Welcome!

Spend two days in Paris and you see a city of contradictions. Beneath the postcard images of the Eiffel Tower and the Seine lies a metropolis where colonial history is not just remembered in museums, it walks the streets, fills the schools, and shapes the very character of urban life. Paris today is not “dirty” or “overrun” because of migration; it is a mirror of France’s empire, reflecting both its former reach and its present dilemmas.

France once extracted raw materials, cash crops, and human labour from vast swaths of Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. When formal empire ended, that extraction did not stop; it simply changed form. Trade dependency, the CFA franc currency system, and unequal development agreements kept former colonies tethered to the metropole. And when poverty, instability, or lack of opportunity drove people to move, there was only one obvious destination: France itself.

This created a one-way migration funnel. Francophone Africans do not have the luxury of multiple obvious diasporic destinations. English speakers can scatter to the UK, the U.S., Canada, or Australia. But for many in Dakar, Abidjan, or Yaoundé, the imagined El Dorado is still Paris.

The result is demographic concentration. France has more than 3 million Africa-born residents, heavily weighted toward the Maghreb and West Africa. In Paris, a quarter of the population is foreign-born, with North Africans making up the largest single bloc. That concentration makes Paris feel, at times, like the gravitational centre of the francophone world.

Contrast that with London. Yes, it has large Nigerian, Ghanaian, and Somali communities. But anglophone migration disperses across the Anglosphere. Toronto, Houston, Johannesburg, and Sydney all carry part of the load. No single city becomes the unavoidable focal point in the way Paris does.

Where critics often misstep is in assuming the urban challenges are caused by migrants themselves. Paris’s housing shortage, high rents, and sanitation strikes are products of policy failures, not nationality. Migrants live at the sharp end of these failures, often concentrated in peripheral banlieues with poor services and limited mobility. The issue is not that migrants make Paris unequal, but that inequality makes migrants hyper-visible.

Paris is not merely a capital; it is empire folded into a city. Its boulevards carry the names of colonial generals; its museums house objects taken from Bamako and Hanoi; its banlieues shelter the descendants of those once ruled overseas. To call Paris “mongrel” is to miss the deeper truth: the city is not contaminated by migration, it is constituted by it.

The story of Paris is the story of a republic grappling with the long shadow of colonialism, trying to reconcile universalist ideals with the hierarchies it once enforced abroad.

If Paris feels different from London or Toronto, it is not because francophone Africans bring disorder. It is because France created a system that tied them to its core long after the empire supposedly ended. Paris today is the living archive of that entanglement, diverse, unequal, and unfinished.

The question, then, is not whether Paris is “dirty,” but whether France is willing to confront the empire that still structures its society.