When the first snowflakes hit the north of France during the week before Christmas 2009, traffic in and around Paris went from its usual snarl to pure chaos. Is this a completely unexpected phenomenon? It is not.

When the first snowflakes hit the north of France during the week before Christmas 2009, traffic in and around Paris went from its usual snarl to pure chaos.  Rows of immobilized trucks clogged highways in and out of the city and pandemonium reigned at the airports with grounded planes, long delays and irate passengers.   

As they do every winter, local authorities reacted as if the French capital were situated somewhere on the Equator and snow a completely unexpected phenomenon.   It is not. 

Many weeks later, after intermittent snowfalls, the city was still in the same messy condition, icy here and mushy there. By then, the slosh included salt and sand sprinkled haphazardly on some, not all, streets and sidewalks. Slipping and sliding along, its inhabitants (including this writer) who are notoriously impatient on their best days, became more ill-tempered than usual.   This time with reason:  Paris never looked more unkempt than this winter and one wonders where our heavy "local taxes" go and why, given the record number of job seekers, the authorities don't invest in simple brooms and snow shovels and offer temporary work to some of the unemployed.

City Management Then and Now

Gripes about this season's weather-induced mess and the inefficiency of local town halls to clean up the streets seem petty when one visits the exposition "Paris inondé 1910"  illustrating the calamities that besieged Paris exactly 100 years ago.

At the same time, grievances against today's authorities also seem legitimate.  Our lazy municipal leaders should be ordered to stand in shame before the pictures of January 1910 and study the manner in which their precursors, with far less equipment back then, managed to cope with a huge catastrophy that could well have become the end of Paris.