Our trip from Sers to London involved almost every available mode of transit. Our friends drove us to the train station and we took the train to Bordeaux. We took a bus from the Bordeaux train station to the airport and then flew across the channel. Once we landed in Gatwick we caught a very expensive taxi into the center of London (the train from Gatwick to London is also expensive, it was actually the same cost either way and travelling with my parents it made sense to take the cab). And, then, of course, we walked from the taxi to our hotel. We’re staying at the hotel for one night before moving to a flat we rented for the week.

Here’s the posts I made while we were in Sers:

Paris Restaurants (and one from Angouleme)
Sers
Château de La Rochefoucauld
Angoulême

Here are links to the posts I wrote about Arles and Paris. The posts from our first couple of days in Europe are available here and here.

Angoulême is the largest city in the region where we’ve been staying. Over the last few days Gilles and Nicole have been showing us around. We’ve explored the Château de La Rochefoucauld and Sers. We’ve also visited a bunch of other places. Here are a few of the most interesting:

Musée de la Bande Dessinée

Also known as the International Comic Strip Museum, the Musée de la Bande Dessinée is located near the SNCF (high speed rail) train station. We saw a temporary exhibition on the relation between fashion and comic strips. I learned that Yves Saint Laurent made a graphic novel prior to ascending to the height of the fashion world.

The museum’s permanent collection is pretty neat too. It portrays a history of comic books (with a French focus) from the mid-19th century through the present day. As someone who was raised on Tintin comics, I appreciated the large selection of Herge’s work, much of which highlighted his early efforts at using the beloved boy reporter as a propagandist for reactionary politics and brutal colonialism.

Musée d’Angoulême

The other big museum in town features three floors of art and artifacts that stretch from the Neolithic to the present day. The collection highlights local artists and history. The historical materials are the most intriguing part. They stretch back to perhaps two hundred thousand years before recorded history and include everything from Neanderthal and early homo sapiens skulls to surprisingly complex tools from the Iron Age.

Looking at the menhirs and (virtual) dolmen on display was something of a spiritual experience. There’s a kind of emotional resonance, maybe I should call it awe, that I feel when I think about the ancient human urge to create systems of meaning. These giant stones were used for ritual purposes. I suspect that these rituals served much the same purpose that rituals in a contemporary Unitarian Universalist (or any other faith tradition) congregation serve—to enable people to feel part of something larger than themselves.

The middle floor of the museum is basically a tribute to French colonialism. It has a selection of beautiful pieces from North Africa, Central Africa, and Oceania that I can only assume were acquired under dubious circumstances. The top floor is dedicated to local artists from the fifteenth-century to the present. The work is almost entirely banal.

Far more impressive is the view of the roof of the Angoulême Cathedral that the upper floors afford. Standing on the inner stairwell, looking through the clear glass windows, I got an excellent view of the various gargoyles that line the roof. They were exquisite and almost certainly worth a trip to the museum on their own. 

Les Modillons

This space for art and ecology is run by Gilles and Nicole’s friend Catherine Mallet. Les Modillons is located in a beautifully renovated early nineteenth-century farm about 20 minutes outside of town and regularly features exhibitions by both local and national artists. Gilles exhibited there a few years ago. The gallery space is hands down one of the most beautiful gallery spaces I’ve ever been in. It’s in a converted barn, built in 1818. The rafters and original stone have been preserved throughout. For those looking for an excuse to visit to France, Les Modillons offers residencies for artists and environmental activists.

Les Freres Moine and Le Maine Castay

These are two local cognac distillers. We visited Les Freres Moine our first full day in Sers. We visited Le Maine Castay on our last. Le Maine Castay is managed by a close friend of Gilles and Nicole’s. They get much of their produce from his garden and most of their meat from his farm as well. He gave us a tour of the cognac facilities. It was on a different scale than Les Freres Moine and principally provides cognac to the big cognac brands that they blend, bottle, and sell. I saw massive wooden cognac barrels and learned that a single one contains about $360,000 worth of liquor. I also learned that making cognac is dangerous work. Every year a couple of people succumb to the alchol fumes and fall into a big vat or barrel and drown. We learned that this happened to one of Gilles and Nicole’s friend’s neighbors last year.

After our tour we were invited back to his house for dinner. It was a beautiful stone building. My son played with his cats and I got to drink his homemade pineau alongside some of Le Maine Castay’s champagne. We were introduced, in French, to some of his friends and family as “the Americans who don’t speak French.” I can understand enough French that I was able to more-or-less follow the French conversation. Everyone was incredibly friendly. It was a great last evening in France after a wonderful three weeks. Tomorrow we’re off to London. I plan to write at least one more post on France as we travel from Sers to Angoulême (by car) to Bordeaux (by train) to London (by plane).

We spent an afternoon at  about 20 minutes outside of the center of Angoulême. It has a long history. The family who built it first occupied the site in the late 10th century and have resided in it continuously since then. They claim to be one of the oldest families in France and the family archives certainly suggest that.

The château is privately owned and operated. We arrived late in the afternoon. There were perhaps a dozen other people on the property. A sole employee, the cashier, was to be seen. Classical music was blaring in the courtyard. The cashier informed us that the mother of the current Duke lived in half of the château, that she liked classical music to be played at all times, and that a large portion of the building was off limits.

We wandered out into the courtyard which overlooks the town below—hundreds of red clay roofs and lichen covered stone walls lining a river bank and dominated by an ancient Catholic church. We then made our way into the family chapel, which features a prominent display of the family tree and the crypt of a male heir who had died at the age of five. The chapel is two stories and includes a choir loft on the second floor. It could be described as modest in reference to Versailles.

Overall, the contrast between Versailles and Château de La Rochefoucauld was informative. Versailles is no longer occupied by the Bourbon family. The Rochefoucaulds wanted visitors to know that they are still around, still wealthy, and still important. Each room we went into after the chapel featured some series of portraits of influential family members or recently deceased ones (the recently deceased ones seemed much less impressive than their ancestors) and information about the family’s history. I learned that some of its members had been executed during the French Revolution despite their, in the family’s account, liberal sympathies. I also learned that the Duke La Rochefoucauld had been Louis XVI’s Master of Wardrobe. The, probably apocryphal, story is that when Louis XVI learned of the storming of the Bastille, he said to the Duke La Rochefoucauld, “It’s a revolt.” The Duke is alleged to have responded, “No, sire, it’s a revolution.”

The continuing ownership of the château by the Rochefoucaulds made me question how much of revolution it actually was. I mean, the mere fact that at least this branch of the French nobility has maintained control of a castle for over a thousand years suggests a certain continuity over time. I don’t know how the Rochefoucaulds are faring financially, but I suspect that they’re not poor. It’s true that they’ve had to monetize the family estate but the mere fact that such an asset has remained in the family is significant. As is the fact that they’ve recently been thinking of adding to it. In one of the rooms we saw an architectural model that included a proposed new wing designed by I. M. Pei (it looked to me like it would have been an aesthetic disaster).

The proposed Pei wing, however, was in keeping with the château’s most interesting feature. It has been consistently added to over the centuries. The original keep was built in the 11th century. The most recent additions are from the 18th. The real gem is the château’s grand staircase. It was supposedly designed by Leonardo da Vinci and traversed the height of the building as a continuous piece. It is beautiful white stone and when the light hits it glows. At the very top of the staircase is a drawing of the castle attributed to da Vinci (it was unsigned).

Near the close of our visit the cashier let us into the family library and archives. They are incredible. The library contains around 18,000 volumes, most from the 18th and 19th centuries. It focuses on law and theology. We were able to find other things, including a beautifully illustrated edition of François-René de Chateaubriand’s translation of Milton’s Paradise Lost that we were allowed to page through. One of the real treasurers was an original edition of Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie, the work that invented the genre. I’d never seen an original copy before. It was a little awe inspiring to stand in front of the first European attempt to systematize human knowledge and realize that when it was written it was the project of only a handful of polymaths.

Undoubtedly, the family archives are of greatest interest to historians. I imagine all of the volumes in the library exist elsewhere. The archives, however, stretch back to the 13th century and contain records of all the kinds of wealth and power the French nobility attained for itself—mostly, I imagine, through theft and violence—over the years. The cashier had closed the front gate so she could accompany us into the library and archives. She showed us a couple of thirteenth-century documents. And then she showed us what must be one of the family’s prized possessions, the Duke La Rochefoucauld’s inventory of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette’s jewelry. It was in an archival box. The cashier showed us the handwritten original and according to her the total value of the jewelry was 3 million pounds. At the time, she said, the Rochefoucaulds could have sold their château for 60,000 pounds.

The inventory and the cashier’s statement were, like Versailles, a good summary of reasons why the French Revolution ultimately happened—vast income inequality. Prior to the Revolution France was ruled by a hereditary elite who cared little for the vast majority of people in the country. Their wealth insulated them from everyone else’s reality. It meant that a few people had extravagant and sumptuous lives while most people eked out an existence. As year-by-year countries like the United States become more economically unequal and the dire threat of climate change increases I can’t help but think that such a situation is returning (or less romantically has returned). The world can only be different if we organize mass movements to make it so.

This week we are staying at our friends’ country house in Sers, a small village outside of the southwestern city of Angoulême. It’s a very relaxing week. I am catching up on some reading—I’ve read two books by James Baldwin, a bit of John Rawls’s “On Justice,” and some elementary school readers in French—and my sleep. There’s not a lot to do other than walk and explore the countryside. Yesterday my son and I took a walk through the village and came across the town’s church (built in the 11th century, remodeled sometime between the 12th and 15th, and then remodeled again in the 19th), its cemetery, a field full of sunflowers and a sign pointing to a 5th century monastery, which I hope to explore before we leave.

We also went to the market in Angoulême where Nicole and my mother planned a menu for the next few days. Lunch and dinner were both heavy on shellfish—oysters and langoustines—served with a simple salad or radishes and local white wine.

About the only other things we’ve done since we’ve been here is eat at La Cigogne and visit a cognac distillery. It’s called Les Frères Moine. The owner was kind enough to give us a tour. It is a small distillery where they make their own cognac barrels and host art exhibitions and gatherings. I bought some cognac and a bottle of pineau, a local aperitif that’s a mixture of cognac and wine. It is quite good which is kind of unfortunate since it is difficult to find back in the States.

No discussion of Paris would be complete without at least a gesture towards the city’s restaurants. In past years, when I’ve been in Paris, we’ve cooked a lot in the apartment we’ve rented. This year the apartment we had was quite small and the heatwave was debilitating. As a result, we didn’t host any dinner parties or make excursions to the Bastille Market. Instead, we either ate sandwiches and pastries from the local boulangeries (bakeries) or went out to eat. Here are some a few of my favorite meals:

Yam’Tcha

My parents took my son and I and their friends Gilles and Nicole to this Michelin Star restaurant that has been getting a lot of press internationally. The chef specializes in a fusion of French and Chinese and doesn’t cook from recipes. She goes to the market and is inspired each day from what she find’s there. The most interesting part of the meal was the tea and wine pairings that went with each course. We had what was billed as a three-course meal but actually turned out to be six courses. There were two amuse bouches—Chinese waffles and three small dishes of crab, sea snails, and egg rolls—followed by a salad of heirloom tomatoes, cockles, and mussels, a main course of sea bass cooked with tea, and then a dessert of fruit and sorbet finished by a palette cleansing coconut marshmallow and a coconut sorbet.

Alongside each course was either a delightful tea—white, oolong, or green—or a wine. I’ve never had food specifically paired with tea before. It works almost as well as pairing it with wine. It’s something I plan to experiment with at home.

Lao Siam and Krung Thep Mahanakorn

The British photographer Nigel Dickinson has been close friends with my parents for something like two decades. He has a fabulous studio in Paris’s Belleville neighborhood. Belleville is a very diverse community. It is one of those places where you can find Sephardic and Tunisian Jews living alongside Muslims from Algeria and Morocco. It is also the home to a sizable Laotian and Thai community.

We had a dinner with Nigel twice. Both times he took us to Laotian or Thai restaurants near his home. The food was far better than any Thai food I’ve had in the United States. It was also quite a bit different. Most Thai places I know serve variations on perhaps a dozen kinds of curries. These places served a huge variety. We had fish mashed and then steamed in a banana leaf while cooked in a coconut milk curry, a red tofu curry that didn’t even vaguely resemble the red curry I get in America, a delicious raw papaya salad, and half a dozen other dishes. Unlike Yam’Tcha, Lao Siam and Krung Thep Mahanakorn were both quite affordable. Two people could eat there for well under forty euros a piece. 

Oyster Club

Oyster Club is a classic Breton seafood place in the Marais. We had their mixed seafood plates and oysters. The mixed seafood plates came with winkles, whelks, more oysters, pink shrimp, and grey shrimp. This last item was to be eaten whole—shell and all.

The restaurant itself is on a small side street and sort of spills out into the street. It’s a lively evening scene and the food is excellent—though the menu is limited to seafood. It is certainly a place I will go back to next time I am in the Marais.

Au Bouquet Saint Paul and Chez Mademoiselle

Au Bouquet Saint Paul and Chez Mademoiselle are two excellent bistros near Rue Saint Antoine in the Marais. Au Bouquet Saint Paul had an inexpensive fixed price lunch—14.50 euro for either an entree and a dessert or an entree and an appetizer—that consisted of classic French bistro food. We ate there twice. The sea bass and gazpacho soup were both great and my son loved the cream brûlée. They also served Berthillon ice cream, which an experience in itself.

Chez Mademoiselle is a bit pricier. It also has a bit more of a scene. It is located in the front of the building where we rented our apartment. I went there a few times—once for dinner and twice for drinks. One night while I was sipping on a glass of rose the bar erupted into a spontaneous dance party. 

La Cigogne (Angouleme)

We ate at La Cigogne for lunch our first full day in Sers. It is a Michelin Plate restaurant. While this is the lowest designation that Michelin can give a restaurant, it doesn’t mean the food is bad. On the contrary, it means it is quite good. It just isn’t good enough to earn a Michelin Star or a Michelin Bib Gourmand. 

I suspect that La Cigogne earned its Michelin ranking because its food is excellent but not necessarily innovative. Yam’Tcha pushes culinary boundaries. La Cigogne delivers fantastic and classic French food. I would happily eat at either again (provided  someone else is picking up the tab) but Yam’Tcha undoubtedly provided the meal that my parents and their friends will be talking about for years to come.

We left Paris for a week in Sers, a small village outside of the southwestern city of Angoulême. We will staying with our friend Gilles Perrin and Nicole Ewenczyk. They just finished building a country house and studio there. It is so newly constructed that all of the furniture is yet to arrive. Everyone gets their own bedroom but I get to sleep on the floor.

Here’s the list of my blog posts in Paris:

It is the Job of the Far Left to Organize the Margins
The Failure of French Socialism and Future Tasks for the Left
Rue de Turenne (or some thoughts on champagne socialism)
Versailles
Walking Paris
The New French Right: a Conversation with Pascale Tournier
Canicule (Heatwave)

I will be writing a long post about food in Paris over the next couple of days while we’re in Sers. No trip there is complete without a meditation of the city’s cuisine.

Yesterday was one of the hottest days on record in Paris. It was officially 108 degrees Fahrenheit. I suspect that on the streets, with all the heat bouncing up from the cobblestones and concrete, it was a lot hotter.

The heat was made worse by the fact that it was the third day in a row where temperatures had peaked at over 100 and not fallen below 80 or so at night. This meant that the inside of buildings never really cooled off. There is not a lot of air conditioning. Unlike Houston, Paris isn’t a city built to withstand extreme heat. But with global warming Parisians are going to have to figure out how to make adjustments. I had to jury rig a portable air conditioner to keep our rental apartment moderately cool—when it was 108 outside it was no more than 78 inside. If I hadn’t, I think that the situation would probably have been threatening to my parents’ health. As it was, the few times they went outside in the extreme heat they had to walk slowly and drink a lot of water to avoid heat stroke.

I went out at the height of the heat to visit the Musee d’Orsay. It is one of my favorite museums and I would have been disappointed with my trip if I hadn’t spent at least a couple of hours there. While I was there, I saw a commissioned exhibit by the British artist Tracey Emin and a retrospective of Berthe Morisot. Emin’s name is probably familiar to those acquainted with contemporary figurative art. Her highly erotic drawings did not disappoint. They were quickly executed ink on paper drawings of female figures in various amatory poses—some in the midst of sexual acts and some simply reclining in the nude. The figures were significantly abstracted and what caught me was that they managed to portray the emotional resonance of sexual love without being titillating.

Morisot, in contrast, is a name that is not well known. She was a major figure in the Impressionist movement—probably the most significant female artist that the movement produced. Over the twentieth-century, her work has largely been forgotten. The last time there was a solo show of her work was in 1941.

This is a shame as her painting was every bit as good as the Impressionist masters. She was particularly skilled at pushing the question: When is a painting finished? Like my brother Jorin, she frequently left the underpainting exposed and even in some places left bits of the sketches she made on canvas prior to painting visible.

What really struck me about her work, though, was the subject matter. She was a member of France’s cultural elite, but she routinely chose to paint intimate, ordinary, domestic scenes—servants at work, women doing laundry, mothers nursing or swaddling their babies, and parents at play with their children. This is quite different from the subject matter of most of the other Impressionists. It rendered a more complete sense of late nineteenth-century French life than is found in the paintings of the male Impressionists.

The Musee d’Orsay was incredibly crowded while I was there. It was filled with people trying to escape the heat. Walking and taking the Metro to and from the museum I drank almost a liter of water each way, and I only had to travel about 25 minutes to get to there.

On the way back I saw someone literally going mad from the heat on the Metro. One of the indigent men who begs on the streets in the Marais had stripped off most of his clothes and was in the midst of a psychotic break. He was gesticulating wildly and yelling by the ticket gate. And then he was walking along the street screaming expletives in French. I had seen him a few times earlier in the week and he had seemed quite calm. The heat had clearly pushed him beyond some inner limit.

Overall, the heatwave really changed in the energy in the city—especially at night. Once it started to cool off a little the streets completely filled up. One night I took a walk through the city and felt a rare kind of vibrant wonder. Another night I went down to the Seine for a drink. The river bank was filled with temporary restaurants and thousands of people collectively celebrating summer, enjoying each other’s company, and escaping some of the heat along the relative coolness of the river. It was a glorious scene filled with impromptu music performances and dance celebrations and passionate arguments in languages that I barely understand (French) or know well (English and Spanish).

I am not sure that I have ever quite experienced anything like it. It even exceeded the vibrancy normally present along the river in the summer. It was as if a milder form of the frenetic energy of the man on the Metro had been unleashed throughout the city.

Last December Mark Lilla published an article in the New York Review of Books titled “Two Roads for the New French Right.” It discusses intellectual currents in French amongst the Right, specifically amongst people about my age or younger. According to Lilla, they represent something new. They are more concerned with climate change and more critical of capitalism than their elders. Some of them are genuinely anti-capitalist.

Lilla drew extensively from Pascale Tournier’s book “Le vieux monde est de retour, Enquête sur les nouveaux conservateurs” for the article. Pascale is a French journalist who writes for La Vie, a left-leaning humanist oriented Roman Catholic magazine. The title of her book roughly translates to “The Old World is Returning, A Study of the New Conservatives.” Since I study conservative thought and right-wing movements in the United States, I thought it would be interesting to get a sense of what’s going on with the French Right. I sent Tournier an email and she graciously agreed to meet with me.

Most of our conversation covered the ground she touched upon in her book. I read French quite slowly and since buying it in Arles last week have managed to make my way through the first couple of chapters. What she, and Lilla, argue is that conservatism is a new idea in France. Historically, the main currents amongst the French Right have been divided into the Orléanists, Bonapartists, and Legitimists. Each current aligned itself with a different royal house that claimed the French throne. The Orléanists supported the Orleans cadet branch of the House of Bourbon, the Bonapartists supported the family of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the Legitimists supported the elder branch of the House of Bourbon. Without getting into the details, each current holds distinctive political positions about the role of the state in French politics as well as democracy. In the 1970s right-wing populism started to emerge as another current in the form of the National Front led by the Le Pen family. And within the last few years conservatism has begun to emerge as a fifth current.

Taken as a whole the conservatism of the French Right is quite distinct from the conservatism of the Right in the United States. Conservatism in the English-speaking world dates to Edmund Burke’s reaction to the French Revolution. Conservatism in France is primarily rooted in French and Catholic sources. In some ways, Tournier’s description of it made it appear as having little in common with conservatism in the United States. American conservatism is organized around the maintenance and restoration of white supremacy. It promulgates climate change denial and is closely tied to white evangelical Christianity. It celebrates capitalism and business and is anti-intellectual enough in its orientation that intellectual historians, climate scientists, and mainstream economists often state, in some form or another, that it has no genuine intellectual tradition.

The French conservatives that Tournier describes are deeply concerned with climate change. The flagship publication is called Limite and bills itself as a “revue d’écologie intégrale,” a magazine of integrated ecology. They are Catholic and have been deeply influenced by Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si, which argues that climate change is real, and that Catholics must take it seriously. They link their ecological concerns with an analysis that says humanity has overstepped the limits of the natural order, which is how they end up as recognizably conservative. They are for heteronormative nuclear families and opposed to gay marriage. They reject the animating slogan of the May 1968 movement, “It is forbidden to forbid” and instead claim that limits must be sought in all aspects of human life if climate change is to be confronted. Interestingly, this leads them to be critical of capitalism as they fear it is both damaging to the planet and undermines what they imagine to be traditional social arrangements.

According to Tournier, they have turned away from the antisemitism of older generations of the French Right. Instead, they are anti-Islamic. When I asked Tournier if this meant that there were either Jews or Protestants among their members, she told me that Jews and Protestants largely supported Macron. She didn’t know of any of them who were either Jewish or Protestant.

Overall, Catholicism seems to be the conservatives central animating concern. Unlike the older French Right, for whom Catholicism is largely a cultural and political orientation, Tournier thinks that the New French Right was deeply influenced by their faith. It is their faith, she thinks, that has led them to take climate change so seriously. It is their faith, also, which seems have to pushed them outside many of the old Right-Left dichotomies.

Tournier and I ended our conservation not with a discussion of the Right in the United States but with a discussion of the reemergence of the Religious Left. I described for her the work of William Barber II, the Poor People’s Campaign, and the work of my own Unitarian Universalist Association under the leadership of Susan Frederick-Gray. My own takeaway from our time together was that there is energy for new ideas on the Right in France in a similar way that there is energy for new ideas on the Left in the United States. I have no idea the significance of this confluence other than it suggests that political ideologies, like the rest of human culture, are fluid, ever changing, and, at the same time, built upon what has come before.

However appealing I might find some aspects of New French Right’s religious based approach to climate change, it makes more than a little nervous to take a friendly interest in political currents that, whatever their other appeals, routinely inhabit the same space as reactionary, historically anti-semitic, movements like the National Front (now the National Rally). My own nervousness was heightened when I discussed Limite with a friend who is not a scholar or a journalist but a climate change activist. She told me, “they dress up their right-wing politics in an ecological package. They are not serious about ecology but they are serious about opposing gay rights, feminism, and other cultural issues dear to the Left.” Not being immersed in French politics, I am in no position to judge her assessment. But it does make me cautious.

Walking is one of my very favorite things to do. Paris is an exceptional city to walk through. It is dense enough that like New York, San Francisco, or Chicago it has not only neighborhoods but micro-neighborhoods. Each city block has its own character. The Marais, where we’re staying, changes from block-to-block. Moving through the city at night, wandering back from dinner with an old friend who lives here, I passed through densely packed streets filled with bistros, almost empty plazas where perhaps a half-dozen people lingered over a dinner at an oyster bar, and a bookstore prominently displaying the works of English speaking anarchists translated into French (Emma Goldman, Kenneth Rexroth, and one or two others). There were also massive billboards advertising upcoming plays, many many closed wine shops, a quality comic book shop, and a cheese shop that had won the Meilleur Ouvrier de France (thus signifying it had some of the best cheese in the country).

The people watching was wonderful and, at the same time, not a little disheartening. Mixed among the vibrant couples out for a stroll, the beautiful groups gathered for dinner, the jazz aficionados seeking the best club, the confused tourists trying not to lose their way, were those who have found themselves at society’s margins: prostitutes gathering along the Rue de Saint-Denis, where they have gathered for generations; an African street vendor grilling corn over a wood fire in the impossible heat; and too many people trying to sleep in the streets.

This was what I love about walking. It makes it difficult to ignore the broader social reality—inequality, stratification, the multi-cultures of the city piled upon each other… When I am in a car traveling from place-to-place it is possible to remain oblivious to human worlds other than mine. When I walk I must, on some level, perhaps only briefly, perhaps for just a fraction of minute, engage the humanity that surrounds me and of which I am a part.

Yesterday we went to Versailles. The crowds were enormous, and it was very hot. Overall, I would rate it a fairly miserable experience. Even with tickets we had to wait almost two hours to get in. And then, throughout the entirety of the palace, there was the sheer press of humanity. The crowd in the famous Hall of Mirrors, built by Louis XIV for parties, was equivalent to that at a large concert. People were packed elbow-to-elbow. It was hard to absorb much of anything.

I’ve only been to major tourist sites like Versailles a couple of times in my life—I went to Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto when I was in Japan this past winter and visited the Tower of London as a kid—and each time I’ve gone the experience has been similar. The site itself has been an impressive tribute to human creativity and, more often than not, an equally disgusting tribute to human greed and cruelty. But when I have been in such spaces, it has been hard to experience much more than the press of the crowds, the energy of hundreds of cell phones thrust into the air trying to get the ideal snapshot, the tour groups shouting at each other, and discomfort and low level anxiety—humans didn’t evolve to tolerate such tight quarters.

At Versailles, when I was able to focus my attention elsewhere, I mostly found myself nurturing anti-monarchist sentiments and feeling grateful for the French Revolution. The level of opulence at Versailles is truly mind boggling and its stomach turning to think that the ruling elite of France lived in such splendor while the majority of the populace had little to live on. In many ways, Versailles was the cause of the French Revolution. The massive spending that was required to build and sustain it—along with the fact that the nobility and clergy (the richest members of society)—paid very little in taxes essentially drove France to bankruptcy. It was Louis XVI’s need to raise additional money for his government, and finance his outlandish lifestyle, that caused him to call the Estates General into session. He hoped to get support for increasing taxes. He got the French Revolution.

I will refrain from singing the glories of the French Revolution. I will simply note that visiting Versailles reaffirmed my belief that inequality is a significant social problem and that a society which sustains gross economic gaps is fundamental unjust. It’s ridiculous that the Bourbons had so much by dint of their births while so many others had so little for the same reason.