For generations, when prospective tourists have dreamt of Paris, they’ve pictured romantic walks along the Sienne, quiet mornings in charming cafés, hours spent browsing world-class art museums, and evenings spent sipping wine in quaint local restaurants. While the City of Lights has not always lived up to the high expectations of the millions who visit each year, Paris has generally managed to deliver on its promises of being an ideal vacation destination. Through the late winter and early spring of this year, however, the world has been treated to wall-to-wall media coverage depicting the oft-romanticized French capital in a state of disarray, filth, and near-anarchy. While it is certain that Paris is currently racked with some of its most prolonged and intense protest movements in living memory, the reality on the ground is far from what you’ve seen on Tiktok and Instagram.

I decided to write this piece when, two weeks ago, I stepped out of Gare du Nord in Montmartre with my girlfriend to begin a long-awaited vacation. We had planned our getaway in early January, and while we were excited to rediscover what the city had to offer, images of widespread protests, accumulating garbage, and vandalism had flooded our social media feeds in the days leading up to our departure. What greeted us, however, was near normalcy. Yes, on some side streets, there was more trash piled up than we had seen on previous visits. Yes, we experienced significant delays travelling through the city due to transit strikes. Yes, in areas that had seen protests in the preceding days, there was evidence of vandalism and fires, but on the whole, nothing seemed out of place for a major city. In fact, I would venture to say that the French capital still felt safer than most of the Southern European, Latin American, and North American cities I’ve visited. Far from the apocalyptic imagery circulating on social media of Parisians sipping coffee beside rioters and burning garbage, we found our café experiences, as well as our visits to art galleries, to be more relaxed, quiet, and authentic than in years past due to lower numbers of foreign tourists, particularly outside the city centre. Speaking to Parisians, we found that most of them supported the protests and labour actions, but that the majority were not involved in or significantly impacted by the unrest. The disconnect between media portrayals of Paris’ condition and the reality on the ground speaks to a longstanding and troubling trend of the sensationalization of protest movements, often taking on an explicitly political dimension. 

In the case of Paris, primarily conservative domestic and international opponents of the country’s social welfare system have harnessed chaotic imagery and projections of Macron’s fall from power to insinuate that France must shift rightward toward a more austere form of governance to recover its stability. A similarly exaggerated media circus surrounded the 2022 ‘Freedom Convoy’ protests in my hometown of Ottawa, Canada. In that case, unpopular acts of road blockading, vandalism, and assault by a small far-right movement were portrayed by conservative American and European media outlets as the righteous actions of an oppressed public against draconian governance. To this day, when I speak to people in Prague about the ‘Convoy’, many are still of the belief that it was a popular movement, just as many people will, unfortunately, think of Paris in early 2023 as a scene of complete chaos, anarchy, and violence on the brink of social collapse. 

As I boarded my flight back to Prague, I took with me not only wonderful memories of a romantic getaway to the City of Lights but also a renewed understanding of the importance of critical thinking in my consumption of media, be it user-generated or traditional. In our modern algorithm-driven social climate, it is easy for stories tempered by reason and careful research to be lost in a sea of flashy headlines designed to affirm readers’ beliefs and entertain them through shock and awe. So, the next time you watch news coverage or find a TikTok addressing acts of public protest, ensure that you explore the full political breadth of reporting before coming to a conclusion. Though a more complete and balanced understanding of events might not be as exciting as most headlines suggest, it will almost certainly be more accurate.