Paris bulletin 6 2009

Le 104, www.104.fr, one of Paris’s more ambitious cultural projects, is gradually coming together. From the echoing empty beginnings of last year it feels at last as though the ateliers and vast central concourses are filling up with interesting artistic experimentation and life. Less than a week ago the bookshop opened for business. I passed it, but didn’t go in, on my way back from teaching on Wednesday. ‘Well there’s a place you won’t see many locals in,’ went through my mind (the 19^th arrondissement is one of the city’s most ethnically mixed as well as one of the poorest). The books on display in the windows were for the kind of people who don’t reach for a dictionary when they come across words like ontological and hermeneutics, for people in fact who expect to meet words like that inside the books they buy.

But if you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover you probably also shouldn’t judge a bookshop by its window display, so I went back again a couple of days later for a closer look and came away with a very different view. They’ve made a real space for children for a start, from board books for tinies to novels for teenagers, and they’ve done what’s relatively common practice in British bookshops now, put cushions for kids and chairs for adults so that people can have a read before they buy. Plus, the range of books on offer is excellent – would put most British bookshops, even good independent ones, to shame.

The building, which extends right through from the rue d’Aubervilliers to the rue Curial behind, is an awesome architectural entity in its own right, with an inner courtyard open to the sky and towards the rue Curial side, a long ramp down to the basement where the stables used to be.

The stables were for the horses who pulled the hearses because until 1997 le 104 was the HQ of the ‘pompes funèbres de la ville de Paris’ – the municipal undertakers. After 1905 when the formal separation of Church and State was made law, any citizen of the Republic was entitled to a proper burial ceremony, regardless of religion or legal status. Pre-1905 funerals for divorced women could only be held at night and suicides were ineligible for any kind of ceremony – presumably they simply ended up in some kind of paupers’ pit.

Like most other things the Republic took a hand in, there was a formidable amount of protocol to be followed for the correct disposal of the dead. Reading about the history of le 104 I at last understood why the outer doors of houses where there had been a death, or churches where a funeral was taking place, were always draped in ornate black curtains when I used to come to France in my youth. Until 1983 it was obligatory to erect such canopies at the door of any building housing a deceased person. But the protocol went far beyond that and le 104 employed at its height in the early to middle 20^th century over 1,400 craftsmen and tradesmen, and every year, sent around 27,000 souls off on their final journey in a horse-drawn carriage and then later on, in one of the city’s motorised hearses.

Now it’s a place for play, chat, artistic experimentation and relaxation. They’ve put out some deck-chairs and sofas in the open area on the rue d’Aubervilliers side. There’s a buvette  – eventually there’ll be a proper café and restaurant - and a small van which runs as a book exchange project: bring one and take one away or if you haven’t brought one to swap, take a book to read on one of the sofas and leave it when you go.

When I went on Saturday afternoon to watch Khalid-K (www.khalidk.net – at the Festival d’Avignon this year – Edinburgh next?), who took us on an extraordinary one-man auditory journey autour du monde, they’d taped gigantic sheets of paper to the floor and adults and kids were down there scribbling and graffitying away in perfect harmony. No black families that I could see. Plenty of black faces manning the security and emptying the rubbish bins … still, it’s early days and living as I used to, near the Tramway in Glasgow, I well remember how long it took for the local Asian families to feel at home in that place, despite it being right on their doorstep in Pollokshields.

Meanwhile here like everywhere else I guess, the European elections are struggling to gain the interest of the populace. I sat on the terrasse of a café at Gambetta yesterday afternoon and watched as some stalwarts of the ‘Nouveau parti anti-capitaliste’ handed out their manifesto at the metro exit. By the time I left for an hour’s meditation at the centre Brahma Kumaris on the rue Orfila the bin nearby was overflowing with them. And I listened to a fascinating and heated debate with Philippe le Villiers who talked about how the Traité de Lisbon has undermined – wrecked? -  the founding ideals of the Traité de Rome. Something else besides hermeneutics I need to get my head round..

The universities are still as paralysed as ever and the queue for free food at our nearby relais du coeur was longer than ever this morning but new buildings are rising to fill gap sites and you can feel the indomitable human spirit running like a current through the city.