The enormous wedding cake of a building in front of you is the Hotel de Ville — the city hall of Paris. The city has been governed from this exact spot since thirteen fifty-seven. Nearly seven hundred years of mayors, uprisings, and municipal paperwork, all administered from one riverside address. And that river is the reason you know a very useful French word.
Before this was a grand square, it was a gravel beach sloping down to the Seine — in old French, a greve. It was the city's unloading dock, so men who needed work came and stood on the gravel, waiting to be hired to haul cargo. Going to the greve — faire greve — meant looking for a job. Then, in the eighteen hundreds, workers began gathering on the same square for the opposite reason — to refuse to work until pay improved. The phrase flipped, and faire greve came to mean going on strike. It still does. Every French strike since — every frozen train line, every quiet airport — is named after the beach in front of city hall. Fran
ce walks off the job in the vocabulary of this square, and France maintains a healthy schedule.
The building behind it has burned with the city's temper. In May of eighteen seventy-one, as the Paris Commune collapsed, the Communards torched the Hotel de Ville rather than surrender it. The fire took more than the building. The city's archives were stored here, and they burned — the registers of ev
