Is Paris Burning?

The French paper Le Monde quoted Trump as saying that Paris was being “conquered, looted and burned to the ground by migrants, jihadists and communists.” The US press shows photos of major destruction in the streets, fires, smashed windows, gutted businesses. My friends and family in the US are all writing, “Are you okay?” My mom’s extreme right-wing friend wrote so much to me about the “destruction by Muslims” that I had to block him.

I’d been living between Paris and Florida since 2021, and on the day of Trump’s second inauguration, I left the US for good. It wasn’t just that I saw the country going down the toilet after Trump was re-elected and I felt powerless to stop it; I also just prefer an urban European lifestyle.

Over the past five years, I’ve seen lots of protests and strikes in Paris. It’s kind of a way of life here. They can be annoying, especially when public transit closes down. I now live where little is more than an hour’s walk, but during my first year I was in the Boulogne-Billancourt banlieue and lost out on a night at the opera because the metro operators were on strike, and the taxis jacked up their prices to the point that the opera would have cost double.