This is a warning. If you go, be prepared for love. Paris does that to you. It provides love at first sight, followed by a long love affair, with the city, the language, France itself, and with luck, someone.

Paris is more than any other European city, and less. It has more to offer the mind, the eyes, and the stomach, and it is less, only 105 square kilometers, 18 long and 12 wide, so it invites walking, and walking its marvelous streets, squares, and public spaces is what makes it so attractive.

Much has changed in France since I first went in 1969, and fell in love. You can no longer walk into any restaurant, and expect an excellent meal, prepared from fresh ingredients, by loving hands. The great Paris market no longer sits in the centre of the city, and the family restaurant, where the couple worked from early in the morning to late at night six days a week is becoming extinct.

So you need a guidebook, and this friendly advice: order the dish of the day, stay away from printed menu items.

You can still pay an outrageous price for coffee with milk, $14 on the Champs-Elsyées at Fouquet’s or $8 at Les Deux Magots on Boulevard St.-Germain, but it is much harder to find reasonably priced wine.

Paris is where the modern world was fashioned. What people wear, how they eat, travel and pursue cultural interests, all bear a French influence. The way people think about and discuss politics, economy, science and society is influenced still by the thinkers of the French Enlightenment. And the main post-modern critics of reason and the search for truth are French as well.

If you are a socialist, say so, and half the country could reply, “I voted for them in the last election.” Evidence of the socialist nature of the society is everywhere present in public and private institutions. The young waiter in the café owns his job, and will still be there in 20 years. The unemployed are insured, and there is a national minimum income. Students pay for their education as they go through life, not through high tuition. The children of immigrants have high levels of educational achievement.

Know a country by how it taxes. In France social security contributions by companies/employers make up a large part of tax revenue. Workers add value to what they produce: for each $100 of salary income, the employer is paying $40 in social security taxes because that work adds value which, as socialists realize, the company is appropriating for profit, so it should have to pay for the privilege of employing people.

Meanwhile, the employee pays $20 in social security contributions. So the company pays $140 for the work, the worker keeps $80 (there is virtually no income tax), and the state takes $60. Employers always want cheap labour; in Canada they get it, in France it much harder for them to organize. France, with a much lower rate of unionization than Canada, has a much stronger socialist culture.

Consumption is taxed at 19 per cent through a value added tax, but hefty death duties are to be paid on inheritances.

Unlike Canada, students are not going into serious debt in France, but getting a first job is a problem.

The city itself is planned, not just its building projects. But capitalism does lurk outside in those suburbs where no one would go for a visit, or an evening out.

Employers who are racist and sexist, are fairly numerous, and this has effects on French life. Demonstrations, protests and random violence make headlines around the world, but they provoke serious debate about the issues in France.

In Canada, homelessness and poverty are kept out of public debate, even in elections, despite appalling social conditions in major cities. When Jack Layton made the obvious connections between Paul Martin, Liberal cutbacks and street deaths, he was attacked personally, and the issues he raised were not admitted into debates.

While governments in Canada do not think about culture, except as something that others do, and so invest little to no money, or time, in the world of creation, the French government regularly surveys the state of the book, the cinema or the magazine, confident that these are French.

Paris has wonderful museums and keeps adding to them; the latest, Quai Branley, hosts collections from first nations around the world.

The largest line-ups in Paris these days are for a photographic exhibit at City Hall featuring Paris itself.

A love affair with Paris is not without disappointments, but then you have been warned, and if you favour the romantic side, you can consider this: not to love … is not to have lived.

Duncan Cameron

Duncan Cameron

Born in Victoria B.C. in 1944, Duncan now lives in Vancouver. Following graduation from the University of Alberta he joined the Department of Finance (Ottawa) in 1966 and was financial advisor to the...