This city is easy to rip on. After all, unlike London (which everyone knows is the Center of the Known Universe), Paris is the Known Universe. Outside of the BP, ships fall off the edge of the world and are eaten by dragons, which somehow does not satisfactorily explain how all Parisians possessed of a motor vehicle manage to get together at the exact same time on certain Friday afternoons and crawl South as part of a titanic metal centipede. Or where all the wine comes from. Carrefour, probably. Either way, French science, as a product of French hautes écoles, which are clearly the world’s greatest, indubitably has a way to explain all this.
Nonetheless, it’s a polite city, notwithstanding the innumerable accounts of frustrated tourists, shaking with impotent rage after having their high school French snooted at by a waiter somewhere. Note to tourists: don’t worry, it’s not you, they do it to each other as well. No, it’s the small, automatic expressions of politeness that make me smile sometimes
Somehow, despite the pushing and shoving and not letting people out the doors before storming into the rush hour Metro, people generally clear a path for others escaping a packed subway car. The occasional fights that break out in traffic from time to time, when two frustrated middle-aged men (or, in one memorable case, me and a potbellied, abusive delivery truck driver) decide to blow their tops and have at each other, are inevitably broken up by well-meaning passersby. People hold doors open, say “merci Monsieur”, and tend to avoid casual eye contact. Except for blatantly staring at anyone speaking an even vaguely foreign language in public, but then again, for such a cosmopolitan country, it’s almost cute how little they’re exposed to the Great Non-French Abroad.
Oddly enough, it doesn’t seem to apply to a lot of seemingly common-sense actions; you’d think, given how sensibly a lot of parents seem to deal with their children — not a lot of “goo goo ha ha ha” baby talk going on, nuh-uh. Teenagers laying down carpets of cigarette butts on every free square inch of park lawn, moped riders cutting off bicyclists’ access to gaps between cars in traffic (that they themselves can’t fit through), the absolutely determined rage with which motorists react to being passed, all these serve as reminders that you’re not dealing with some sort of well-behaved, altruistic candyland.
Maybe these bits of politeness are a method for dealing with 8 million urbanites and uncounted commuters crawling about a limited space like so many Gallic ants every day, and often, it definitely comes across as superficial, even false, maybe masking a cutting putdown delivered with an insincere smile, but it sure makes life just that little bit more pleasant.