Bourgeoisie Mentality

I live on one of Haussman’s boulevards in Paris in an old bourgeoisie building which fits Haussman’s charming “street-wall” façade regulations splendidly.  The ground floor is for storefronts mostly—pharmacies, bakeries, boutiques, and the like—but amidst the storefronts is a large double-door that acts as the entrance to the apartments on the floors above the magasins.  The first floor apartments have proper balconies with iron railing while the following second through fifth floors (in France, the floors start at 0) have similar façades as the first floor, sometimes with, but often without, a balcony or railing of any kind.  The apartment façade is completed by a mansard roof with a 45° angle and dormer windows.

At the end of the hallway from the street-entrance to the apartments is where the concierge lives, and where a lavishly carpeted staircase leads up to the bourgeoisie apartments.  There are two bourgeoisie apartments on each of the first five floors, one on the right of the staircase, and one on the left of the staircase.  These apartments each take up half of the floor and contain several rooms, much like any apartment would.  Whereas in the western United States, one might rent an apartment only until a house can be purchased, a Parisien is a little more like a New Yorker and rents or owns an apartment for the mere sake of living in the city.  And owning an apartment in this part of Paris is what one considers “well-off.”  There is no ill connotation to the word apartment, here.  Furthermore, it’s apparent by the red-carpeted staircase and the extravagant hallways and the red doors of the first-five stories of apartments that you are standing on the doorstep of someone who lives in Paris like one might live in Beverly Hills: no qualms about social status.

Yes, this is the apartment building where I live.  Only, I don’t take that main staircase to one of those nice bourgeoisie apartments.  Instead, I walk through the small inner courtyard off of the hallway on the ground level, where they keep the trash bins, to a door that leads to the old servant’s staircase: narrow, damp, wooden, dark—no carpet.  The staircase winds up to each floor of the building, leading to servant’s entrances to each apartment, until it comes to two floors of servant’s quarters.

(Rachel, notice apparition.  The team has debunked this as a dust particle.)

I was intrigued by the history of these old staircases before I was struck by their blatant separation of the classes.  After living in Paris for even a short amount of time the mentality one adopts concerning architecture and old buildings changes.  Though the 21^st century inhabitant of my building can take an elevator up to the sixth floor and follow the hallway to the servant’s staircase up to the seventh, the elevator is such an unabashed ‘addition’ to the building, one is immediately aware that it exists for the pure sake of convenience than as a statement of social status.  I didn’t realize it until I came to Paris, but that’s what an elevator is in the United States: a sign of social status.  In America, for cultural reasons of our own, the newest and best technology is expected of the rich; but in this bourgeoisie building, the elevator is not efficient, nor is it fast, nor is the building the proud owner of the elevator (assuming buildings can feel pride).  So what one understands, as she uses the elevator every day, is that if Parisien’s could have gotten away without adding an elevator to their old buildings in the latter half of the 20^th century, they would have.

As a resident of the seventh floor, I am quite pleased with the advent and addition of the elevator.  It took the maintenance of the elevator for me to understand just how pleased, for without it, all those living on the two upper floors of the building have to take all six or seven flights of stairs up to their floor.  As there is no electricity in the servant’s stairwell, it is impossible to see the steps, the wall, the handrail, or even your own hand—even during the day-time—until you get to the fourth or fifth floor, where seventh-floor skylights and glass blocks affixed into wall afford some light.  In addition, whereas the bourgeoisie staircase grants its climber a steady and gradual ascent to their floor, the servant’s stairwell is steep and too narrow to heft even groceries comfortably.  In my exodus to the seventh floor, I couldn’t help but imagine building maids, leaving their rooms on the seventh floor five minutes before their day began so they could stop outside the servant’s entrance to their employer’s apartment and catch their breath.

Servant's entrance

An American might ask, Why not take the main staircase up to the fifth floor—enjoy the climb, at least—and then take the servant’s staircase the last two levels up?  Our misunderstanding of any sort of class system makes this a fair question, albeit a non-applicable one.  There is no access to the sixth and seventh floors from the main staircase—you must take the servant’s staircase.  Furthermore, there is no secret door or hidden hallway connecting the two staircases.  Here, I get images of some young maid cleaning the steps of the main stairwell on the fifth floor, only to realize she’s forgotten something, have to go down all the steps to ground floor, out to the servants staircase, up all seven flights of stairs to grab what she needs, only to come down seven flights of stairs and up another five to get the job done.

After my own hike up the staircase, I was entirely aware of the class differentiation endured by those living atop the sixth and seventh floors.  And to be honest, the structure of the building ensures that not much has changed.  At best, the elevator was an attempt to equalize the social status of the buildings occupants, particularly in the case of the upper floors.  But even with an elevator which services the sixth floor as well as the first five, the lives of the two types of inhabitants are quite separate.  Much like what one would expect of the bourgeoisie and servants of late 19^th century Paris, there is no crossing paths by way of staircase; nowadays the only interaction is the occasional ‘Bonjour’ when exiting the elevator on the ground floor.  No one is treated poorly or looked down on—it is the 21^st century—it’s just the way the whole staircase/elevator system works.  But the history of bourgeoisie apartment owners and their servants who once lived above them explains the reason for that system.

While the seventh floor was most certainly the old servant’s quarters, the sixth floor of this building is an anomaly.  The hallway of the sixth and seventh étage is floored by red-clay hexagon tiles, rather than wood or carpet, the walls are textured white, and the doors are painted dark green, the color of Paris’s park benches.  On the first five floors of the building, there are two apartments per floor, each with multiple rooms; on the seventh floor there are sixteen individual doors to sixteen individual apartments.  Given that the seventh and final floor of the building has roofs angled in at 45°, the space for these sixteen apartments proves even smaller than any other floor.  These apartments are mere rooms; even ‘studio apartment’ fails to express their size, for when an American thinks of an old studio apartment, she thinks of Joe Bradley’s quaint living space in Roman Holiday, not an apartment the size of a guest bathroom.  The sixth floor has seven green doors, meaning the apartments are larger than that of the seventh floor, but still significantly smaller than that of the apartments below.  Though the exact capacity of the sixth floor is not formally documented, some old bourgeoisie buildings had one or two upper floors for middle-class families, merchants, or perhaps head-of-staff employees.  Now, the apartments on the sixth floor have been altered to create three larger apartments.

I had my mother ask me about my apartment when I first moved in, which despite my scathing review of their size, I am quite fond of.  I described it to her.  The man, who bought the old chambre de bonne, repainted it, installed a shower, a desk, and a small kitchenette.  I sent her pictures.  I received an email from my sister later in the week with connotations of the belief I was living in squalor, for, “Mom saw no toilet in the pictures.”  I explained that my toilet was across the hall in a separate room, which I had a separate key to.  In other buildings, the toilet is often shared between many tenants of the old servant’s quarters.

My own apartment

The view out of my window

Later, when I met a neighbor who moved in across the hall from me, and I started spending some time in her apartment, my suspicions of each apartment on the floor being owned and renovated separately were confirmed.  While each one of the sixteen green doors used to lead to a separate room, now, many of the rooms have been combined to create appropriate livable square-footage.  I recounted the size and shape of my neighbor’s apartment to my family, and expressed how interesting it was that three of the old chambres were combined to create her apartment.  My family asked several questions about her apartment—Why is her apartment the size of three rooms, and yours the size of one?  Why does she have a toilet, and you have to walk to a separate room?  Why does she have a shower with a curtain, and yours is merely an alcove?—all of which confused me; they were hardly applicable to the interesting fact I had just relayed about the history of the apartments.  Weren’t they more interested in the living conditions of someone living in a room a third of the size of my neighbors?  Weren’t they curious about how the old maids would have kept clean, or used the toilet?  Instead my family was preoccupied with why my neighbor’s apartment was so different from mine.

Then I realized the misconception at work in my family’s questions.  American apartment buildings are typically several stories high, and no matter which level you live on, each floor has the same blueprint.  Furthermore, each individual apartment typically has the same layout.  The structures are built to fit a certain number of apartments which apartments will house a certain number of families which families consist of a certain number of family members.  The person across from you has an apartment with a mirrored layout to yours; the person under you has an apartment with the exact layout as yours.  It wasn’t that they didn’t understand why my neighbor’s apartment was different from mine, they didn’t even fully comprehend the whole system of bourgeoisie apartments: the fact that the lower floor you inhabit, the better-off you are, the fact that the main staircase doesn’t even go to the sixth and seventh floors, the fact that in order to get to the top of the building, you are forced to take the servants entrance.  Hearing I had a studio apartment sounded more like I lived in an apartment complex with several other studio apartments, not that I lived in the top floor of a well-to-do bourgeoisie home where social class was separated by floor levels.

And it runs deeper than that.  It’s not that Americans don’t understand class and social status, in fact, our class system is just as complicated as others’.  It’s that in the United States, the poor, the middle-class and the rich don’t live together in any capacity.  The person living across the hall from you, above you, or below you, is usually at the same economic status as you are.  Even if the person who lives across from you is an immigrant, or if your child goes to a better school than the children of the family living below you, your economic status is accepted as being in the same range.  And when it isn’t anymore, and an American believes that the people moving in around them are of a lower class than they are, they move.  Take Harlem as America’s best-known example: what used to be an area inhabited by the wealthy and old-Dutch families of New York, in the 20^th century became a place renowned for crime and poverty.  It’s also true that there are poorer parts of Paris, where the well-off do not live, but the difference is that they never lived there.  The difference is that the French would never consider moving out of the Luxembourg Quarter just because their new neighbors might seem to be of a lower class.  After all, the Luxembourg Quarter is the Luxembourg Quarter.

The American culture of capitalism was another road-block for my family to truly understanding my living situation.  Surely, someone realized the profit to be made from renting the top floor apartments to young students, bought up the entire floor of sixteen rooms, and renovated them to create eight apartments—for there are eight tenants currently living on this floor.  Each of the apartments would be affixed with a kitchenette, and a shower, and use a bathroom down the hall.  The fact that my neighbor’s apartment was different meant that someone made the two apartments noticeably and intentionally inégal.  This makes no sense to an American—and probably wouldn’t make sense to the French either, if the argument were presented that way.  Except this idea of snatching up this real-estate city space, improving it, and renting it out for a profit is an American mindset, not necessarily a French one.  The French might be more likely to think, “They’re just the old servant’s quarters, after all.  Writers, students, and the elderly sometimes rent them because they can’t afford anything else, but the rooms are probably better suited for storage space,”—which is perhaps true. 

But this doesn’t answer the question: If the area is unfit for living, why doesn’t someone gut the whole thing and make it fit for living?  This is, after all, what an American would do to a nice bourgeoisie apartment building like this one, in the middle of a nice area like the Luxembourg Quarter.  The French wouldn’t.  The French wouldn’t gut any building built before 1915—if they’d consider gutting any building at all.  They’ll demolish them, and tear them down, and build up around them.  But they won’t tear out the insides of a building that is just fine the way it is.  Recall my explanation about the elevator; how if the Parisien’s could have gotten away without adding one, they would have.  They are not the proud owner of the contraption, it is just a convenience.  Similarly, gutting out the servant’s quarters to create nicer apartments would be like fixing something that isn’t broken.  Let me also use my own apartment as an example: the apartment may have been wholly renovated to include electrical outlets, a kitchenette, a shower and a heater, but the floor remains the red-clay hexagon tile.

Consider the idea that it’s in the blood of American culture to improve on what isn’t broken and to consider broken what is merely less efficient.  Europeans in general—particularly when dealing with domestic buildings—are not this way.  The British have a saying they use often, “I couldn’t be bothered.”  It’s not a thoughtless, rude or dismissive statement—it is recognition that there are some things there is no reason to doing, like turning the page of  newspaper when there’s still a story on the front page that interests you, or getting up for a chocolate when there are almonds in a bowl beside you.  It’s not that the idea isn’t worth doing, or that there wouldn’t be a point to doing it, or even that doing it is a significant amount of trouble.  It’s just that it works fine the way it is, and no one is really complaining, and individual proprietors are improving the apartments little by little, so why should anyone be bothered?

I lost my audience long before I could accurately explain these cultural differences I find so fascinating: something as simple as a staircase or whether or not an apartment has a toilet is attached not only to history but to mentality—a mentality which runs deep.  Buildings aren’t just about form or function; they aren’t just about changing and being changed.  In fact, it’s a little more than that.  Carl Jung afforded to artists the responsibility of tapping into the collective unconscious and presenting its truths to the world, but it turns out that cultural experience is organized not only by painting or tapestry, but by the very halls we walk in, and the very stairs we climb.  The detailed truths of how we consider the world around us are presented to us by small inefficient elevators, by the remnants of old doors in the hallway, and by whether or not we would gut our seventh-floor servant’s quarters for a profit.  The very fact that an American would do something so differently than it has been done here is proof that our histories have a place in our cultures, that our cultures have a place in our mentality, and that our mentality shapes the world we inhabit.

Pep-talk for Paris

Sometimes I wonder and think what they'd have done in Paris. What they'd have done in any paradise, even if it wasn't paradise, and what I'd do if paradise existed. I should have done my field study in New Orleans. I should have gone down there and been a volunteer, helping rebuild something, somewhere. I should have asked people about jazz. I should have read Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston at night. Is it ridiculous to say that my mother would probably be more nervous about me going to New Orleans than me going to Paris? Not to mention, Caitlin would never forgive me.

It's funny, that I'm less than a month away now, and more than aware that I'm doing the craziest thing I've ever done before, but also aware that this is just a stepping stone for doing things that are crazier in the future. I was watching The Music Man last night with some friends, and I realized how good it was for me that I wasn't born in a small town. The old women talked of the librarian in a way that I realized people would talk about me if the people from where I'm from weren't used to people hauling off and doing crazy things. For most of them, moving to LA from wherever they were from was the crazy thing. So me going off to Paris is surprising, maybe, but not unexpected, if they know me, which many of them do.

My mom says she's afraid I'll never come back.

I'm not afraid of that, though it wouldn't upset me if I found a reason to stay somewhere.

Going over culture shock again I realized what I'm most prone to is holing myself up in whatever apartment I get or wherever I'm living, reading, writing, but never going out because it means I'll have to go out on my own. That's how I am at home. I love getting in the car and driving somewhere, but I always have to have a purpose, and directions. But then again, I am prone to wander. But wandering for me usually comes with the need for comfort--not total comfort, just an understanding that I can control myself, or...something. I haven't figured that one out yet.

I wanted a way to "mitigate"--I hate that word--this issue. I hate the word because it's so impersonal, and it means nothing to me. It's just meaningless. Anyway, I've decided that I'm going to chose one place that I have to visit every day. Not the same place, a new place. Something to get me out of the apartment. When I went to London, and realized I had no idea what I was doing there, and I didn't have alone time, and it was brand new, and I'd never been abroad, I got an email from my father telling me to go to St. Paul's. Honestly, to make him proud, to tell him I had gone, to write back to him about it, was all that got me out that first weekend. And that was all I needed.

I'm not afraid of the romanticism of Paris. I'm afraid that'll all melt away as soon as I'm in that city alone, and part of me wants to just sit on a park bench for two or three days after Kate leaves and force myself to realize that this city will be kind. I think that's why I might need Langston Hughes with me, to keep me company. I may have found something to love. But which love? And in which life? Kate says that God let me listen to the music, enter those speakeasies and listen. I feel I can remember asking, please let me go. Please. And I imagine God rolled his eyes at me. But it makes me wonder if perhaps I've been to these places before, and if I have, then why be nervous?

I remember thinking when I was in Heathrow for the second time, so nervous because it was such a big airport, and that taxi driver had just cheated me out of about £20 and I was angry at him (and will not be speaking for him in the trials of heaven) and I was afraid of never getting home. Getting into JFK airport was like coming home. You could feel America in the soil, coming up through your feet. Everything clean and in straight lines, the shops on the right in the left, rather than circling around you, and I knew I'd get there. On the plane to JFK they gave us these horrible airplane pizzas but on the cover of the pizza box was the Coliseum, the Eiffel tower, and the London Gherkin, all of which I had seen and been to, if not inside of, and it occurred to me that 4 months ago I hadn't at all been to those places, just seen pictures of them. This wonderful sense of accomplishment came over me. The boy sitting next to me laughed at me, and I explained. He said he was going on holiday to Florida with some friends. I thought that a very odd place to decide to go on holiday, but didn't say so. All of this goes back to the point that I said to myself, "If you can get through Heathrow, you can do anything." I honestly believed that, because I was nervous about it, and I was afraid, and it seems a ridiculous thing to be afraid of, if you've done it, but I hadn't. So when I got back home, an occurrence I don't actually remember, Heathrow had been done. And I knew I could do anything.

Why shouldn't that apply now? Why can't I use that as my reason for going to Paris alone on a Field Study? Gosh I'm crazy, but going crazy--so I've been told--can be a fun experience. If I just let it happen. Damn. I've been through Heathrow! What can't I do? Learn and speak a foreign language? Sure! Travel a foreign country on one's lonesome? Done! Live abroad for as long as a tourist visa will let you stay? Not a problem. I mean let's be clear about this: Heathrow is 10 miles in diameter. 5 terminals. Outside of London. It's got really circular design, so its easy to get lost, and there are a trillion people so it's easy to not be certain where you are. It's only when the plane is going to board that they actually tell you where your gate is, so you have to stave off sleep while you wait for the board to update your gate, meanwhile you may be on the other end of the terminal from your gate. That's not nerve-racking at all.  (In another time-continuum, by the way, Jennifer is still sleeping in Heathrow; she missed her plane and just became an illegal immigrant of the UK.) My question is, if I've been through Heathrow, what can't I do? Well, honestly, I'm aware there are plenty of things I can't do. Like speak Romanian. Or French, for that matter. But you know, people have been doing this for centuries. Americans have been doing this for centuries. What really is the problem?

If you haven't figured it out, this is my pep-talk. Because it's easy to tell yourself its all going to be fine when you've got 3 months until you go. But now it's a couple of weeks, and I really have to do myself some convincing.

Shifting

A few months ago I lost a journal of mine.  This is a journal I carry around with me, almost like an anthropologist might carry around a notebook to take notes in; that is what I used this book for.  See, most people think if you use the word 'journal' you are writing down what you've been doing throughout the day, or how you feel throughout the day.  Some of those things were included in my journal, but more often this book contained things I saw, things I learned, things I thought about that I wanted to remember.

I've been telling myself I'll find this journal of mine because there are some things in it that I sorely miss and regret losing.  One thing I miss that was in this notebook were 5-10 pages (small pages, given) of notes I took on a tour my family and I took of Downtown LA's movie theatres.  It’s a tour put on by volunteers, organized by USC on different parts of Downtown LA.  My family and I had been on one of these tours before, but when a friend was visiting LA with me, I asked if we could go on another tour, and my father decided on the theatres tour.

I fell in love.  To the extent that I just wanted to study Los Angeles history, film history, and historical theatres around the Los Angeles area.  I love movies; I love the theatres; I love going to the theatres to watch movies, and I love history.  It seemed perfect.  We walked around Los Angeles for over two hours learning about the different theatres, some abandoned, some altered into storefronts for electronics stores, or jewelry stores, others altered into churches, and some used for special occasions but no longer used on a day-to-day basis.  I thought it was all fascinating.  I took so many notes.  I drew pictures of the things I saw, and drew maps of the streets I turned onto.  I wrote about what these places were, I wrote about what they are now, and I wrote about the stories told about these places.  Los Angeles.  Movies.  Gosh, I miss those notes and I pray that when God resurrects me, he will return all lost items to me.

Have you seen Psyche?  Remember that episode where they know a man who can find any lost object?  I need him.  I hope this book turns up.

But I think these notes I took, and this tour I took of downtown Los Angeles helped me realize how much I love cities.  See, I've always known I loved cities, but I always thought that because we as Latter-day Saints are such "Romantics" (notice the capital R) we attach this romantic notion to nature.  I think I like nature, but I don't share the feeling that without nature I'd die.  I don't need wide open spaces in the literal sense, because I get it in the figurative sense when you're in the middle of a city crowded with people and yet alone.  Its a wonderful feeling.  And I don't mind being anonymous.  I also don't mind being around so many people because we share a camaraderie that I love.

It is the love I have for Los Angeles, and every major city I've been in--San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, London, Paris--that led me to this decision to go the route of Urban Studies within my field study.  I love African American history and I want to learn about it, and jazz, and I want to read about the African American expatriates, but I realized that I want to know about their experience in the city, and I want to know about the culture of the city.  The people are important to me, but in the city the culture isn't held by the people--it's held by the city itself.  It's carried in every brick or cobblestone, every layer of paint, and every broken tile.  The place holds something different.

The people in Los Angeles have changed considerably in the last fifty years, but the place still has a power to it that you can feel when you wander the streets, and it's been there longer than the people who inhabit the streets now.  I think that's important, that people bring culture, but sometimes place is embedded with culture and it's okay to study that too.  I want to take that approach with Paris as I discover Paris and the culture of Paris.  It is this idea that the place itself has embedded within it a culture that allows me and mandates that I go to the city to truly understand what these African American expatriate musicians felt and went through upon moving to Paris and working in Paris and making a home for themselves in a city with a culture that predated them, or anyone around them.

This makes going to Paris necessary.  This makes the location integral and I've been struggling with expressing that or explaining or justifying those ideas even to myself.  But I also think it's an important shift in my field study and realizing why I'm going.  It's not about these African American expatriates necessarily, but the city and learning how to think about the city, read about the city, and talk about the city in a way that expresses this theory that the city is a living organism that contains more than just the people living within it.  But the city is a big place, and one way to study the city is to study peoples' interactions with the city and that's where the American expatriates come in.  To know where they worked gives me a place to start.  To know who they were and their experiences gives me a comparison.  To listen and read their creations gives me tangible evidence of their experience which I couldn't have just by walking through the city alone.

I love these ideas, and I also love that this applies not only to my field study and to Paris but to the city I came from which started this whole thing.  It gives a lot more interest to all the places I'll be going and things I'll be doing.  I need to rewrite my proposal now.  Excuse me.