With its garish shops, escort-girl bars, uncouth and drunk visitors, it is crowded, stressful, overpriced – and shunned by the French themselves. No, this isn’t the description of a nastier corner of a banlieue, but rather Hugh Schofield on Paris’s best-known avenue, the Champs-Élysées. And the French are already furious.
As a native Parisienne, born exactly 160 yards from the Champs-Élysées, who still lives round the corner, I have mixed feelings about the place. I know the crowds, because I hear their drunken arguments under my windows late at night. And it’s true that the avenue has little more to offer today than chain stores – H&M, Zara, Adidas, Nike – a few cinemas, and overpriced cafés where no Parisian would ever set foot.
True to the BBC’s default position, its Paris correspondent blames Jacques Chirac’s long tenure as mayor for the change; but he’s wrong. What changed everything was the opening of the RER train station at the Arc de Triomphe in 1973, four years before Chirac’s election.
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