With 2024 Olympics set to open, CU Boulder professor Aimee Kilbane ponders Americans’ long love affair with the City of Light

Among all cities on earth, Paris must surely be counted among the most storied, the most romanticized and the most infused with literary, artistic, historical and cultural meaning.

Consider just a handful of associations with the City of Light, as the capital of love, art and the avant garde. It brought us Impressionism, the Belle Epoque and la vie de bohème, and it served as the stomping grounds for uncountable expatriates, including the “Lost Generation.”

The mystique of France’s ancient capital has long drawn tourists from around the world in search of their own unique experiences. With the opening of the XXXIII Olympiad, aka Paris 2024, on July 26, countless thousands of visitors old and new are expected to pour into the city and its environs, including many Americans, who’ve had a long fascination with the city.

“One practical reason Americans fall in love with Paris so easily is that it’s such an accessible, walkable city. You get your bearings more quickly than in London or elsewhere in Europe,” says Aimee Kilbane, assistant teaching professor of French at the University of Colorado Boulder.

At the same time, she says, “it’s a beautiful city, with no end to its layers. A familiar refrain is that you can never fully know Paris, but that doesn’t stop people from trying.”

Romantic Paris

Kilbane first went to Paris as a third-year undergraduate and over the past quarter century has returned for frequent visits and residencies. With an academic focus on the tourists, expatriates and subcultures of Paris, she teaches a course on Modern Paris and has served as tour guide to dozens of students abroad.

The romantic Paris of the American imagination is only a recent addition to millennia of history. The city’s ancient roots fascinate many visitors from the still-wet-behind-the-ears United States. What we now know as Paris was founded by the Parisii, a Celtic tribe, on an island in the middle of the Seine River around 250 BCE.

“Walking through the city is like walking through history, no matter what you’re interested in— the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the 19th-century. There are traces of Roman, and even pre-Roman, Paris everywhere,” Kilbane says.

Kilbane enjoys taking students to see the largely intact Arènes de Lutèce, a 1st-century Roman theater and amphitheater unearthed and excavated in the 1860s.

“Every time they build an underground parking structure, extend a metro line or widen a boulevard, they find remnants of Paris’ buried past,” she says.

Kilbane also teaches a Global Seminar on-location in Paris, to explore the city’s literal and figurative “undergrounds.” The literal includes its famous, eerie catacombs, Metro rail system, sewers and the depths of the Louvre art museum; the figurative encompasses cutting-edge art and cultural movements past and present and discarded or “buried” histories such as the stories of immigrants and their influence on the city.

Above ground, the medieval cathedral Notre Dame de Paris, built in the 12th century, looms large in the city’s history, landscape and, thanks to Victor Hugo’s novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, literary heritage.

“It’s a magnificent piece of architecture, with massive Gothic towers that lend a sense of permanence as they watch over this ancient and modern city, almost as a surveyor or protector,” Kilbane says. “It’s magical and majestic, but it’s also a nearly 1,000-year-old marvel of engineering that defies gravity.”

On the other end of the architectural spectrum is a landmark that has, over time, supplanted Notre Dame as the most visible symbol of the city: the Eiffel Tower, built as a centerpiece for the 1889 World’s Fair.

“It’s another kind of tower, not as solemn, its presence feels less eternal. I suppose some find it elegant,” Kilbane notes wryly, “but I could not give a good answer as to why or how it’s become the symbol of Paris.”

(She’s not the only one who’s been less than impressed: When asked why he so often frequented the tower, 19^th-century British author, poet and artist William Morris replied, “This is the only place in the city where I can look out and avoid seeing this hideous thing.”)

A crossroads for artists and thinkers

Medieval Paris was an influential center of theology and scholarship as far back as the 13th century, thanks to the establishment of the Sorbonne, one of Europe’s oldest universities. The 19th-century cemented Paris’ reputation as an artist’s paradise, with its influential École des Beaux-Arts. Impressionism, considered by many the zenith of 1800s European art, began as a rebellion against the rules and strictures of the day, and Paris has long been a crossroads for artists and thinkers who push boundaries.

Many Americans first encounter the city through the written word, particularly the famous Lost Generation—American writers who made pilgrimage to the city in the 1920s, including Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Paris also drew Beat hero Jack Kerouac and some of the greatest African American artists, performers and writers of the 20th century, including Langston Hughes, Josephine Baker and James Baldwin.

“Paris was the place to go study to be an artist in the 1800s,” Kilbane says. “In the 20th century, it became the destination of choice for would-be writers and other exiles seeking more creative freedom than they knew at home.”

The city has deeply influenced film, as well. Paris has played a starring role in American cinema: musicals like Funny Face and An American in Paris helped renew American tourism in Paris after World War II, and more recent films like Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset and Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris continue to revisit the romantic myth of the young, contemplative American writer abroad.

“Hemingway provided the blueprint for Americans with artistic ambitions in Paris,” Kilbane says. “Midnight in Paris comes directly from A Moveable Feast.”

Literary-minded visitors still visit landmarks of Hemingway’s Paris, such as the Luxembourg Gardens, the cafés he made famous and the bookstalls along the Seine. And no trip to Paris would be complete without stepping inside Shakespeare and Company. Established by American Sylvia Beach in 1922 as an English-language lending library that would be instrumental to the anglophone expatriate community and modernist literature, it published the first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, sold Hemingway’s first collection of poems and is still going strong.

Contemporary Paris has a vibrant music scene, infused with world influences, and is a leader in green innovation and livable-city sensibilities, Kilbane says.

She likes to take students to Batignolles, a neighborhood less frequented by tourists that combines old and new Paris. Parc Clichy-Batignolles - Martin Luther King, completed in 2021, is a green space built between towering high rises, adjacent to a 19th-century park and village once frequented by impressionist painters.

“Les Batignolles is really a unique spot in Paris—it has a great old-Paris, sleepy village feel while being young and animated,” Kilbane says. “Meanwhile, the new park looks nothing like the rest of Paris—it combines wild vegetation and community gardens with 21st-century architecture.

“Paris has been unfavorably compared to a museum. That is to say, the past is enshrined and fetishized to the extent that the vibrancy of contemporary Paris is obscured. But it really is a living city that is able to adapt and reinvent.”

Or as Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast, “There is never any ending to Paris….”

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