Do you prefer your City of Lights with a side of big-ticket bling or boho attitude?

Do you prefer your City of Lights with a side of big-ticket bling or boho attitude? It's a tough decision, but our duelling experts can help guide you to the right (or left) one.

Declaring your right or left leanings these days is the quickest way to land yourself in deep merde - unless we're talking about the City of Lights, which I'd much rather do.

And when it comes to Paris, I'm firmly far right. How far? All the way up to the 130-metre summit of Sacre-Coeur, or the 240 steps to the panoramic terrace on the Arc de Triomphe, or into the heart of the Louvre to stand at the feet of Venus de Milo and smile back at Mona Lisa. Maybe to the Moulin Rouge because I can-can-can, then through the Tuileries gardens or along the Rue de Rivoli and Champs Elysees, detouring via Place Vendome and Place de la Concorde and popping into Palais Garnier to spook the Phantom of the Opera.

And that's just le debut. Name a Paris emblem - with one notable exception, and I'll come to that - and it's on the Right Bank or Rive Droite. Boasting 14 of the 20 Paris arrondissements, the city's grandest hotels, shops, museums and boulevards and a skyline dripping in look-at-moi monuments, gold statuary and giant domes, north of the river Seine is maximum bank for your buck.

While struggling artists and broke bohemians were pondering the meaning of life over on the left, right-sided Parisians were busy living it to the full.

Bourgeois? Hell oui. The Rive Droite was built on big-ticket bling - from the home of haute couture at flagship fashion houses around Champs Elysees, or the Louvre, with its 40 hectares of magnificent pavilions, courtyards and halls showing 35,000 items spanning ten millennia of creativity.

Of the 12 luxury hotels awarded France's official 'palace' distinction, 11 adorn the Right Bank, including Hotel de Crillon, built in 1758 by Louis XV, Four Seasons George V, Le Meurice and Le Bristol. All but one of Paris's fabled covered passages, with their glass roofs, mosaic floors, and enchanting alleyways belong on the Right Bank, amid the blockbuster buildings of the Grands Boulevards. The cathedral-esque, glass-domed grands magasins stores, Printemps and Galeries Lafayette, turn retail into religion as only Paris can. Their roof terraces bestow 360 panoramas and perfect perspectives on the Eiffel Tower.

Le Tour, of course, is on the Left Bank. Does this trump the right's supremacy? Non! The Iron Lady, like any ageing beauty, is at her loveliest viewed from a discreet distance.

Rather than gazing at girders, you could be framing your ultimate tower tableau from Le Trocadero just across the river, from the city's highest point, in Montmartre, the verdant Tuileries or any number of chic and sexy rooftop bars across the city's better half.

Heads rolled last time left and right fought it out in France, but our battle of the banks has a happier ending. Mal and I will always have Paris. It's just that I've got all the good bits.

Gritty, cerebral and thriving on divisive debate, not unlike myself, Rive Gauche is the authentic essence of Paris, and you can take that to the bank.

The Left Bank has always skewed boho. In the 12th century, controversial philosopher and teacher Peter Abelard was voted off the Ile de la Cite and set up on Rive Gauche, laying the scholarly foundations that formed the basis of the saying: "Paris 'learned to think' on the Left Bank." During the French Revolution, activists were drawn to cabarets and salons around Montparnasse to recite anarchic poetry, to demonstrate, and to denounce and decapitate the rich. Between the world wars, the bloom of artists and musicians residing here became known as the "School of Paris".

The early 20th century was a golden age for the countercultural Rive Gauche. French and emigre artists, authors and philosophers were lured by siren call to fight fascism, seek truth, create and get merde-faced. This avant garde, which included Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and dozens more, crafted their oeuvres and roused their rabbles over espressos, croissants, baguettes and litres of cheap Bordeaux.

Woody Allen's 2011 masterpiece Midnight in Paris encapsulates the area in a musing by Picasso's lover, Adriana: "I can never decide whether Paris is more beautiful by day or by night".

On the Rive Gauche, carrying a dog-eared Sartre paperback is not just a badge of honour, it is part of the uniform, along with a faded black beret, a Gauloises hanging from your lips and a superior attitude.

Meanwhile, over on the snooty Rive Droite side of the Seine, carrying Louis Vuitton and Chanel shopping bags is part of the uniform, along with a Hermes clutch, a blurry selfie with the Mona Lisa and a comme ci comme ca attitude to credit-card debt. The Right Bank boutiques have more security than Mona; each tourist gets assigned their own pickpocket, and brasseries provide sparkling mineral water lists.

Creative, radical and crammed with cachet, the Left Bank comprises tree-lined streets, narrow cobblestone alleyways, Juliet balconies, jazz dives and atmospheric bookstores, such as the legendary Shakespeare & Company. Every literary cafe claims Charles Baudelaire wrote his greatest poems while sipping their cafes au lait and munching their macarons. You'll feel like ordering in iambic pentameter just to fit in. Which bank? Gauche Bank.

When it comes to Paris, do you lean left, or right? Comment here or send your thoughts to editor@exploretravel.com.au