Country Review: France

Epistemic status: Vibes.

France

There’s a basic 2-part test for whether a country is a true first-rate modern power: It’s a first-rate military world power if it has nuclear weapons, and a first-rate civilian power if it has high speed rail. Both of these are good test both in being important capabilities in themselves, and in that they demonstrate a basic required level of state capacity and scale. Here’s the map of first-rate powers:

There’s some room for judgement over who qualifies as “has HSR”, mainly in northern Europe, but that doesn’t affect which countries are blue (no, ACELA doesn’t count).

Under this metric there’s only two real advanced countries, and one of those¹ has some issues with autocracy. So there’s a meaningful basic test by which France is the world’s only major high-functioning democracy, and I think it lives up to it in other ways too. This article makes the point that France gets transit, childcare, housing and energy right, which lets it get away with a whole bunch of dysfunctional labour market regulations and other issues.

The way I would describe France is Adequate, and this isn’t damning with faint praise. Being Adequate is incredibly difficult and only a handful of countries (or organizations of any kind) manage it at all, of which France is probably the largest. It’s not perfect or brilliant, but it handles most of the basics right and avoids constantly falling into obvious traps.

Paris

Pictured: A river. Paris stole London’s trick of having their city on a river that’s pronounced with a short e even though it’s not spelled that way.

Paris generally matched this overall. I can see why people get Paris syndrome - it’s not a beautiful perfectly-preserved old-world city (Vienna or Munich are better for that), and it’s not a hyper-functional futuristic city². It has dingy bits, the streets aren’t all super clean, there’s beggars harassing pedestrians and sociopathic motorcyclers driving overly loud vehicles and the bike lanes are inconsistent³. And it doesn’t have the kind of strong law-abiding social norms that Vienna and Munich did - I can’t imagine it getting away with running a Metro system without faregates.

But Paris is still very pretty, very nice, and huge. The Paris metro has over 13 million people - it’s at least twice the size of Berlin or Madrid, and far larger than any other city in the EU. Outside of London, the nearest cities on that scale are Moscow and Istanbul. And size aside, Paris had the kind of ethnic and linguistic diversity I’ve only otherwise seen in New York⁴. Aside from the ubiquitous French⁵, it felt like what New York would be if it were adequately governed.

There’s a sense in which they simply solve the problem of New York with More Dakka: Have less homelessness by having more housing. Have more nice usable pedestrian areas by just having so many of them that even the massive amount of tourists (or hobos) can’t occupy them all, and most of them are pretty and have space. Have so many museums that lines tend not to be overwhelming⁶. Have a giant inside out building right in the middle of the old part of Downtown.

This one isn’t so much “more dakka” as “a thing that they have”.

Apparently the pipe system is fully functional

The view from the top was great

Trains

There are, as far as I can tell, five different train systems in Paris (six if you include trams): The Metro, RER, Transilien, TER, and TGV (the last two being intercity trains). They seem to coordinate reasonably well. A couple of the Metro lines are automated, which leads to things like this

Lessons for other cities

Paris made me optimistic for American cities. Even more than Amsterdam, just felt surprisingly achievable. It doesn’t do anything New York fundamentally doesn’t - New York has metro systems, pedestrianized areas, rivers, bike lanes and so forth. It just does them more and faster, but American cities can catch up eventually (especially if they step up the pace, which isn’t impossible even with the political barriers).

There’s three things that could be really hard to replicate: The river (having a river through your city is nice, but it can be hard to make a new river if you didn’t start with one), the old architecture, and the climate.

The old architecture, I think, is overrated. It’s nice, especially if you’re the sort of person who’s really into that style of building, but new buildings can look nice too, if you plan the area well.

This is a new suburb to the south of Paris. It works, even without old buildings, and the apartments in those are probably much more pleasant to actually live in

The climate is actually the hardest, and is the reason I’m deeply pessimistic about Israel. Even if it solves its cultural, religious, and infrastructure issues, builds the metro systems it’s planning and gets past the political barriers to running them on weekends… it’s just too hot to ever be a nice place (and climate change will make it worse over time). Paris is very far North (it’s North of Toronto!), and you can’t replicate the way the air smells after rain on a chilly summer day.

La Defence

La Defence was interesting. It had this really big gate, which shows the French can in-fact one-up their past glories and just build something really big.

Take that, Napoleon

It reminded me a bit of midtown if it was pedestrianized, which is neat

Apparently the French stoel the Gherkin

Askew Buildings are great

That said, I think Midtown is the wrong New York analogy for La Defense. It feels more like Long Island City⁷ - an area outside of the real downtown (where all the people are) that’s at a confluence of transit lines and got built up as a secondary hub.

The Mystery of Princess Creperie

On my last day in France, I went looking for Crepes. I ran into Princess Creperie, which was rather impressively over-the-top

Not seen: Several giant posters

The mystery is this: They had four different specialty crepes. None of them come with a description of what goes into them. The fourth, the mystery crepe, also doesn’t come with a description, and doesn’t even have a picture. They all have different prices, but give the customer no way to judge if the more expensive ones are worth the extra price. What is going on?

Sadly, I arrived there just after closing time and could not order anything to try figuring it out. Next time I visit Paris, I should unravel this mystery.

1. China

2. Singapore is supposedly the example of that. I’ll be visiting there in about a month, so I’ll see how accurate this is.

3. Although they’re getting better impressively fast. During the two weeks I was there, a two-block section of my bike ride back from downtown got a protected bike lane half-built.

4. It was a lot more diverse than I saw when I was in London, but then I was staying south of the Seine in Paris, and north of the Thames in London, which probably affects this.

5. The local language

6. I didn’t go to the Louvre, that one’s probably worse.

7. This is a compliment, LIC is great