The fantasy of Paris for women was largely written by men. Hemingway’s Paris. Henry Miller’s Paris. The café-terrace Paris of films made by directors who understood the city as backdrop, with women as furniture. In this version, Paris is romance, seduction, a woman in a trench coat crossing a bridge. The city as aesthetic. The city as something that happens to women rather than something women inhabit.
The actual Paris is more interesting, more contradictory, and more honest than any of this.
Simone de Beauvoir’s Paris
Begin where you should begin: with a woman who actually lived there.
Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908, grew up in a bourgeois apartment on the Boulevard Raspail, studied philosophy at the Sorbonne when women were still a curiosity in its lecture halls, and spent her adult life writing at the Café de Flore and the Deux Magots in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. She wrote The Second Sex in that neighbourhood, in those cafés, in the Paris of 1947 and 1948 — a Paris still rebuilding from occupation, a Paris in which women had only just received the right to vote (1944, later than almost every other Western democracy).
De Beauvoir’s Paris was not the city of romantic fantasy. It was a city of intellectual life conducted in public — the café as workspace, as salon, as the place where ideas were tested against other ideas. She chose this life deliberately, against the expectations of her class and her sex. She never married (she and Sartre had a famous open partnership that lasted their entire adult lives), never owned property, chose work and thinking and writing over the domestic script that Paris, like everywhere, was offering women of her generation.
What she found in Paris was something specific to the city: a culture that took intellectual life seriously as a public activity, that provided shared space — the café, the bookshop, the lecture — where women who insisted on intellectual presence could exercise it. This is not the same as equality. De Beauvoir was well aware that she operated in a male-dominated intellectual world. But Paris gave her a stage and an audience, and she used both.
The apartment she shared with Sartre at various points, the studio on the Rue Schoelcher overlooking the Montparnasse cemetery where she eventually lived alone, the graves where she and Sartre now lie together in the Cimetière du Montparnasse — these are as much sites of Parisian pilgrimage as the Eiffel Tower, and more honest ones.
What French Culture Offers Women
French culture has a specific and genuine gift for women: it takes female appearance seriously as an art form rather than a moral failing. The French concept of style — which is distinct from fashion, from trend, from the anxiety-driven performance of the right look — is built around the idea that how one presents oneself is an intelligent choice made by a thinking person. Women are expected to have opinions about their presentation, to make decisions, to develop a point of view that is theirs.
This sounds like a small thing. It is not a small thing. The difference between a culture that treats female appearance as a performance of adequacy (am I thin enough, attractive enough, young-looking enough) and a culture that treats it as a form of self-expression is the difference between anxiety and pleasure. French women — and this is, of course, a generalisation with significant class and race dimensions — are often described as less tortured about their bodies than their American or British counterparts. Research supports this to a degree. A 2021 comparative study on body image attitudes found that French women reported significantly lower levels of appearance anxiety than American women across comparable demographic groups.
The joie de vivre that tourists imagine as inherently Parisian is, when it exists, partly a product of this: a culture that permits women to take pleasure in food, in wine, in their own bodies, in sex, without the moralising overlay that Anglo-American culture attaches to all of the above.
What French Culture Takes
Honesty requires the other side of this.
France has a gender pay gap that remains among the largest in the EU for equivalent roles. It has a culture of sexual harassment — le droit de regard, the assumed male right to comment on female appearance in public — that Parisian women endure daily and that forms the backdrop of every woman’s experience of the city’s streets. The #MeToo movement arrived in France as #BalanceTonPorc (Expose Your Pig) in 2017, and the backlash was fierce and specifically French in character: a letter signed by prominent women, including Catherine Deneuve, defending men’s right to “importune” women as a fundamental liberty.
The French intellectual tradition that gave de Beauvoir a stage also gave her endless condescension. The same Sartre who respected her intellectually was consistently unfaithful, often dismissive, and in his later life, dependent on her in ways he never acknowledged publicly. The male geniuses of Saint-Germain-des-Prés expected women to be interesting enough to talk to and invisible enough to not compete with.
Parisian beauty culture, for all its apparent ease, operates within strict parameters. The French woman is thin, well-dressed, effortlessly groomed — the effortlessness itself requiring considerable effort. The cultural permission to enjoy food coexists with a culture that is, by any measure, thin-obsessed. The women who live most freely in Paris’s beauty culture are often those outside its mainstream: Black Parisian women, Arab Parisian women, immigrant communities who have created their own aesthetic languages parallel to the dominant French one.
The Working Woman’s Paris
The actual experience of working women in Paris is far from the café terrace fantasy. Parisian women work long hours, navigate expensive childcare, commute on the Métro, and deal with the particular exhaustion of a city that is both beautiful and functionally difficult. Paris is one of the most expensive cities in Europe. The arrondissements beloved by tourists — the Marais, Saint-Germain, Montmartre — are largely unaffordable to the women who work in them.
Real Paris is Belleville on a Tuesday morning. It is the Goutte d’Or market, which smells of cumin and fresh coriander and is as far from the tourist fantasy as it is possible to be while remaining in the same city. It is the banlieues, which contain the majority of Paris’s working population and almost none of its Instagram presence. It is women on the RER reading paperbacks, eating sandwiches, negotiating the school pickup while taking a call.
This Paris is also beautiful, and also French, and also, if you’re paying attention, extraordinary. But it requires a different kind of attention than the one that arrives pre-loaded with the fantasy.
What to Actually Do
Go to the Musée de Cluny — the medieval museum — and stand in front of The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, which are among the most extraordinary objects in the world, and whose female protagonist has been analysed by feminist art historians as a rare pre-modern image of female interiority.
Walk the Canal Saint-Martin on a Saturday morning, when it is full of Parisians rather than tourists. Eat at a restaurant where the menu is handwritten, the wine list is short, and nobody speaks English unless you start.
Visit the Musée Maillol — built to house sculptor Aristide Maillol’s work, but now a contemporary art museum — and the Musée Bourdelle, which most tourists miss and which is one of the most beautiful museum spaces in the city.
Read de Beauvoir. Read Colette. Read Annie Ernaux, who won the Nobel Prize in 2022 and whose Paris — working-class, striving, sexually alive, politically conscious — is the most honest literary Paris of the 20th century.
Paris gives women real things: intellectual culture, aesthetic seriousness, public space for thinking and being. It also makes demands and maintains contradictions. Understanding both is how you have an honest relationship with the city rather than a love affair with someone you’ve invented.
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