Comment: US-style hen parties are one import Paris can do without

There is a long tradition of Americans in Paris helping to make the City of Light famous around the world. 

Movie stars from Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have done their time in the classiest quartiers, persuading millions from the United States to pay a visit themselves. 

Before Hollywood, literary greats such as the Anglo-American author Henry James, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Jazz Age writer, romanticised France’s capital as a place of sophisticated pleasures. 

As a result, billions of dollars have poured into the French economy as Americans look to soak up some European culture. 

Their presence in Paris over the decades has also encouraged the French to embrace a number of US exports, including plenty of impressive artistic developments. 

There is no doubt that Nouvelle Vague – the hugely successful New Wave cinema movement that started in France in the 1950s – was greatly influenced by New York-style detectives, cowboys from states such as Texas, and big American automobiles, for example. 

This mutually beneficial history hit the buffers last month, however, when some of the most famous women in the US arrived in Paris for what they called a “bachelorette party”.

Led by Lauren Sánchez, the TV anchor and self-styled astronaut who is betrothed to the multi-billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, it was a particularly vulgar version of the prenuptial ladette jolly. 

These are usually associated with cheap alcohol destinations, such as the Spanish Costas and former Soviet Union states in eastern Europe, but Ms Sánchez wanted a Gallic twist. 

Fresh from spending multi millions and enraging environmentalists by flying to space with her girl gang, Ms Sánchez went on a glorified bar crawl, sipping cocktails with friends such as Eva Longoria, Kris Jenner, and Katy Perry. 

Reality TV queen Kim Kardashian was also there, having just given evidence at the criminal trial of those accused of robbing her at gunpoint in a Paris hotel in 2016. 

They all piled on to a boat on the Seine for a booze cruise, posed in their glad rags in front of the Eiffel Tower, and ordered the most expensive items possible at upmarket eateries including Lafayette’s, based in the former townhouse of the ultimate Americanised Frenchman, Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, the hero of the American War of Independence and a central figure of the French Revolution.

Alcohol is expensive in the French capital for a number of reasons, and one of them is to keep such hen and stag nighters well away. 

I have spoken to numerous café and restaurant owners in Paris, and all are delighted that the city has largely escaped them over the years. 

Yes, the French have their own modest versions of hen and stag nights, largely in the provinces, but they are a lot more civilised than the dreaded Anglo-Saxon ones, which have become synonymous with noise, vomiting, fighting, and a host of other horrors. 

The cheesiness can be off the scale too, as evidenced by Ms Sánchez’s reflections during her four-day trip to France. 

This also included an excursion to Cannes, where she was pictured by paparazzi on Mr Bezos’s $500million yacht. Ms Sánchez wrote “to my girls” on Instagram: “Forever starts with friendship, surrounded by the women who’ve lifted me up, illuminated my path in dark times, and shaped my heart along the way.” 

As with bachelorette parties themselves, there is very little irony in such social media messages, and the awful prose certainly has nothing to do with the poetic charm that attracted Americans to Paris in the first place.