenchmen who went to work in finance, electronics and restaurants have come home with Anglicized tastes.

As the EU gradually loosened controls, Londoners flocked to Paris to shop, eat and buy property. Officials can’t say how many, since citizens of both countries carry EU travel documents. In essence, it is one big place.

Eurostar, the cross-Channel train, offers a round-trip ticket for about $70 designed for people who want to spend Saturday night partying in another language and then drag home early Sunday.

International tourism, meantime, laid down an American-accented omnicultural carpet that muffled old distinctions between Leicester Square and Les Halles. And money from elsewhere drove up real estate prices everywhere.

“Both cities have changed beyond recognition,” said Larry Collins, a sometimes Londoner whose book “Is Paris Burning?” described Hitler’s plan to destroy the French capital.

Like most people who know both well, he finds the two now fit together comfortably, each complementing the other while retaining its own personality.

“I first fell in love with Paris in the 1950s, when I came as a GI, and it is still a wonderful place,” Collins said. “But if I had to choose, it would be London. Things are so much more ordered, and life is better.”

But certainly not cheaper. “Down and Out in Paris and London,” George Orwell’s 1933 memoir, might also bear updating. An inspired pauper can still scrape by in Paris. In London, he’d likely starve and go roofless.

In fancy parts of London, rents can be twice those on Avenue Foch in Paris. A McDonald’s “Royale Cheese” in Paris is just like a Quarter Pounder in London, except it costs less. Subway riders find Le Metro cheaper than the Tube.

Until Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, the two economies shared common values: protected jobs and social safety nets at the cost of high taxes. Now London’s labor laws seem closer to those in New York.

“I came to make some quick money,” explained David Goacolau, pouring pastis at Flo, a French franchise cafe in South Kensington. “It’s easy to find work here but easy to get the sack, as well. That makes you stronger.”

In April, France was dismayed to learn that Laetitia Casta, the shapely actress chosen by the country’s mayors as the symbol of Gallic beauty and virtue, had decamped to London.

She told reporters she preferred to live in “a diverse and lively city,” but many Frenchmen suspected that the reason had more to do with income tax. For the wealthy, levies in France might run half again as much as in Britain.

Both cities date back to Romans who conquered settlements at river fords: Celts on the Thames, Gauls on the Seine. Ever since, they have had a history of bitter rivalry relieved by occasional rapprochement.

Napoleon was the first to propose a tunnel under the Channel two centuries ago. The emperor’s nephew, Napoleon III, revived the idea in 1856, but it was shot down in Britain.

“What?” Lord Palmerston is famously reported to have exclaimed. “You wish to make us contribute towards a scheme, the purpose of which is to reduce the distance we find already too short?”

Now Frenchmen alight at Waterloo Station, and hardly anyone thinks back to historic irony. The London-Paris trip is shorter than London-Edinburgh or Paris-Marseille.

Today, the cities with their outer rings are the same size. Each approaches 8 million inhabitants, 12% of the national population. Drivers use different sides of the road, but most sit stalled in similar traffic jams.

For all they have in common, however, their characters are different.

“Paris sees itself as a national capital, the quintessence and refinement of everything French,” author Julian Barnes said in an interview. “London is one of several cosmopolitan cities, more Americanized, businesslike, less individual.”

Companies on London’s stock exchange total about $8.8 trillion in capitalization compared with $2.3 trillion for Paris, with Brussels and Amsterdam thrown in. Londoners broker half the world’s shipping.

Deciding between London and Paris requires a lifestyle choice. Like Daphne Benoit, a French journalism student with flawless English, many young people are happy to be close enough so they don’t have to choose.

“I love Paris, my little neighborhood, the way I can walk around a center, but life is so structured,” she said. “Everyone is posing, like, ‘Did you see me?’ In London you can be who you want. No one cares.”

That seems true enough, no matter where you look. The range in Paris runs from sloppy to chic, but London knows no extremes.

On any given workday, there are sentries in scarlet tunics and bearskin and Horse Guards surrounding a royal family still beloved to many. In the City, pinstriped bespoke suits recall London’s formal earlier days.

But at all-night clubs where only the outrageous and drop-dead elegant get through the doors, the dress code is Absolutely Fabulous.

By day, anything goes: fuchsia spiked hair, hot pants and high platform shoes, heavy metal facial ornaments. No one seems to notice.

Both cities have sizable communities drawn from far-flung former colonies, but London is by far the more international. Power brokers from the Middle East, Asia and points south all cross paths at Heathrow Airport.

While Paris cleans up its classic buildings, London reinvents the old and creates the new in ways the French capital did a decade ago.

Shakespeare’s old Globe Theater has come to life again. An obsolete power plant on the Thames has become a magnificent annex to the Tate Gallery. Every unused space seems to shelter a trendy new bar or a techy upstart business.

But there is still that cross-Channel French accent. When the much-maligned Millennium Dome slipped closer toward becoming a billion-dollar bomb, officials hired a Parisian manager to boost its appeal.

No Bastille Day festivities in Paris raised amused cheers like this year’s pageant outside Maison Bertaux on Greek Street, deep in Soho.

The pastry shop was founded by refugees from the brief Paris Commune rebellion of 1871. Now it’s owned by Michele Wade, English through and through, and her staff is more Balkan than Gallic.

Each July 14, she hauls out the rickety wooden guillotine and dresses up her colleagues in frilly bonnets, leather britches and bloody bandages to reenact the French Revolution.

At the last notes of La Marseillaise, the proprietress flung back an arm for a well-engineered finale: an ample bosom escaped her bodice. A nearby London bobby merely harrumphed, “Let them eat cake.”