Global Stage, Local Price Tag: How the Champs-Élysées Sells the World to Itself
The Champs-Élysées, Paris’s 1.9-kilometre runway of limestone and delusion, has always been less a street than a global stage—equal parts catwalk, battlefield, and cash register. On any given day you can watch a Japanese honeymooner pose with a baguette she’ll never eat, a Gulf-state prince queue for a €12 macaron, and a Parisian waiter perfect the art of ignoring them both. The avenue is a living Rosetta Stone: every empire since Louis XIV has tried to translate its glamour into soft power, and every empire has ended up hawking fridge magnets in the gift shop.
Lately the Champs-Élysées has become geopolitics with a side of crêpes. When Emmanuel Macron announced in 2021 that the avenue would be “re-enchanted” before the 2024 Olympics, the world heard a familiar refrain: Europe polishing its antiques while the planet burns. The plan—fewer cars, more trees, extra benches for existential dread—was hailed from Berlin to Buenos Aires as proof that the West still knows how to stage a comeback. Critics noted the €250 million price tag could instead vaccinate a mid-sized African nation, but then again no one ever took a selfie with effective public-health policy.
International brands treat the avenue like a nuclear deterrent: you station troops there not to win a war, but to remind rivals you can still afford one. When Abercrombie & Fitch elbowed its way onto the strip, French newspapers reacted as if the Visigoths had returned—only the Visigoths had better lighting and an in-store DJ. Meanwhile, the Saudis, Qataris, and assorted oligarchs keep buying entire Haussmannian façades the way the rest of us grab duty-free Toblerone. Rumour has it the next Louis Vuitton flagship will include a cryogenic vault for oligarchic tax receipts; the ice-cold aesthetic dovetails nicely with the brand’s winter collection.
The avenue’s most reliable export is symbolism, refined and re-exported until it achieves the purity of a stock-photo smile. Every July 14, Bastille Day tanks roll down its chestnut-lined lanes while diplomats pretend the choreography still intimidates someone other than the catering staff. During the 2018 World Cup victory parade, the Champs-Élysées briefly became a multicultural utopia—until the tear gas drifted in like the world’s least welcome confetti. By morning the gilets jaunes were back, reasserting France’s core competency: protest as performance art.
Climate change has added a fresh layer of irony. The new tree species planted to survive hotter summers are mostly North American transplants, meaning the most French street on Earth will soon be shaded by Yankee oaks. When the Seine next floods, the avenue may revert to its original swamp, completing a 350-year rebranding cycle from wetland to wasteland to wonderland and back again. Tour guides will doubtless sell tickets to the “authentic flood experience,” ponchos extra.
And yet, like a stubborn bottle of Bordeaux, the Champs-Élysées refuses to turn to vinegar. On New Year’s Eve, half a million humans still cram shoulder-to-shoulder, collectively pretending the fireworks aren’t sponsored by a Chinese phone company. For a few hours we forget inflation, war, and the fact that the planet is actively trying to evict us. Instead we stare up at pyrotechnics choreographed to Daft Punk, convinced that if we can just keep dancing, the bill will never come due.
The bill, of course, is already itemised in 12 languages at the brasserie on the corner. It lists the cost of bread, circuses, and the shared hallucination that some places are immortal. The Champs-Élysées endures because we need somewhere to project our collective nostalgia for a future that never quite arrived. So we stroll, we shop, we sigh at the Arc de Triomphe like it’s a monument to our own improbable persistence. And tomorrow, when the cleaners sweep up the champagne corks and tear-gas canisters, the avenue will open for business again—ready, as ever, to sell the world its reflection at a 40 percent markup.
