Readers may recall that I took a few weeks off in July 2025 to get married. In September 2025, after applying for and receiving a long-stay visa1, I moved to France to join my wife2 in her home country3. We now live together in her Paris apartment.
I am extremely, wildly, incredibly lucky. I think every day about how lucky I am.
There has been such a vast multitude of words written about the city of Paris and broader French culture, history, cuisine, landscapes, architecture, and politics, enough that I would guess it’s become relatively familiar to most English-speakers, so I’m not even going to try to dive into French history like I did in my reporting on Albania or Mexico, or provide a “what the city feels like on the ground” narrative for Paris like I did in Mumbai and Delhi. The famously really cool stuff in Paris is, indeed, really cool! The museums are majestic4, the architecture is beautiful, the boulangeries are ridiculously abundant and consistently delicious.
The cross-cutting aspect that I do want to discuss in more depth is that the city of Paris, and France as a whole, are making some really extraordinary strides on building an “ecological civilization” fit for the multifaceted challenges and opportunities of the Anthropocene. This has become pretty central to France’s national project: the current French Fifth Republic’s constitution now contains a ten-article Charter for the Environment, added in 2005 at the instigation of a president who in the French political context was considered a right-winger. The first two articles of this charter section are “Each person has the right to live in a balanced environment which shows due respect for health” and “Each person has a duty to participate in preserving and enhancing the environment.” The fourth article is “Each person shall be required, in the conditions provided for by law, to contribute to the making good of any damage he or she may have caused to the environment.” That’s the polluter-pays principle in the freaking Constitution, on a par legally with the U.S. Bill of Rights!
France has one of the cleanest grids in Europe thanks to the multitude of nuclear power plants it built in the 1980s and 90s. They’re now experiencing a “clean-to-clean” transition, with the share of nuclear in electricity generation gently and steadily declining as cheap and reliable solar, wind, and batteries grow while nuclear plants are used less (they’ve laten proven vulnerable to water intermittency, like U.S. coal plants). I’ve written a full article discussing renewables vis-a-vis nuclear worldwide — the data clearly show that nuclear power is safe and clean, but not cheap and not fast, while batteries, wind and solar are safe, clean, cheap, and fast.
France’s early world-beating nuclear buildout back when renewables were expensive is still paying spectacular dividends. As of 2024, France emitted 44 grams of CO2-equivalent per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated (and that’s declining quickly!), compared to 344 grams in neighboring Germany, 384 in the U.S., and a world high of 1,306 grams in the decaying petro-dictatorship of Turkmenistan5.
And in Paris, emissions from transportation are now plummeting thanks to the absolutely incredible transformation of the City of Lights since Anne Hidalgo was elected mayor in 2014. Paris is kicking the car habit, it’s working great, and it’s still accelerating. In March 2025, Parisians voted to further accelerate its world-leading urbanist revolution and pedestrianize an additional 500 streets across the capital, bring the total of car-free streets to 700 (over 10% of all streets in the city!) and eliminate an additional 10,000 parking spaces, creating more beautiful human-scale spaces of nature, creativity, and play while reducing traffic danger, air pollution, stormwater runoff from impervious surfaces, and the urban heat island effect.
As a result, air pollution levels in Paris, France have fallen sharply since 2005. A recent report calculates that lung-harming PM 2.5 levels (particulate matter below 2.5 micrometers, which contributes to millions of human deaths per year) have dropped by 55%, and nitrogen dioxide, a major ingredient in smog, has dropped by 50%. This is solarpunk urbanism in practice.
Just across the river from the rebuilt Notre Dame cathedral, the Hotel de Ville now has freshly-installed forests on its left and right wings, flanking a central plaza.
The whole city is walkable to an extraordinary degree, and the Hotel de Ville forests aren’t an outlier. Ongoing vegetalisation efforts are planting more and more trees to provide shade, evapotranspiration, and beauty to pedestrians as well as habitat for urban wildlife. Protected bike lanes are absolutely everywhere, and if you don’t own a bike, you can use the Velib app to rent one from the city. The plaza near our one-room apartment is in the middle of a public-works project that’s tearing up asphalt, expanding bicycle and pedestrian lanes, and planting more trees, and the explanatory sign explicitly notes that it’s a climate adaptation measure. I’ve already heard rose-ringed parakeets6 squawking as they fly over it.
The Seine River at the heart of the city has seen an extraordinary transformation after years of dedicated cleanup work. As I wrote in my newsletter, a recent analysis of environmental DNA (eDNA) found in water samples from the heart of Paris has revealed the presence of 23 different species of mussels and 36 different species of fish — about ten times more than were present in the Seine as recently as the 1960s! Notably, three of the freshwater mussel species identified in Paris (the thick shelled river mussel, the black river mussel, and the compressed river mussel) were endangered or vulnerable, rare to detect anywhere in France. I have personally regularly seen people fishing off the historic stone bridges of Paris! It’s genuinely extraordinary to see this kind of rich aquatic ecosystem running through the middle of a city of millions of people.
In summer 2025, three new urban swimming areas were made available, fenced-off portions of the Seine itself, and they were free to the public on days when the water quality indicated it was safe to swim. I got to visit one shortly after my wedding this summer, and it was a delightful experience. Paris really gives the feeling of having entered a post-pollution age — there’s obviously more work to be done, but nonetheless it’s a standard that governments in the rest of the world should strive for.
On another note, the public transport is just incredibly, unbelievably good. It’s so seamless you barely even have to think about it, you can just think “I want to go somewhere” and get there. The deservedly famous Paris Metro lines within the metropolitan area is one part of it, and high-speed rail links to other European cities are excellent, but there’s also an underreported “middle ground” of cheap and easy RER and Transilien train lines connecting Paris suburban or even rural towns in the Ile-de-France and neighboring regions.
On a recent weekend, we gathered chestnuts in the Forêt de L’Isle-Adam, a lovely area about 25 kilometers north of Paris. From anywhere in the city, you can simply take the metro to the Gare du Nord train station, then an RER line from which you can stop at any of several villages around the forest.
We went from an urban apartment in a high-density area to a spreading woodland preserve where you can spend hours walking in natural surroundings, entirely on public transport (reading on the way!), with travel time of just over an hour, for the price of a fancy coffee. I’m biased, but I think this is basically exactly the sort of casual weekend travel experience that built infrastructure should be set up to enable.
Gathering wild chestnuts is amazing. If you go to the right forest at the right time, as we did the last week of September, you can literally hear the big burrs falling from the trees as you walk, even louder than acorns in a New England mast year.
I’ve written before about the dauntless endeavors of Dr. Tom Klak (and others) to bring back a blight-resistant form of the American chestnut, and this experience of wild chestnut gathering in France has made me even more excited for the dawning prospect of the nutrient-rich and ecosystem-sustaining “perfect tree” once again becoming common on the continent of my birth!
Another interesting thing about chestnut harvesting is the depth of its history. I’ve tasted ground chestnut-based bread at a Paris boulangerie, and it was delicious — really capable of replacing a large fraction of wheat flour in a recipe.
As discussed in the interesting recent book Feed Us With Trees and many others, nut tree agriculture/semi-wild collecting was a serious competitor to grain agriculture as a mainstay provider of human calories in many pre-industrial cultures, from large-scale acorn processing in Korea and pre-colonization California’s Native Americans to chestnuts in the mountains of Europe and (pre-blight) eastern North America. Since wheat, maize, and rice grow to mature seed-producing states a lot faster than nut trees, chestnuts, hazelnuts and acorns were mostly left out of the massive selective breeding and other productivity increases that have catapulted grains to the super-abundance that defines modern agriculture. With modern genetic engineering, it seems possible that a concerted effort sometime in the future could produce much more productive and harvestable nut trees, opening the tantalizing possibility of converting substantial chunks of fertilizer and pesticide-heavy grain lands to rolling multispecies nut-tree savannas that sequester carbon while providing a similar calorie output.
It’s fascinating to be living in landscapes shaped by the sustained presence of large-scale agricultural civilizations for thousands of years. Like the Valley of Mexico, the Nile Valley, Mesopotamia, the Ganges plain, or the Yangtze Delta, but unlike New England or Australia or California or Russia or South Africa, France is an “anti-frontier,” a land profoundly physically shaped by the choices of large-scale metalworking agricultural societies for over two thousand years. From Vercingetorix’s Gaulish hill-forts and farmsteads, to Roman roads and aqueducts, through brutal centuries of endemic poverty and war, to Colbert’s grands projet canals and forestry reforms, to Macron’s offshore wind farms and high-speed rail lines. One particularly striking set of artwork reminded me of just how palpable the depth of history is here.
I was fortunate recently to be able to visit a limited-time exhibition7 in the town of Chantilly displaying twelve exquisitely detailed calendar pages during the rebinding of the Tres Riches Heures of the Duc du Berry. Painted in the 1400s, it’s perhaps the best-known and most-admired illuminated manuscript of the Middle Ages.
These magnificently detailed landscapes would have been impressive enough adorning a wall-sized painting, but they were each on one page of a book. A large book, to be sure, like a big old-fashioned dictionary or encyclopedia volume, but still a book, not a wall. The renowned Limbourg brothers who created these beauties reportedly traced the finest details using a paintbrush made from one individual squirrel hair.
In the absence of time-traveling photographers, these are likely the most detailed contemporary images we’ll ever have of medieval European landscapes. You can flip through images from the whole book online here and here.
The December calendar page from the Tres Riches Heures brought me a shock of recognition. The donjon keep from the castle in its background is still in existence today as a tourist-friendly national monument, and what was once the hunting woods of Valois kings is now a pleasant park open to all.
The Bois de Vincennes, easternmost and second-largest of the many parks of Paris proper, is a really spectacular example of an urban park. I fancy myself a bit of a connoisseur of city parks, having visited examples from Boston Common to Chapultepec Forest to the Red Fort of Delhi, and this one is in the top rank. It’s delightfully variegated, with bike lanes, sporting grounds, horse-riding trails, multiple artificial lakes, bosky wooded groves, a nudist zone8, boat rentals, a Buddhist temple, grassy meadows, trickling rivulets, marshy wetlands, and more.
It’s also home to a really astounding diversity and abundance of bird life. I’ve seen over twenty bird species in walks and bicycle rides around the wooded and watery expanses of this park, including Canada geese, mallard ducks, moorhens (poule d’eau), cormorants, Eurasian coots (foulque macroule), swans, starlings, pigeons, woodpigeons, sparrows, laughing gulls (mouette rieuse), crows, magpies, peacocks9, grey herons, European robins (rouge-gorge) terns, rose-ringed parakeets, great crested grebes, (grebe huppée), a common pochard duck, and a white wagtail (bergeronnette grise)!
Canada geese have also fascinated me for years, and there are always a great multitude to go see in and around the Lac Daumesnil in the Bois de Vincennes. They’re physically imposing, visually striking, boisterously social birds, and I see in them an exemplar of how wildlife conservation efforts can succeed so emphatically that a species feared to be disappearing in one century can be seen as omnipresent by the next. Canada geese were nearly extirpated by overhunting in the early 20th century, but now (thanks to early conservation work!) they’ve recovered so well that they’re even considered a pest in some landscapes. I’ve seen Canada geese in New England an uncounted multitude of times, from hearing their honking in casual suburbs to spotting their swimming in morning mists rising over the Allagash Wilderness Waterway, but it was in the French capital that I got my closest and most prolonged look at them. When they close their eyes, the down on the eyelid creates a new white spot amid the black of their heads, separate from the white bar diagonally criss-crossing it at all times. It reminded me of the white head-spots on the skin of orcas.
“France is quite a nice place” isn’t exactly a groundbreakingly original sentiment, but it’s nonetheless true. To me — admittedly sporting the rosiest-colored of glasses given that I just moved here as a newlywed — it sometimes seems positively utopian. As Paul Krugman wrote recently, Europe is now seriously underrated10. On the ground, France just feels like a healthier society, with more consistent basic11 functionality12 plus more, well, joie de vivre. Epistemically, I am aware that this might well be selection bias on my part, and that I’m now joining a long tradition of Americans stereotypically adoring Paris….but that sure is what it seems like to me13!
France is well known for its active civil society and longstanding “street protest” culture, which is on a new upswing at the moment with mass mobilizations over controversial budget negotiations that could cut some government benefits14, against the backdrop of a bitterly divided Assemblée Nationale currently split between (broadly speaking) left, center, and far-right multi-party groupings. I’ve seen lots of headlines in English-language media that breathlessly talk of an “unstable” France with “turmoil” in the streets of Paris. But I’ve never seen signs of what I would call actual really-threatening political instability on the ground. Tons of discussion of politics, graffiti and stickers and posters and protests and so on, but no actual danger, nothing actually interfering with daily life. When I saw a protest go by at the edge of the Place de la Nation recently, part of the “Bloquons tout” movement over the budget — among the biggest Paris protests in years — it had all the visual language of a dangerous event: a parade of raised fists and banners and folks shouting slogans bracketed by phalanxes of dark-uniformed armed police with riot shields. It looked disturbing at first glance, but like an AI-generated image, it didn’t quite match the “disturbing” prompt when you zoomed in on the details. Businesses right next to the protest stayed open, senior citizens and families with kids lounged unconcernedly on park benches a few meters away from shouting protesters, and many people (including me) just walked along the sidewalk literally between the police and the protest march, going around or even through police presence on their way to some other street. Life went on almost completely as normal, just with a new street spectacle passing by15.
Political outcomes are by and large the result of policy choices, not fundamental constants of the universe. Polities can have better or worse reactions to similar circumstances due to everything from institutional design to individual initiative. If France used a one-round Electoral College to pick their president instead of the two-round popular vote system they actually use, they might well have elected a pro-Putin stooge in 2017 or 2022, but they don’t, so they didn’t. They might yet in 2027, but they’re already showing encouraging signs of establishing firmer guardrails around democracy and the rule of law. A former French president just got sent to jail for accepting bribes from a foreign dictator when he was in power, and a judge has sentenced the leading far-right candidate for 2027, convicted of embezzling public funds, to house arrest and banned them from running. A French parliamentary report recently recommended banning social media for kids under 15, and might yet pass such an Australia-style ban. You may disagree with many of these things — I have concerns about some of them — but at least they’re trying, a Republic trying to maintain its values and civic identity in the face of the nonsensical neo-reactionary wave fueled by social media radicalization funnels. It sounds facile to say “You can just not let crazy people take over your country” but at the very least political elites and institutions can try harder to not let crazy people take over their country. France is trying.
There’s a whole mythology among the global political far-right that Europe is being “overrun” by immigrants from other cultures, invoking hateful old tropes of degradation and impurity. If you actually live in a European country and don’t just read mainline propaganda on your pocket supercomputer, you realize pretty quickly that it’s utter nonsense. Assimilation just works. Multicultural diverse societies just work. Rare outlier events where one individual immigrant commits some crime are blown up to insane media saturation points, but the overwhelming 99.9% reality of peaceful coexistence is ignored.
I’ve often heard English, Spanish, and Chinese in the streets alongside the predominant French. On the streets of Paris I’ve seen people wearing hijabs and yarmulkes, dreadlocks and berets, West African kaftan/boubou style robes and full formalwear tuxedo-style suits. I’ve bought a haircut from a Ukrainian woman and msemen flatbread at a boulangerie run by a lovely Moroccan couple who just welcomed a new baby. A stroll through the Bois de Vincennes on a sunny day sometimes feels to me like a glimpse at a utopian future — a utopian present, already here but just unevenly distributed — with flocking birds, playful children, and courting couples from what feels like every conceivable variant of humanity.
I feel like the lesson to take from the state of modern Paris is that we can have nice things. We can choose to build trains, clean energy, and apartment buildings. We can choose to not structure our elections so rural areas have disproportionate power. We can choose to not give random “public meetings” of bored senior citizens veto power over new multi-family housing. We can choose to not empower a psychotic secret police to snatch people off the street in the name of border control.
All the nice things that France has — bike lanes, high-speed rail, restored rivers, lovely parks, tree-planting in city centers, pedestrianized neighborhoods, and strong coordinated resistance to reactionary politics — are things that humanity knows how to do. They’re on the table. Other places can have them, too.
An EU permanent residence visa is akin to a U.S. “green card” — I now get to live and work in France, but not vote there. I’m still a U.S. citizen.
We had previously discussed moving to America together if Kamala Harris won, but I couldn’t possibly ask that of her now given the current political instability.
In my personal opinion, the top four museums in Paris are the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, the Musée Guimet, and the Musée du Quai Branly, in that order. Your preferences may differ!
Yes, rose-ringed parakeets! Another thing I love about Paris is that you can see parrots here. It’s not at all the sort of bird intuitively associated with a Northern European metropolis, but I’ve found that rose-ringed parakeets are a common sight in many forested corners of the City of Light, from the Tuileries to Notre-Dame to the Jardin des Plantes to the Bois de Vincennes. Here’s my full article on urban parrots worldwide.
As recommended by Tyler Cowen.
Which I discovered by accident a week ago when I bicycled up to the edge of it. Unexpected!
Yes, peacocks, living uncaged in Paris. There are tons on the Ile de Bercy in the Lac Daumesnil.
There’s a whole cottage industry of Americans trying to paint Europe as a washed out has-been, and it’s fundamentally misguided. Sure, GDP and GDP per capita is lower in the EU than in America, but life expectancies are a lot higher in the EU than in America. Geopolitics-wise, while Europe has long been dependent on U.S. security guarantees, they’re now rapidly pivoting towards independence now that their traditional partner has been shown to be unreliable. Europe has now contributed substantially more than America to Ukraine’s struggle for freedom against brutal invaders, has a fast-growing defense-tech sector with several unicorn startups, and continent-scale “drone wall” and “restored wetlands wall” projects to deter future Russian aggression are in the works.
One point that I suspect will become increasingly relevant with humanoid robots and eVTOLs on the horizon is that Europe actually lets their people buy the cool new electrotech coming out of China, from BYD cars to solar panels, and as a result is electrifying rapidly. Zero-electricity-price days are becoming common, and entire new ways of conceptualizing the grid are forming. And they’re simultaneously still growing their own domestic electrotech industries by following the strategy Tom Friedman recommended for the U.S. — joint ventures and technology-transfer-for-market-access deals, the classic playbook to catch up to a more technologically advanced power.
When my mom visited me in France at one point, she said she was shocked to see so many young people reading paper books. I regularly see people reading old-school books in parks, on the metro, and in trains. When my dad visited me in France at one point, he said he was shocked to see how good the roads were, smooth and pothole free even out of the big cities, with the roads in our part of the U.S. seeming third-world by comparison.
“Postal banking,” letting people set up a bank account at their local post office to ensure everyone has access to reasonably fair baseline financial services, has been an idea proposed by the Democratic Party in the U.S. for years, but it’s never managed to pass Congress. France just…has it. A lot of policy issues that are sharply contested in the U.S. are just settled normality in France — a constitutional right to reproductive healthcare being another recent example.
To take just one small but possibly indicative example, advertisements. The ads in American cities these days seem to me to be overwhelmingly for products that look like, frankly, slop. Gimmicky AI and crony-based cryptocurrencies and on-demand marijuana delivery services and pocket-casino sports gambling apps galore (I have actually seen all four of these ads in Boston or New York, they’re not made-up examples), but very little that looks to me like it will actually advance human flourishing, technological progress, or eudaimonia in any meaningful way. In Paris, in the metro stations and on the streets, I’ve seen ads for museums, new book releases, charitable foundations, the La Vie plant-based meat startup (purveyors of a vegan bacon that I can attest is absolutely delicious), the Octopus Energy clean energy software rising star, new swimming areas in the cleaned-up Seine (closed recently for autumn, but they’ll be back next summer!), and a new app called Timeleft designed to arrange dinner parties with strangers to meet new friends. There’s even a city-sponsored ad campaign celebrating the 10th anniversary of the landmark Paris Agreement climate accords in 2015, and promoting the upcoming climate talks in Belém, Brazil this year!
This broader “pension reform” issue is a big and likely growing political problem worldwide and will likely have substantial ramifications for the rest of my life, but fundamentally, this is a good problem for a civilization to have — developed-world welfare states are becoming fiscally unsustainable because people are living longer and having healthier lives, thus living much longer after the age of retirement and increasing the “dependency ratio” of retirees to working-age folks. I personally would be fine with retiring at 75 or 85, especially if healthcare capabilities and accessibility continues to progress, and even more fine with seriously cracking down on the rampant tax evasion in high income brackets (like the Biden Admin so nobly tried to do). I suspect most countries will eventually need to do both.
Maybe it takes some kind of special cultural sang-froid to treat a protest like street theater, but I suspect that this sense of safety might have more to do with the country’s admirably strict firearms regulation. More broadly, controversial as it is, average people in the street are talking about the federal budget, engaged with it in public spaces. We could have used a lot more of that to fight OBBBA in the U.S. recently.
Congratulations, Sam! On all counts! You're singing my song -- love Paris and to have "the environment" in the Constitution is imperative. (The state of Pennsylvania has it, and I think others as well.)
Love the "Tres Riche Heures" cycle -- you're so lucky to see it! Another must-see is the magnificent Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. I wrote about it here: https://juliegabrielli.substack.com/p/the-book-will-kill-the-building
I look forward to more dispatches in the coming weeks. . . .
Awesome article and congrats on moving to Paris. I lived in Paris from 2021 to 2022 and loved it. To your point, Paris isn’t just a museum either, it is actively the urban model that other cities should follow and realize that building big cost-effective infrastructure, abundant and clean energy, environmental and architecture restoration, and creating community can all be done in 2025. Even in the most historical places we don’t need to look at the past for greatness and beauty, we can build it today.