Why do we say Paname to say Paris?

Of all the nicknames given to Paris, it is undoubtedly the most famous and still the most used. Paris is “Paname” for many. But where does this name come from, sung in its time by Maurice Chevalier, Léo Ferré and more recently by Slimane? An old story that talks about scandal and hats.
To find traces of “Paname”, you have to go back to the end of the 19th century. In 1892 precisely when the Panama scandal broke out, a corruption affair linked to the drilling of the Panama Canal. This affected many French politicians and industrialists during the Third Republic and ruined hundreds of thousands of savers, in the midst of the international expansion of the Paris Stock Exchange.

We then point the finger at these hated “panamists”, in other words these “rotten”.

“Outside the capital it was not long before people began to call not only politicians, but all Parisians as a whole, “Panamists”, and “Panam” the city where these sharks lived…”, wrote in Le Figaro, the journalist Claude Duneton (1905-2012) who led the investigation. The first to use this nickname seem to be the market gardeners of the suburbs, angry at paying a tax to sell their products in the capital.

For Claude Dubois, journalist and historian of Paris, author of the work I remember Paris, the appearance of the term could also be explained by the "panama" hat brought into fashion by the workers of the Panama Canal and worn by the Elegant Parisians: “Paname may have meant the city of the elegant then, because of the scandal, the city of shimmer, of illusions and disillusions…”