VIII. HISTORY THAT ILLUMINATES

THE ECONOMIC GOALS BEHIND PAST DRAMAS LEAD US TO SEE OUR OWN WORLD DIFFERENTLY

In Old Regime France coachmen insulted each other with "Your father was a valet!," not realizing that they strengthened the system that oppressed them.

-- Coachmen: The Age of Louis XIV by Voltaire, 1751

Nobles' control took place in so many ways that it was invisible. Today the trap is the same.

-- "Invisible:" The Old Regime and the Revolution by Alexis de Toqueville, 1856

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Take the ads that hover over Paris and other megapolises. Beyond promoting brands, they encourage a mentality that favors modern lords, the billionaires. The innumerable aspects of life that coincide with the wanted mindset lead us to act as the coachmen did, unknowingly bolstering our subjection.

The ads' formula and most views of the past blend:

• They urge you to buy on emotion rather than logic, driving you to follow irrational propaganda.

At the Châtelet crossroad in central Paris

So it's fine to think that Somali immigrants are "eating the dogs, eating the cats...". Etc.

By ignoring economic foundations and material interests, traditional narratives of battles, treaties, and rulers are as irrational.

• Figures are alone.  (The rare secondary personnages do not change the isolation.)

Irina Zwerger

Along the Seine river

The ads glamorize isolation, because buying changes one's mind from loneliness. It is also the opposite of the collective action that alone can stymie sponsors' power. 

In France, the 19th-century insurrections are distorted, downplayed or simply left out. Paris from Fresh Perspectives gives a full chapter to those upheavals and to how they are shown (or not).

• The background is a void, because only the brand counts.

Elisabeth Rawson

Behind the Flatiron building in Manhattan, photographed from Broadway.

Most histories of France leave out what contradicts the official story. Paris from Fresh Perspectives exposes this bias, and shows how tourism usually aligns. 

• Even an asepticized past offers other perspectives, plus human drama. It is being deleted.

The façade of the Opéra became a backdrop for ads in 2023 (photo of September 2025) 

Erasure began by replacing Marie-Antoinette's (reconstituted) cell by a tablet (in 2017). It continued by camouflaging the vestige of the Louvre's medieval rampart, the void at the Opera that highlights tycoons' entry and the huge space in front of Notre-Dame Cathedral. That's explained here.

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"All that seems to have permanence goes up in smoke, all that was sacred is profaned and men are at last forced to look lucidly at their conditions of existence and reciprocal ties." 

-- The Communist Manifesto 

But this ad and the demonstrations that are springing up world-wide show a different vision:

The company is described here.

Mustafa Orhan Selçuk

The arrow points to a French group that unite the multiple protests, launched in 2025.

By unveiling a conditioning of which we are usually unaware, this blook and its sequel fit that spirit. 

If you find them useful, please pass them on.

Blook II, 

Paris from Fresh Perspectives

presents Paris in a way that is as different

 as what you have read here. 

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