Thousands of people gathered on the Champs-Élysées for a huge free picnic organized by a committee of local merchants and businessmen fighting to stop the slow decline of the boulevard long known as “the most beautiful street in the world.”
Once a favorite promenade for Parisians, the Champs-Élysées has been increasingly abandoned by locals in recent years as popular shops and cinemas have been replaced by luxury boutiques and the street has become a hangout for wealthy tourists.
Relating to: Paris agrees to turn Champs-Élysées into ‘extraordinary garden’
“This is a way of saying to Parisians, ‘Go back to the Champs-Élysées,’ a way of showing them that this street is not just for luxury shopping,” said Marc-Antoine Jamet, president of the 180-member Champs-Élysées. The committee organizing the event.
Approximately 273,000 people applied to participate in “le grand pique-nique”; 4,400 people were selected to sit with up to six guests each on a 216-metre-long red-and-white checkered picnic blanket described by organizers as “the largest in the world”. tablecloth”.
Eight partner restaurants, including the venerable Fouquet’s brasserie, a haunt for French movie and music stars for decades, offered dishes for two separate sittings, from ham baguettes to Caesar salads to croissants and macarons.
“Thousands of people picnic on one of the best-known streets in the world, within sight of the Arc de Triomphe; this is a truly popular and gourmet celebration,” said the event’s guest of honor, former Élysée Palace chef Guillaume Gomez.
The picnickers were enthusiastic. “The sky is blue, the sun is shining, we are sitting in the middle of the Champs-Élysées. We’re pretty lucky, aren’t we?” Fabien, who came specially from outside Paris with his wife Michelle, told BFM TV:
“The picnic is really nice; I have Ladurée pasta,” said 14-year-old Léo.
The committee has repeatedly warned that the iconic street has “lost its splendor” over the past 30 years, falling victim to changing consumer habits but also crises. vest yellows (“yellow jackets”) protests and pandemic.
Last year, in another exercise aimed at “re-enchanting” Parisians with the street that has provided the backdrop for countless films, it transformed the Champs-Élysées into an open-air mass dictation festival, with 1,800 tables lined up along its length.
But many years have passed since the street was at the height of its popularity in the late 1960s, as French-American singer Joe Dassin crooned in a famous song: “You’ll find anything you want in Champs. -Élysées”.
The street’s last cinema, UGC Normandie, which opened in 1937, will close next month; It is the third cinema to close in recent years due to falling ticket sales and what the UGC calls a “significant change” in the demographics of visitors to the Champs-Élysées.
As entertainment venues, book, record and clothing stores disappeared, they were steadily replaced by luxury and high-end sporting goods stores; An address on the street has a significant attraction, especially for tourists.
French luxury group LVMH, which owns Louis Vuitton and Dior, paid more than €1 billion for its recently acquired flagship store on the Champs-Élysées, real estate agents say. Dedicated to luxury brand shopping.
Ronan Guevel, who has lived on the streets for more than 20 years, told France Info radio: “When I was young, we loved going out. [to the cinema] In Champions. There must be seven or eight of them on the street. Now the last one is leaving.”
Another cinema was recently replaced by a Lacoste sportswear store, Guevel said: “The stores and venues used by Parisians have been replaced by brands you can find almost everywhere. The Champs-Élysées is losing some of its soul.”
As more than 1.3 million people stroll the streets every month, property prices have soared, forcing smaller, independent and less profitable shops and venues to hand over their keys in the face of rents rising 15 per cent in the last year alone.
“Property speculation is a big problem,” said Paris council member Nicolas Bonnet-Ouladj. “The price per square meter is too high. We will have to ask the government for help in regulating and limiting rents in this part of the city.”
Paris city hall is working on a €250m (£225m) plan to transform an eight-lane city highway into an “extraordinary garden”, but the bulk of the work is not planned to start until after the Olympic Games this summer.
Some minor improvements are being made to the street before the Olympics; The terraces are rearranged along their length, giving more space to pedestrians.
The Champs-Élysées committee will present an 1,800-page report on Monday with 150 recommendations for a redesign of the boulevard aimed at “guiding a more radical and wholesale transformation” of the neighborhood, Jamet said.