In Europe

Malot's
Sans Famille
could be found everywhere: in 1905, there were some 400,000 beggars wandering the French countryside.
    While enormous facilities for the supply and drainage of water were being built in Paris – small underground lakes can still be found there today – the gutters of provincial French towns like Rouen and Bordeaux were still open sewers. Rennes, a city of 70,000 inhabitants at the turn of the century, could claim precisely thirty bathtubs and two houses with a bathroom. In the literature of the day one finds an increasing number of complaints about the stench of domestic staff, for example, or of fellow passengers.
    But here, too, began a period of rapid and radical change. Starting in the 1880s, the French state allocated tens of millions of francs to the development plan advanced by the ambitious Charles de Saulces de Freycinet. By building roads and schools, this minister of public works hoped quickly to narrow the gap between Paris and the provinces, while at the same time giving the stagnating French economy a badly needed boost.
    The measures soon bore fruit. By 1900, the infamous black bread, symbol of grinding poverty and backwardness, was almost nowhere to be found. Within two decades, stiff traditional costume was replaced by supple, ready-made clothing; around 1909, a farm girl at the fair was almost indistinguishable from a dressed-up factory maid from the city. The market stands run by public scribes also began to disappear: from 1880, every farm child learned to read and write, effectively putting an end to a brand of dependency we can scarcely fathom today.
    The regionalist writer Émile Guillaumin described the lives of five hired men hoeing a field of beets near Moulins on a hot summer's day in 1902. Eight years later, in 1910, the first of these farm workers had become a hotel doorman, the second lived in the city of Vichy, the third worked in a furniture factory, the fourth was a domestic servant. Only the fifth man still worked the land. Today, in 1999, I dare assert, no more than two of their one hundred great-grandchildren still work the soil. At least thirty of them will have ended up in Paris, and the Parisians – more than the residents of any other metropolis – seemed to realise that theyare all the great-grandchildren of beet-weeders, and that they must grant due respect to both beets and their hoers.
    At Opéra metro station I start a conversation with Pierre Maillot. With his grey beard and plain spectacles, he is standing in one of the corridors holding a tin can and a cardboard sign: ‘I beg your forgiveness. But I am hungry.'This is how he earns about a hundred francs (roughly fifteen euros) a day, enough for a bed and a lonely meal with a quarter-litre of wine. The older people are generous, but the young ones tease him. ‘I have my only friend right here with me,’ he says, reaching into his inside pocket and pulling out a bible with a red plastic cover. Then he tells me a complicated story about prisons, a divorce, problems inside his head, vanished unemployment benefits and the other vagaries of a man's life.
    Up at street level, there's a demonstration going on. To my knowledge there is no other city in Europe where the papers each day print maps, as nonchalantly as they do the weather report, showing the anticipated routes of popular assemblies: illegal aliens, dentistry students, royalists, telecommunications workers, it goes on day after day. I come across a group of students. They are angry because their teachers have been laid off in mid-term. Philippine Didier explains to me that she will not now be able to complete her Greek exams. Like her fellow students, she plans to attend the École Nationale d'Administration, the ENA, the breeding ground for France's top politicians and administrators.‘The minister hates us,’ Philippine says with great conviction. ‘It seems he once failed his exams himself.’ I begin seeing all these sloppy pea jackets, bent spectacles, velour caps and backpacks through different eyes: standing here before me, I realise, is the French elite of the year 2030, the cabinet ministers, the top officials, the iron rails on which France rolls along, the Establishment of the future.
    In Paris, even the ordinary is often impressive. That applies particularly to the city's public transport system. Paris and its environs have a network the likes of which cities such as London, Amsterdam and Berlin will only be implementing