Thirty-seven years on, the song's claim is still plausible. Aux Champs-Elysees, you can dine in a starred Michelin restaurant. You can gobble a Big Mac. You can buy cheap knickers in Monoprix. You can join the young people with blonde or light-brown hair (mostly Japanese) queuing to buy expensive leather goods in the new Louis Vuitton store.

You can watch tall, naked women (mostly Germans and Australians) dance at the Lido, although the elephant which used to be part of their act has departed long ago.

Day or night, you have a choice between 40 movies in seven cinemas.

The man who wrote the song 'Aux ChampsElysees', Pierre Delanoe, died last week. Is the Avenue des Champs-Elysees also dying, spiritually? Is the world's favourite high street . . .500,000 visitors a day on a summer weekend . . .doomed to become just another high street, another, grander row of Benettons and Gaps?

The city of Paris and the French government have promised action this year to halt the "banalisation" of the Champs-Elysees. Too late for the UGC Triomphe, one of the remaining seven cinemas on the avenue.

There used to be 15.

The Triomphe, a four-screen cinema which specialises in relatively demanding movies, will close soon, forced out by an explosion in rental prices. The UGC Normandie, a bigger, mass-market cinema further up the avenue, is losing money and may also have to move. The boom in rents . . . which have quadrupled in 10 years . . . has been generated by a clamour for places on the Champs-Elysees from clothes and designer sportswear shops. Already, they occupy 39% of the street-front retail space. If nothing is done, the town hall fears, the Champs-Elysees will go the way of parts of the Left Bank and become a mass-market fashion victim in the capital of high fashion.

Last month, the city's commerce committee refused permission for the Swedish clothes chain H&M to move into a building now occupied by Club Med. H&M is appealing and may win.

Lyne Cohen-Solal, the assistant mayor of Paris responsible for commerce, said: "We are determined to preserve the diversity of the avenue, its cultural activities, its restaurants, its shopping. It is crucial that the cinemas and cafes are not forced out."

Francois Lebel, the mayor of the eighth arrondissement, which includes the Champs-Elysees, said: "The avenue is balancing on a knife's edge. It is no longer exceptional. But it has not yet become banal."