I know Paris isn't all that hot with currents events and my preconceptions of the place has been shattered by YT...

It certainly has gone down a lot in the past 10 of so years. Last time I went 4 years ago I didn't enjoy myself at all. According to a Frog in one of the many previous threads similar to this, the centre of Paris is now okay (area 1 to 8 I think (?)), you still have to do the "standard" city life actions of ignoring street sellers and guarding your personal belongings, but it's better than it used to be.

>you still have to do the "standard" city life actions of ignoring street sellers and guarding your personal belongings
what? I've been living in Paris all my life (35 years).
Of course you don't have to fall for people selling you a "Rolex" for 9€ or running money game scams, but I've never been pickpocketed or mugged even once. And I'm a glasses-wearing midget.

I hear from foreigners it's probably better to avoid taxis, too. But the subway and buses safe and mostly efficient, plus with a little planning you can walk your way from one spot to another, enjoying a nice scenery while you're at it.

I live in Gournay in Seine-Saint Denis and resent that ;_; it isn't anywhere near "bad".
This is the school my kids go to. Certainly not a war zone, or else we would have moved out long ago.

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hurrr that's almost a village and at the outskirts of seine saint denis. seine saint denis as a whole is a shithole. you can always find diamonds in coal mines tho.

Went there a few years ago and didn't have any problems. There's always gonna be problem areas is bigger cities, whether it's London, Paris, New York or Madrid.

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Population is about 7000, it's not a village. And it borders Chelles (population: more than 50,000).
It is on the far side of the department though, I'll grant you that.

DOM TOM blacks and Arabs are not a problem really.

Paris is a paradise for white rich bourgeoisie and this 300 years old trend keeps increasing

>I feel like right wing ytbers like to exaggerate the negative.

They always do that you know ?

Paris itself is actually a fairly small little city that concentrates ALL the wealth of an entire nation into a few square kilometers.
It is not a shithole at all, though the surroundings might as well be.

it's still better than any american city

pretty low bar there

unironically the most criminalized place of france

This. Paris was limited in size by its fortifications in previous centuries, which where later replaced with the "Périphérique" highway which entirely encircles Paris. So its growth was stopped early on in history.
Pairs "intra muros" (ie proper) has a population of merely 2 million and is tiny.
See that map? the grey blocks are single (albeit large) buildings, like hospitals and the town hall.

>It is not a shithole at all, though the surroundings might as well be.
Many aren't though, Hauts-de-Seine and Yvelines have rich suburbs (that's where Versailles is), La Défense is the business district with skyscrapers (forbidden within Paris), it's boring but safe.

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>I feel like right wing ytbers like to exaggerate the negative.
So in order to get a more balanced view of the place, you decided to ask Jow Forums? Are you literally retarded, man?

How about you fucking visit the place. It'll cost you what, 80 bucks nowadays?

the ile de france region is 30% of France 's GDP la

parool.nl/amsterdam/wat-is-de-nederlandse-economie-zonder-amsterdam~a4357335/

France isn't all that unusual compared to the rest of Europe, though clearly on the higher side. Without Paris, France's economy would shrink 15%. Compare this to 20% for Athens/Greece and 13% for Copenhagen/Denmark and Helsinki/Finland. The Netherlands is incredibly decentralized with the economy shrinking by 5% without Amsterdam. Berlin is actually such a shithole that the German economy would be bigger without it.

memes aside, do people go to Paris unironically expecting it to be a thematic park about guys in stripped shirts eating frogs, baguettes and singing la javanaise while they twirl their tiny moustaches?

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>Went to Paris five years ago
>"We are le angry with le government, we are on le strike"
>Zero guillotines
>No purge of the political class
>Nobody had put Hollande's head on a pike

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France has been highly centralized since the 1400s, this concentrated the government and a large part of businesses (who weren't geographically tied to some other place), education and such.
The other French large cities were either established in antiquity (like Lyon or Bordeaux) or are formerly foreign cities (Lille, Nice) or even capitals of small states that were integrated into France (Strasbourg, Metz, Rennes, Nantes...) at a comparatively recent date. So they had time to grow larger outside of France.

Germany, like Italy, unified really late (1860), so cities like Milano, Naples, Frankfurt, Hamburg were capitals not so long ago, and grew large and prosperous on their own.

The tourist neighborhood are ok, full of nigger scammer and Gypsy pickpockets tho

The baguette is still mostly true. A significant part of the population love its baguette, and since it goes hard within a day, you have to buy them everyday.
You'll certainly see me walking around with a baguette each day before noon.

The rest of the stereotypes are either ridiculous exaggerations or downright inventions.
I have no idea where the "French don't wash" comes from, a NY Times study concluded that the average French spend more time in the bathroom than anybody else among large countries except for Mexicans - who probably aren't stereotyped as the cleanest people on Earth, though they are.

No idea where "ooolala" or "hon hon hon" come from, either.
"Pierre" doesn't even appear in the top 100 of the most commonly given first names. And "Mohamed", the right-winger suggestion, only comes 21st. "Mamadou" isn't in the top 100.
Real ones are Gabriel, Louis, Raphaël, Jules, Adam.

Don't be ridiculous, no one expects la javanaise, we expect la vie en rose.

I went there before the ISIS and illegal immigrant crisis and the place was already overflowing with cops and soldiers on every corner, plus Africans and gypsies trying to sell you junk or scam you in some way. I don't think I would want to go back now

>London
>15% of the population
>Yet 11% of the economy
Why do so many politicians place so much importance on that shithole?

Maybe not to that exaggerated extent, but when you go to a place, don't you go expecting to see their culture and their way of life? Isn't that the whole point of tourism? I think that's a huge part of Paris Syndrome.

I'm more surprised about Italy though. Regardless of the Northern cities you'd still think Rome itself would contribute a lot more to the economy.
How do you even shit after eating so much baguette? I always need full grain bread or I cannot shit.

thoughtco.com/oh-la-la-vocabulary-1371324

>I have no idea where the "French don't wash" comes from
WW2, when the Germans were hoarding resources from the occupied territories. The Americans came across a lot of stinky Frenchmen because most of them could either drink or bathe, not both. Same for the Netherlands, where we literally had to eat tulip bulbs because the Germans starved us that hard.

No joke, the US military had to give out manuals explaining this (and other things) to its personnel. 112 Gripes about the French actually explains a lot about contemporary American stereotypes about the French.

Most sources say that lindon is around 25%, maybe they got confused with the actual City of London

Every tourist spot in the world I've been to has its share of peddlers and scammers. Just don't pay attention to them.

>the place was already overflowing with cops and soldiers on every corner
Currently, 7000 troops for the whole of France, so one for every 10,000 people. Hardly overflowing.
And the terrorists are running out of puff, they've only killed 2 civilians, 1 soldier and 1 cop this year (the perpetrators were all killed by the police on the spot). Four too many of course, but still 4 as compared to the 603,000 people who died of other causes in France last year.
The terrorists tend to target the soldiers, anyway.

I honestly don't believe it comes from here. I don't think the average grunt would smell good. i think it goes deeper, from english butthurt centuries ago, especially with the "popular" revolution. I mean dissing the french is a national sport form them, we have all the flaws according to them and they sure tell them to everybody new they meet

The old stereotype here is that you smell of garlic. I mean in olden times it literally might have been true, garlic historically wasn't a thing we ate and it is something that comes out in your sweat, just like curry

Well thank you, this means sense.
Indeed, my great-grandma who lived in Normandie and was young during the war told me they couldn't buy soap during those times (materials diverted for the war economy), and had no running water for a while after D-Day because the allied bombings had cut off the pipes.

>112 Gripes about the French
Yeah, I remember reading that - fun stuff.
Some US soldiers were complaining about hearing French "lies" about "the Statue of Liberty having been built in France and gifted to the US".

I'm not used to any of that so I did not feel very safe

Just back from a week there and it was great. Probably the best city break city in the world.

even there you hardly risk anything if you're just minding your business.

There are lots of scammers in the tourist areas too, I suppose you get then in every big city but seriously within my first hour in Paris I had someone trying to scam me

Stayed down in Nanterre last week and got invited to lunch in St. Denis on sunday. Probably the best part of the trip.

patience my friend

well yeah but anyone with comon sense knows how to avoid street scams

Robert Graves said allied troops in WWI made a list of which nationalities kept the cleanest trenches, from best to worst they were:
1.) English & German Protestants
2.) Northern Irish
3.) Welsh, Canadian, Scots, German Catholics
4.) Muslim Indians
5.) Algerians
6.) Portuguese
7.) Belgian
8.) French

He later added that Belgians and French were place there out of spite and were actually equal to Algerians or Portuguese since these were as bad as sanitary conditions could possibly be.

Canadians were also highly unimpressed with the condition of French trenches they occupied claiming that they were shallow, poorly connected, poorly use of barbed wire, filthy, full of dead bodies, and human excreta
Historians claim this was because comfortable and clean trenches made troops complacent and defensive, shitty trenches kept the French in an offensive and transient mindset.

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Falling in the stairs killed more people in Paris those past few years than terrorists.
Of course, when a stupid accident happens the media don't cover it (who would buy the paper or watch the TV for this?) while any terrorist attempt (even those that fail) make the headlines.
It's how terrorism works, they try to terrorize people. And it has been going on for a long time now, here are the most significant terrorists attack in French history besides the recent ones :

1961 : 28 killed in Blacy (Marne)
1983 : 8 killed in Paris
1983 : 7 killed in Avignon
1995 : 8 killed in Paris

Plus quite a few ones with 5 or fewer people killed. All in all, fewer than 500 people killed, so calling this a "war" is an insult to people who had to suffer during actual wars.
The French wars of religion killed 2 million people (lower estimates), WWI 1.15 million French dead, WW2 600.000 (about half civilians).

Those islamist punks will have to do *way* better than that before I even consider to move out from Paris.

The French "poilu" (called like this because he was unshaven) was busy winning a war against an extremely tough foe. He had little time to shave or sweep its trench.
The war ended a century ago, though, and soon after things reverted to normal.
So, in this century, (source: NY Times) the average Frenchman spends more time grooming himself than everybody except the average Mexican.

But if you're expecting France to be anything like it was during the world wars, indeed you're going to be majorly surprised...

I went to Paris this year and had an amazing time

I wasn't passing judgment, just adding to the Dutchanons explanation for where stereotypes come from.
As I said, it wasn't because French were inherently dirty, officers intentionally kept conditions poor so that troops would be more likely to leave them and try for a nicer German trench.
Not exactly French but similar were the French Canadian coureur de bois. Famously rugged woodsman that would spend months in the forests stinking and wrapped in rotting hides but had a tradition of stopping before reentering Montréal for hours to preen and clean themselves and perfect their clothes and hair like dandies.

Seeing soldiers with SMGs patrolling the streets is an instant pass for me, no matter the statistics

The worst part of Paris is actually Gypsies.
I haven't seen that many arabs and niggers are usually not dangerous at all

>coureur des bois

Yeah, I heard about those. Read the natives watched them with some sort of awe, because they seemed to live more like beasts than men.
There's such a rugged French-Canadian in the TV mini-series "Colorado".

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It's awful. I don't care about the crime but you go there trying to soak up some European culture and all you see are disgusting niggers and Arabs swarming every corner.

Terrorists or no terrorists, life expectancy in France is higher than in Slovenia (and almost all other countries in fact, France has in the top 10 for ages). So it's a matter of perception, indeed.

That's what I told myself when I first heard this stereotype. Same for French women's armpits and the myth of them being whores. They probably didn't shave their armpits in 1945 but today the only unshaved French women are the feminists under heavy American PC influence that think shaving is supporting the patriarchy. No wonder Americans are not that appreciated in France when they persist in perpetuating insulting stereotypes with no more basis in reality

I think the Dutch guy is right. There is the more general stereotype that "Europeans smell bad," and it seems it comes from the same source as the "French people smell bad" thing.

That's retarded. Why would German catholics have filthier trenches than German protestants ? Loads of bullshit

Yeah, don't come if you're not comfortable around non-whites. The tourist spots especially, are swarming with Chinese, Japanese, Americans, Indians and others.

Graves was a poet not an historian. He did fight in WWI (until 1916) but was later suspected of desertion.
Hardly a reliable source - but he may have started a stereotype like Canadian user suggests.

But I'm more convinced with the "late WW2 civilians" theory, myself. Checks with what my great-grandma told me.

>or has it actually turned into a 3rd world hell hole
It has
The shitty parts have become even shittier and the good parts have become even more elitist
It's still a cool city if you ignore it's a time bomb that is eventually going to blow

I was told it comes from the 60s because that's where most of the naked pictures came from