Hating Paris Is So Hot Right Now

Paris has been getting a roasting in the English language press recently. British columnists have seemingly lined up to damn the city with a variety of clichés, such as that it's snooty and unfriendly, populated by people who are "arrogant, snobbish, unfriendly and stressed out," or as CNN dubbed it, one of the world's "most hated" cities.

The real coup-de-grace came this month, when an already notorious Newsweek piece lambasted France as a "suffocating nanny state" populated with "navel gazers a la Jean Paul Sartre." Focused on the American writer's experiences of living in a French capital waylaid by "the heavy hand of socialism," the piece contained howlers such as stating that "a half liter of milk costs nearly $4 in Paris" (in reality, it costs around $1.80) and pushing France’s top income tax bracket up from 45 percent to a purely fictional 70 percent. Such was the furor around the article that Le Monde published a point-by-point rebuttal (translated into English here). But even the French press has weighed in with its own attacks on themselves. Last week, Le Figaro titled a story about London (only just) overtaking Paris as world’s most visited city with the headline: "London Dethrones Paris."