As one approaches Paris by train from the south, and probably from any other direction, even the most cursory glance out the window will inevitably fall upon the seemingly endless stream of “tags”—i.e., names and nicknames in colorful, stylized graffiti—adorning the retaining walls that line the railway’s path through the gloomy banlieues and into the city of lights. The broad cultural range of the names themselves—which during my passage included OTELO 93, MALIK, and ALI aswell as the somewhat more Gallic FILOU and DéDé DREAMER—bears eloquent witness to a changing social landscape. Yet perhaps the most striking thing about this graffiti is its unmistakably American character, both in its content (i.e., names) and in the style of its swirling, sometimes illegible lettering. This Americanness seems all the more pronounced by the fact that until lately French graffiti, like graffiti in the rest of Europe, clearly distinguished itself from the American variety by its naked directness and its almost exclusively political content.

The most striking thing about this graffiti is its unmistakably American character.

Another manifestation, perhaps, of what former Minister of Culture Jack Lang called American “cultural imperialism”? Would that it were so simple: in fact it serves as a splendid example of the profoundly ambivalent and contradictory feelings of the French toward what they see as an ever invasive force, for which they sometimes simply cannot resist rolling out the red carpet. Indeed, following the successes of Jean-Michel Basquiat and other American “graffitists”