… La Ville Lumière: Paris, City of Light


Robert Doisneau, 1989

Webster's defines "cliché" as a "trite expression" and "trite" as "worn out by constant use." Happily, the title Ville Lumière or City of Light is neither a cliché nor trite. Though it is constantly used in reference to Paris, it has become a nickname, a sobriquet, an endearment.

For me, the images it evokes are rooted in history yet very much alive.

Say Ville Lumière and some will see old-fashioned street lamps spilling pools of light along the Seine where lovers stroll hand in hand. Others will think of the Champs-Elysées and Eiffel Tower ablaze. Still others will envision night-lit monuments perched on hills-the Panthéon, Sacré Cœur, Trocadéro-and a cityscape bathed in an otherworldly glow.

Personally I've often imagined the expression had more to do with the welcoming lights of the city's cafés, its bookshops, museums and universities, where minds meet and tongues wag into the night.

Professors and philosophers like to say that the appellation Ville Lumière isn't about physical sources of light at all. Rather it's a metaphor for political, spiritual, cultural and intellectual energy. Louis XIV, an enlightened despot, was known as the Sun King (though he abandoned luminous Paris for swampy Versailles). The 18th-century's Enlightenment found fertile ground here for its philosophical, social and political ideals: empiricism, skepticism, tolerance and social responsibility. Voltaire, Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other proponents were called les lumières….