Paris officials have blamed a "political smear campaign" after angry comments and pictures of filthy streets spread on social media criticising a "trashed Paris", reports BBC News.
The hashtag "saccage Paris" went viral over Easter, with many of the messages accusing the city's socialist leadership of ruining the capital.
They complained of uncollected rubbish, damaged pavements and graffiti.
The Paris deputy mayor said keeping the city clean had always been a problem.
However, the social media campaign was a "travesty of reality", Emmanuel Grégoire insisted. Paris was densely populated and cleaners were doing all they could, he told RTL radio, but he said the French capital was no different from London, whose mayor Sadiq Khan faced exactly the same issues.
Among the thousands of tweets, Cyrille Capuano said that for years Paris had not lived up to its reputation as the city of light, and he accused Mayor Anne Hidalgo of turning it into a public dump.
"If you take a picture every day of the worst moment of your daily life that isn't reality. You have to draw a distinction between occasional issues of cleanliness and the slant of political protest," Mr Grégoire said.
There were pictures of broken, antiquated benches and before-and-now comparisons suggesting general negligence.
On the political right, the mayor's opponents weighed into the debate, with far-right leader Marine Le Pen saying the many thousands of pictures broke the heart of anyone who loved Paris. The capital's "decay" should not leave anyone in France unmoved, she tweeted.
Rachida Dati, who is mayor of the seventh arrondissement [district] of Paris, which takes in the Eiffel Tower, called for an emergency council meeting to tackle the problems of "cleanliness and sanitation".
But on the left another mayor, Jérôme Coumet from the 13th district further to the south, said he did not see evidence of a ruined city, just an orchestrated campaign.
Others noted that the Covid pandemic had led to depleted council teams, and closed restaurants meant Parisians had to eat more often in the street.