In May Andrea and I spent two weeks in Paris. Breaking our flight going and returning, we stayed for several days in Singapore. As Paul Keating once famously said, Australia is at the arse-end of the world. To get to Paris we had to undertake three seven to eight-hour flights (Melbourne-Singapore, Singapore-Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi-Paris). Here are a few thoughts on what we saw.
Singapore
Singapore is an island city-state, some 140km north of the equator. It is home to about 5.6 million people, three quarters of whom are Chinese alongside sizable Malay and Indian populations. The country has four official languages (English, Chinese, Malay and Indian). Its official multiculturalism is a pleasant contrast to the ethnic tensions stoked by the ruling classes in most of its neighbours.
Singapore is a pro-Western capitalist state but whatever its social, economic and political problems it obviously works on the basic level (people get around, are housed, and so on).
Metro system
As tourists we used the city’s extensive MRT subway system to get around. For anyone from Australia, it is extremely impressive. In 2019 the MRT averaged 3.4 million trips per day. It is amazingly modern and efficient. Fares are cheap; there are no tickets: Passengers use their credit cards or phones. All the stations have platform fences and gates which means people can’t fall onto the tracks.
Singapore’s MRT was part of the losing consortium which bid to be the operator of Melbourne’s new public transport ticketing system. Instead, the state government chose a less experienced US-led consortium, at the cost of an extra billion dollars. No wonder the losers are claiming the contract process was a big stitch-up.
Echoes of history
In the city museum I saw an early 1930s promotional film. It began with trumpeting the might of the British military forces on the island — the powerful airforce, the heavy battleships, the big colonial army. It all looked extremely impressive but in early 1942 all that would be shown to be absolutely worthless.
The invading Japanese forces defeated a British army 3-4 times their size: They were better led, better motivated and better equipped. The British-led forces were hobbled by some very poor decisions (made both before the war and during it), inadequate training and poor morale — especially due to colonial tensions in the army.
Some 7000 captured Indian troops joined Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army, which fought for the Japanese in Burma, hoping to spearhead the liberation of their homeland from the British.
Churchill described the British defeat in Malaya and Singapore as the greatest catastrophe of British arms in history. He was rightly especially worried about what it would mean for the prestige of the “white race”. The local nationalist movements were greatly encouraged to see an Asian country defeat their hitherto mighty white masters. The defeat of the French, Dutch and British in the Far East presaged the end of Western colonialism in the area even if it took some years and some big struggles to fully play out.
On our trip home we stayed at the YMCA. Right behind our hotel was Fort Canning Park. Today it is a lush tropical park with some beautiful walks. During the Japanese invasion, the hill covered the bunker where the British commander General Percival made the fateful decision to surrender his forces.
Paris
In Paris we stayed in Montmartre, a district on a modest hill overlooking the central city. Our hotel was very close to the famous Sacre Coeur Church (see photo above). The church was actually built after the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871, apparently in an attempt to restore public morality! Visitors crowd in front of the church on the crest of Montmartre to enjoy a spectacular view of the city below.
Montmartre has numerous flights of steep stairs to enable people to get up and down the hill. While obviously great for keeping fit they are otherwise problematic. (These stairs feature prominently in the final sequences of the movie John Wick 4 which, being completely unable to sleep, I watched on the overnight flight home from Singapore.)
A beautiful city
Paris is undoubtedly a very beautiful city — at least in the main tourist areas. Most of this is due to Napoleon III (1852-70) and his supremo in charge of urban planning and renewal, Baron Haussmann. The great wide tree-lined boulevards, the uniform facades, and the wonderful gardens are extremely impressive. Over the last period, serious efforts have been made to reduce vehicular traffic and encourage cycling and walking. There is a way to go but the results are already clearly evident.
Like all capitalist countries, France has some acute social problems and the far right and mainstream parties trade in anti-migrant and anti-refugee sentiment. President Emmanuel Macron recently rammed through (without a parliamentary vote) an increase in the pension age. While we were there a weekly magazine featured an interview with him and their posters adorned news kiosks. Under a mug shot of Macron was the text: “Réformer: Plus vite, plus fort”. We will fuck you over, faster and harder — the universal message of capitalist neoliberalism.
The Métro
Just as in Singapore, Paris is served by a very efficient public transport system. While there are buses (and also 12 tramlines), the heart of the system is the Métro. There are 16 lines, three of them automated (i.e., driverless). In 2019 it averaged 4.1 million trips per day. It is very dense, efficient and — to a visitor from Australia with our miserable public transport systems — very impressive. Using the Métro it is very easy to get around the city.
Arc de Triomphe
At one end of the Avenue des Champs-Élysées is the Arc de Triomphe. It is all very spectacular, celebrating hundreds of battles and generals in the Napoleonic wars. It also has plaques honouring soldiers who fought in France’s innumerable and bloody colonial wars. Across Paris, the street names seem to favour famous French generals and battles (there are apparently very few women honoured in this way).
The Arc de Triomphe immediately made me think of Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance, also quite spectacular but when you get down to it, ultimately tawdry and militaristic. Abstract appeals to patriotism play such a big part in bourgeois ideology; we are exhorted to salute the flag and so on while the real urgent needs of the mass of people who actually live here are ignored.
The Louvre
One day we paid a visit to the Louvre, the most famous art gallery in the world. It is home to the most famous painting in the world, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. In 2022, the Louvre attracted 7.8 million visitors — over 21,000 each day.
We duly made our way to the room where the Mona Lisa hung, behind a solid protective housing. But even there, the queue was several hundred people long so we just gazed across the room and then went elsewhere. There is certainly an immense number of works to look at. (Personally, I especially liked Jacques-Louis David’s canvases of historical scenes from Napoleon’s campaigns and reign. They are enormous and spectacular and make you want to look up things on Wikipedia!)
Versaillles sanitised
We made the obligatory trip to Versailles, the gigantic palace outside of Paris created by the long-reigning Louis XIV (ruled from 1643 to 1715). We joined the huge crowds walking through the palace.
While it was impressive in its way, I felt the display didn’t give one any sense of how it actually worked. There were thousands of courtiers and a veritable army of servants to look after them. They simply don’t feature in what the tourist sees.
The display is also sanitised — in a literal sense. The stench of piss and shit and unwashed bodies is completely missing. But back in the day it was absolutely inescapable. A report on history.com talks about European royal palaces in the period:
But without a doubt, the most pressing health concern was caused by the dearth of waste disposal options in an era before reliable plumbing. “Faeces and urine were everywhere,” Eleanor Herman, author of The Royal Art of Poison, says of royal palaces. “Some courtiers didn't bother to look for a chamber pot but just dropped their britches and did their business — all of their business — in the staircase, the hallway, or the fireplace.”
A 1675 report offered this assessment of the Louvre Palace in Paris: “On the grand staircases” and “behind the doors and almost everywhere one sees there a mass of excrement, one smells a thousand unbearable stenches caused by calls of nature which everyone goes to do there every day.”
The article goes on:
Louis XIV is rumoured to have bathed twice in his life, as did Queen Isabella of Castile, Herman says. Marie-Antoinette bathed once a month …
It was the Sun King himself, Louis XIV, whose choice to no longer travel from court to court would lead to a particularly putrid living situation. In 1682, in an effort to seal his authority and subjugate his nobles, Louis XIV moved his court permanently to the gilded mega-palace of Versailles. At times over 10,000 royals, aristocrats, government officials, servants and military officers lived in Versailles and its surrounding lodgings.
Despite its reputation for magnificence, life at Versailles, for both royals and servants, was no cleaner than the slum-like conditions in many European cities at the time. Women pulled up their skirts up to pee where they stood, while some men urinated off the balustrade in the middle of the royal chapel. According to historian Tony Spawforth, author of Versailles: A Biography of a Palace, Marie-Antoinette was once hit by human waste being thrown out the window as she walked through an interior courtyard.
The tourist sees none of this. We see room after room with immaculate furnishings and endless artworks covering the walls. On SBS On Demand you can watch the series Versailles about Louis XIV. Everyone looks so clean — including the almost never-washing king!
Some concluding thoughts
Singapore, Paris and Melbourne are all capitalist cities. But within this framework, for various reasons, they have developed in different ways. Australian towns and cities follow the US pattern and are generally enormous. They sprawl in all directions and often measure scores of kilometres across. This puts a very heavy burden on infrastructure, especially transport systems — even if the will was there to improve them.
It is heartbreaking to see the developers putting up their crappy single-storey, dark-roofed homes in the treeless suburbs on the outskirts of Melbourne. How much better life would be if everything were more compressed on the European or Singaporean model. I would much rather live in an apartment in a well-constructed block with decent public amenities (public transport, parks, playgrounds etc.). Capitalism, with its generations of greedy "developers" and venal politicians, has sold us a pup.