Edit: The analysis itself starts on the third page, after comparing and contrasting two travel journals from centuries apart.
I’m not sure what Paris would look like with a negligible tourist population, but it would be quite different. Who maintains the historical buildings? Le Mėtro? Straight tax dollars alone won’t cover it without the tourist subsidies.
But it is a functioning capital city, most of what goes on there isn’t related to tourism.
Museums sure were empty last year when I was there.
The central challenge to running any sort of mass food chain is to keep your product as consistent as possible. People expect the Starbucks drink they order when they get off the plane in Miami to taste exactly the same as they one they order back home in Boise.
In coffee, the darker the roast the more the individual characteristics of the beans are replaced by the flavors of the roast itself. Starbucks, and most mass coffee chains, char their roasts because it's a way to homogenize away the variance in terroir that comes from beans sourced across a wide range of farms and batches.
Of course, your criticism ignores that culture is more than restaurants and much more than consumerism. No matter what stores are open along the Champs-Elysees, that it connects the Arc de Triomphe and Tuileries Garden is worth more culturally than what store fronts exist along the way. That is certainly the unique bit, and probably what draws tourists.
Well, the Sephora was a draw for my sister :)
Also, this measure is not really about french culture. It is about culture in general. If you visit an art museum most of time it's filled with art from everywhere. The quai Branly museum comes to my mind here, but really most museum have exhibits of foreign works.
When the local art museums rotate in traveling exhibits that’s more for the locals (where ‘locals’ might loosely include a few hours’ transit in all directions). But I feel a little guilty going because I know someone risked a truck full of Van Gogh or Picasso works by sending them a third of the way around the world. It’s cool but what if there’s an accident?
I've never heard of anything like that. McDonald's are everywhere, there are new American concoctions of dubious nature making their way into the mainstream everyday and half the central streets of any given city seem to be made out of kebab joints.
In France it's usually the worst meat available, aggregated with salt and spices to hide the horror.
McDonald's has the best meat I'm aware of and they've gone to great lengths to wash their shit food image.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_McDonal...
Not sure why that should be considered weird or bad. If all France had was Chipotle and the other American chains then I would have visited it once and never again rather than the 15 or so times I've been.
It has a strong (and also protected) agriculture sector, from memory they're in the 10 largest in the world, and having consummers buying these products is a big deal. McDonalds is fine, but they also definitely need restaurants serving steaks with blue cheese sauce with a small glass of wine.
Language protection also had an incredible effect on the entertainment industry that was seriously struggling before (also due to how strongly it was enforced, notably with the 40% rule)
In foreign countries the financial targeting is different and there are always fewer McDonald's per capita. There are twice as many McDonald's per capita in the US vs France for example (and France has a lot of them at nearly 1,500); Britain has a similar ratio as France.
Considering all of the Canadians in Hollywood and on the music charts in America how exactly do you define Americanized anyway? Don’t you have a ton of European/Asian originated things in your local culture too like we do down here in America? I love IKEA and drive there in my Japanese car. I cut my fingernails every week with a great set of German tools (Wusthof or something). Tonight we’re going to watch Train to Busan peninsula on Amazon (Korean movie) because I love zombie flicks and heard good things (the first one was good!).
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/bill-c10-user-generated-con...
Entertainment is a hugely profitable business. Disney and Marvel for instance made billions of dollars of profits year after year for almost a decade. They did it by making content that people want to watch.
Why not simply... make content that people want to watch?
Its just that French Canadians buy their own culture.
What? It's also a notoriously hard market to get into.