Execution lesson – Frank McNally on social-media influencers, Wolfe Tone’s diaries, and the last public guillotining in Paris

A minor but growing hazard of modern-day tourism, as I was reminded in Paris this week, is the work of the social-media influencer.

When visiting beautiful or historic sites these days, one increasingly runs the risk of walking through the shot of a freelance opinion former, as she (it’s usually she) pouts or poses in front of something famous, while wearing designer clothes, or jewellery, or the scenery itself.

Unlike mere selfie takers, influencers tend to have a support team – or at least a friend to take the pictures and provide image consultancy.

And even where you don’t walk through their shot, the shot may sometimes walk through you. In the Jardins de Luxembourg, mid-week, I had to brake sharply to avoid collision with an influencer who was swaggering, cat-walk fashion, towards the person with the iPhone. She didn’t even look in my direction. Her focus on the job was total.

‘The trial of the century’ – Frank McNally on a notorious child murder of 100 years ago

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Liberal outlook — Brian Maye on Sheelagh Murnaghan, an indomitable presence in NI politics

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Change of tune – Alison Healy on not being a songbird

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‘Worst morning of my life’ – Alison Healy on tricky tourists

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So ubiquitous is the phenomenon that it’s almost a surprise now to see an old-fashioned professional advertising shoot in progress. But when a friend and I stopped by the Deux Magots café, of literary fame, on Thursday morning, there was one of those happening too.

An all-female team including two photographers and a wardrobe department (or at least a woman supervising a suitcase full of clothes) were taking pictures of a pair of small schoolchildren in next season’s fashions.

The little girl was foregrounded in shots. The boy was seated in the background, with a croissant on the table in front of him that he must have been forbidden to eat. He looked tired and bored. At one point, before posing for yet another shot, he hid his face behind a menu and yawned.

Around them, the terrace tables of Les Deux Magots were full and there was a queue to join them. This is partly the effect of 20th-century influencers, including Simone de Beauvoir, who used the place as her office.

The café website claims she composed the novel Les Mandarins (1954) here. It even has a picture of her writing it, live. Thanks to such associations, Les Deux Magots now bills itself as a “café littéraire” and has tourists queueing up to pay its inflated prices.

In the event, we ended up at a less celebrated place down the road. But even there, perhaps because of proximity to greatness, a double espresso was €6.80.

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Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763–1798) is now mainly known as a republican martyr, of course. But as I was reminded in Paris on Friday, he was also a noted diarist. In fact, according to Tom Bartlett of the University of Aberdeen, he may have been the greatest of all Irish diarists (an opinion the rest of us will try not to take personally).

During efforts to persuade revolutionary France to help free Ireland, Tone doubled as a tourist there, recording his impressions of the local food, wine, and women with colourful detail.

In a more peaceful era, he might have been a travel writer, such was his fascination with faraway shores in general. But he loved France in particular. As Bartlett noted, Tone’s ambition was not to be the first president of an Irish Republic, but its first ambassador in Paris, with the ready supply of good “Burgundy” that would bring.

Bartlett’s talk was at the opening of a conference on “Irish Writers and French Connections”, hosted by the University of Chicago’s Paris campus. The free event continues Saturday.

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Speaking of the French Revolution (and of Irish diarists, as I’ll explain), a shock revelation of my brief visit to Les Deux Magots was that public executions by guillotine were still happening in France as recently as 1939.

Not that the café was involved. It’s just that when I looked up “Deux Magots” in this newspaper’s archive afterwards, I found it mentioned in An Irishman’s Diary from 1946, by “Nichevo”, who in the same piece also recalled that his previous visit to Paris, seven years earlier, had coincided with France’s last public guillotining.

“Nichevo” was Bertie Smyllie, the then editor. And of the postwar Deux Magots, he noted it was “coming steadily into favour among the smart boys and girls”.

But as for the Café Flore, then as now its illustrious neighbour, Smyllie found it “depressing”, perhaps because on his previous visit, in June 1939, he and a group of friends had gathered there one night, planning to attend a morning execution at Versailles.

The man beheaded was a German serial killer, Eugen Weidmann. And so badly behaved were those attending that afterwards – almost 150 years after the Revolution – the French government banned further public executions with immediate effect. Happily, the Diarist was not implicated in the scandal. “Personally, I funked it,” he recalled in 1946. Rather than join his blood-thirsty friends on the trip to Versailles: “I went home to my hotel at about 2am.”