‘The history of the city shows how things can get out of hand’

Philosopher, guide and recently writer Alec van der Horst walks through the Parisian district of Montmartre, where he lives, and gestures around him like a large landowner showing his lands. Look, here: the house that Adolf Loos designed in 1926 for Dada founder Tristan Tzara. Follow along to the right: the dead-end Villa Léandre, a street as un-Paris as possible and which you would expect in London; the front door of number 10 looks exactly like the official residence of the British prime minister. Note the names at this chic apartment complex. Famous people live here, so famous that they have put the names of long-dead painters next to their doorbells in place of their real names: Manet, Renoir, Valadon. And have you seen Au Marché de la Butte, the grocery store from the movie Le fabuleux destin d’Amelie Poulin? New? Come on, we’re close now after all.’

Also beautiful: the statue of Saint-Denis in the Square Suzanne Buisson. Denis (actually Dionysius) was a Greek Christian who tried to convert the French to the new faith in the 3rd century AD. In the year 250, his head was cut off by a Roman brute who did not like Christians. But Denis didn’t flinch. As his head rolled down the hill, he walked calmly after it. He picked it up and took it to a fountain, where he rinsed it clean. At that fountain now stands the statue of Denis, now patron saint of France, who clenches his head like a trophy and to whom Montmartre owes its name: mountain of the martyr.

Alec van der Horst looks a bit sad: ‘This is a really historic place, but the Dutch tourists pass it by. They prefer to go to that bust of Dalida a little further, because they know that from Chansons.’ He himself has not yet seen the TV program of Matthijs van Nieuwkerk and Rob Kemps. “I have a bit of mixed feelings about it. It is of course nice that more Dutch people come to Paris because of this, but the book of the same name came out at the same time as mine. Which made me shake it in terms of media attention. ‘Funny, a book about Paris’, the editors said, ‘but we just paid attention to Chansons so we’ll let it sit for a while.” As a result Chansons has been a bestseller for months and City of Ideas – A Biography of Paris by Alec van der Horst not.

That’s a shame, because the wave of books that has recently been published about Paris and France includes City of ideas by its originality and depth. ‘I wanted you to be able to read the book on multiple levels. It wasn’t superficial, but it wasn’t too difficult either. It’s okay if not everyone understands everything.’

A lost guide

Alec van der Horst always wanted to be a writer, but it never happened. He earns his living as a guide; he guides tourists through the museums and streets of Paris. When the city was closed two years ago by corona and his work came to a standstill, he gathered his courage and left every day for the Salle Labrouste in the Rue de Richelieu, the beautiful 19th-century study room of the Bibliothèque nationale, to finally write the book he’d had in his head for years. He handed in the final chapter on the day he turned 50: ‘I’m a late debutant.’

But although Van der Horst is a guide, City of ideas not that. It is much more than just streets, squares and buildings on the history of Western philosophy, with Paris as the starting point. In his book, Van der Horst was able to combine his philosophical knowledge with everything he has learned about the city in recent decades. ‘I now know what people like and what not, of course I’ve been able to test my material all these years as a kind of stand-up comedian. And in fact a philosopher is also a kind of guide. A lost guide. Socrates was a street-walker, just like me.’

No other place in the world is so intertwined with the succession of ideas as Paris, says Van der Horst. ‘In ancient times Athens was the center of Western thought and in the 19th century this was true of certain German cities, but in Paris you will find the repercussions of Western thought of the past three thousand years. In the Middle Ages, during the Enlightenment and just after the Second World War, the city was the intellectual center of the West.’ France is no longer leading in the field of philosophy, he admits. “But this is still a country where ideas matter, where people debate and try to understand the world.”

Although he still feels like an outsider in Paris, he never wants to leave. ‘I like that anonymousness and it is of course a beautiful city. I think that few cities in the world are as beautiful as Paris, so diverse too: Montmartre is completely different from Saint-Germain-des-Prés. It’s also kind of an older world here, a bit messy, lots of small shops, full streets. I hate that terrifying Dutch pragmatism.’

Coincidence

He ended up in the city in 1998 more or less by accident. ‘I was almost done with my philosophy degree when my relationship broke down. I was devastated. It was also her house, so not only did I no longer have a girlfriend, I was also homeless. I ended up in a bit of a self-destructive period and when my best friend also ended up without a relationship and a home, I said: we have to leave Amsterdam. We had seen an advertisement to pick grapes in Châteauneuf-du-Pape, we liked it, so we bought a tent and two sleeping bags with our last money and we left. In Châteauneuf-du-Pape we met an Irish girl who went to Paris after five weeks of grape picking. My friend and I took her to the station. And while we were waiting for the train with her, we looked at each other and said: why don’t we come along?

‘I’ve been living here ever since. First in very cheap hotel rooms that I shared with friends and also a lot of cockroaches, now in a small apartment of 12 square meters. I’ve just done really bad in my life. I first worked in call centers – the most terrible job there is, but you learn French well because everyone scolds you – and in 2004 I started doing the guide training course. I’ve been for years now guide conference. The rules are very strict here, without a valid card you have no droit de parole and you are not allowed to work as a guide in the Louvre and the other major museums.’

A time of confusion

Paris has been fascinating in all periods of history, says Van der Horst, but the 19th century is his favourite. ‘Paris is then not only the philosophical but also political capital of the world, with those three revolutions of 1830, 1848 and 1871. It was a time of confusion, with major technological changes and with enormous uncertainty about the future. That confusion is now also there, whether it is about the ecological crisis or about issues of identity. We live in a very interesting time when more and more people are wondering whether the democratic institutions are still suitable to solve the big problems. My second book will be about the great French writers of the 19th century, and about all the ideas that arose then that we are still trying to come to terms with.’

The war in Ukraine gives some passages an extra sour connotation, such as the chapter Utopias and nightmaresin which Van der Horst describes the horrific aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789, the period of the grand terror in which people could be sent to the guillotine without evidence for any criminal act. He who trembles is guilty, thought Robespierre, the Putin of the time; and so the streets of Paris flooded with the blood of the decapitated corpses that were transported in crowded carts from today’s Place de la Concorde—where the guillotine stood—to the mass grave next to the Madeleine.

Van der Horst then introduces Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), the great German thinker who was 18 when the French Revolution broke out and visits Paris in 1827. Robespierre would have been dead for a few decades – eventually he would also end up in such a bloody cart himself – and his megalomaniac successor Napoleon has been safe under the green sods of Saint Helena for a while. France is almost a normal country again and Hegel walks ‘like a diligent tourist’ all the monuments and other famous places in Paris: the Louvre, Notre-Dame, the Palais-Royal. He considers Paris to be ‘the capital of the civilized world’, writes Van der Horst, and has ‘a sense of glimpse into the future of the West’.

Yes, the city had nearly been destroyed by its imperious and unreasonable rulers, but all in all, it had come out better, Hegel thought, proving once again that history unfolds as one great pendulum swing—called dialectic by Hegel—of events that always help her in the end. Napoleon had been a devastating mass murderer, but he had also eliminated the last vestiges of feudalism, allowing European countries to develop into modern civil societies and the rule of law.

Does he agree with Hegel? Van der Horst: ‘Hmm. I am a pessimist. An enthusiastic pessimist, but still. You could read my book a bit as a response to that much too optimistic Rutger Bregman book, Most people are good. I think the history of Paris mainly shows how quickly things can get out of hand when people get too fanatical and spread dangerous ideas. Beautiful, but also terrible things have happened in this city. And that cruelty is not just a thing of the past. It can come back very soon.’