La Défense is a major business district erected on the outskirts Paris, on par with the City of London. There, towers dream of Manhattan while being located in Puteaux. One of them is called La Pacific: the Pacific Tower, or Tokyo Tower as it was formerly known at the time of its construction in the early 1980s, designed by Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa. It’s a simple building with smooth geometric forms, a forgettable tower housing a bank and large French business groups. Every day, men and women come and go in business suits. They work and then they leave. As evening arrives, the tower empties out. The white collar class departs and La Défense transforms into a nocturnal ghost district. The creatures of the night can finally come out.

In his essay “Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity,” Marc Augé offers an analysis of these strange places that are characteristic of supermodernity: parking lots, business centers, airports, shopping centers.² Augé defines supermodernity by three characteristics: 1) event overload—the fact that our current era produces an increasing number of events that in being so become difficult to locate or interpret; 2) spatial overload—moving very quickly, including through an omnipresence of images; and 3) the hyper-individualization of reference points that occurs through each person's desire to interpret the information available to them. Through these terms, non-places are the direct result of supermodernity. These sites fail to record the marks of history. Humans merely pass through, without leaving a trace of their story, never making their life there. These are places where people work and consume day-in, day-out but do not form a narrative. Five hundred years from now, what will be left of La Défense won't resemble the anthropological remains of intimate stories: only broken glass, concrete, suitcases, bills. If this is the case, the history of the Pacific Club will be lost with it, too.

Augé's fatalistic interpretation of history through supermodernity forgets the crucial element of domination—or rather, accepts it. Simply put, there will be no trace of the Pacific Club in the official history of La Défense because history does not remember the narratives of minorities, of the subaltern. This kind of History only recalls the great national narratives. The Arch was built as a utopian symbol to mark the bicentennial anniversary of the French Revolution and the ideal of Fraternity. But the true utopia lies in the Pacific Club. It is a heterotopia,³ in Foucault’s sense: a spatial manifestation of utopia situated in Augé’s non-site.

History is written by those who win. The businessmen of La Défense will leave nothing behind, yet we think of only them when we talk about this place. Something similar occurs when we talk about the history of ‘80s Parisian nightlife: recently-published articles idealize and fetishize this specific period, fixating on Les Bains Douches. This mythical club is the subject of countless films and essays that tend to value a narrow version of Parisian nightlife. This is a white history, a depoliticized story that remains fixed in the city center, where glamour and flashy photographs obfuscate the racism and classism that operated at the entrance of its clubs, and that continue to prevail today. In a ‘90s special broadcasted on French TV channel M6, Les boîtes de nuit parisiennes, one of the bouncers of Metropolis, the largest nightclub at the time, proudly states: "I'm not going to criticize the kids from the suburbs but we don't want any riff-raff here…”⁴

If you search for "Parisian club 1980" online, you’ll be inundated with images of famous, conventionally beautiful, mostly white people. Where were the others dancing? The people who were turned away from Les Bains Douches? The people from the banlieues (the suburbs)? The sons and daughters of immigrants?

Karim was 18 years old in 1986. He grew up in a low-income building in the 19th arrondissement. His older brothers attended the Pacific Club when it was founded. Karim remembers seeing them wearing De Fursac suit jackets and polishing their Pierre Cardin shoes before going out, as they hoped to get into upscale nightclubs on the Champs Elysées or the Grands Boulevards—but they always ended up at La Défense. The Pacific was the first to be opened by a man known as Monsieur Martin as a club aimed for the Sephardic Jewish community, but quickly became a touch point for North African communities of all religious backgrounds.

The club wanted to be different from those of central Paris and played a new kind of music. At the time, Parisian clubs and French radio stations avoided playing genres from the United States such as soul, funk, or R&B. One had to go to the Pacific to hear these rhythms.

When Karim was old enough to go out, the fashion had changed from his brother’s time. Instead, he became part of a specific fashion trend called the reurti (“shooters” in French verlan vernacular). On Friday nights, Karim would wear a white Lois turtleneck, tobacco-colored Achille Adidas sneakers, a Fatma's hand on a gold chain, and loose pants. A true Jean Genet character, he spent his weekends hanging out in the Grands Boulevards district. They were banlieusards who only dreamed of one thing: dancing and having fun. This generation, born in the ‘80s following the end of the Algerian War, dreamed of integrating into France, under that Arch. They were soon disappointed. Karim tells me of his 18th birthday, when they all went out to dance on New Year's Eve, but were abruptly turned away, sometimes violently, by every single club.

They only went to the Pacific on weekends. During the day they would go to the movies at the Rex, sneaking in behind security doors to avoid paying the entrance fee. Afterward, there was a restaurant on the main boulevard that served merguez and fries, it was the reurti hangout. After the movies and meal they would ride the subway to La Défense or take one of his brothers’ cars.

Weekends in La Défense were empty, abandoned. Everything alive happened in the basement under the Pacific tower. Karim and his friends often had to wait in long lines. The best time to go would be Sunday afternoon, when the party would last through Monday morning. You can imagine the importance of a club like this at the time: a real breath of fresh air for people like Karim. This space could only ever exist in the suburbs, outside the protective and stifling walls of Paris. As a utopia it carried the dreams of a whole generation in a country that refused to see them.

Karim went to the club many times. He was part of the second generation to attend the Pacific. The first generation that had gone in the early '80s disappeared quickly—many dying of HIV/AIDS or heroin overdoses. Karim remembers how things changed after that epidemic. Suddenly, young people didn’t dare touch any drugs, they were too scared to end up like their older brothers. The desire to live was stronger. The club was full of boys and girls from different suburbs of Paris. Sometimes some gang-related violence took place between people from different areas but mostly they flirted, drank, and danced. It was quite impossible to kiss in the club because most of the girls came along with their brothers or family friends. Karim tells me that it was quite innocent. The flirting was soft and tender.

Augé was wrong. La Défense is actually filled with the stories of men and women who lived and loved in the shadows of this non-site. But Karim is surprised when I ask about his story, his youth at the Pacific: "Why do you want to know about this? We were petty thieves, nothing interesting.” Such stories are forgotten and erased because of the misconception that history can only be the official one, the one that is mythologized. We’ve internalized the idea that these stories are not worth telling. The truth is that the history of Parisian club culture is nourished by places like the Pacific and, later on, the Galaxy Club, which opened in central Paris in the mid '80s and welcomed a similar crowd. It was located near the Réaumur Sébastopol subway station. One of the resident DJs, DJ Hafid, recalls the dance competitions between Arab girls and boys every Wednesday afternoon, dancing to Barry White or Afro-Canadian artist Boule Noir.⁵ In the ‘90s other clubs appeared like Fun Raï, the first Parisian nightclub to play Raï music.⁶ By the 2000s, music that was once exclusively danced to by suburban youth had infiltrated night clubs throughout the French capital. 

On a Youtube page dedicated to Pacific Club alumni, user Mo Mor reminisces, "The Pacific on Sunday afternoons: we’d plan this all week long - the perfect 501-Weston combo. Dedicated to all the guys from Nanterre - I think of you Mounir, my buddy who died so young.” Further down, Ben-Amar Barry adds: "With the golf convertible and barry white, ready to spend the night at the pacific.” The "old-timers of the Pacific," as they like to call themselves, didn’t wait for anyone to take an interest in them and created these virtual groups where they share memories and music from the time.⁷

Karim describes how once a year, they still get together in the suburbs of Paris to play music and hang out, proof that something very strong unites them. They decided that the Pacific had to live on in some way, even if the space itself is long gone. The Pacific survives through them, continuing to influence an entire generation through the stories of those who fight against oblivion. In the sense that it has physically disappeared, the Pacific is no longer a heterotopia. Instead it now lives in this new reality that its elders have created. As a symbol, French equality needs monuments like the Arche to convince the world that it exists. The Pacific Club does not. This casual gathering is their monument, as it always was.

Valentin Noujaïm’s film projects explore the strange and marginal lives of characters in fantasized worlds. Noujaïm was born in 1991 in France to Lebanese and Egyptian parents and began directing films in 2015. His projects include the short films Before She Forgets Heliopolis (2019);The Blue Star (L’Étoile Bleue, 2019); and Daughters of Destiny (Les Filles Destinées, 2021). He is currently developing the experimental documentary science fiction film, Heliogabale (2022) with Kometa Films, as well as a film on the Pacific Club. Noujaïm was a co-author and an assistant director of the documentary THF Central Airport by director Karim Aïnouz (Berlinale Panorama, 2018). He currently lives in Marseille, France.