Paris bulletin 7 2010

I’ve been studying beards these past few days. It all began with the appearance in our neighbourhood of an elderly man, a clochard of a sort, sporting a long tapering beard like a prophet’s and carrying a walking stick which he uses to poke around in the public rubbish bins. Two days later I (quite literally) bumped into a corpulent rabbi in the 19^th arrondissement, with a flow of hair like a mountain torrent. It extended well below his waist or rather below the impressive bulge where his waist might once have been. So after that I began noting more systematically the size, shape and depth of beards. As I expect you know, the style of beard a man grows is as indicative of the version of Islam or Judaism he follows as any headscarf or burka.

Then I went to listen to Philip Pullman talking about authority and authorship at the ‘Storytelling and Politics’ festival Shakespeare &  Co ran this weekend past. Pullman was talking about his latest book, ‘The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ’. He mentioned the conversation he’d had at the National Theatre, with Archbishop Rowan Williams. Now there’s another beard on a religious man. Not quite patriarchal - in keeping with the Archbishop’s liberal politics, more ‘foaming’ than majestic.

Hair and religion eh? The locks of temptation, the manes of authority…

There aren’t many men in the Sarkozy’s cabinet with facial hair but there’s been plenty of billy-goat foot-stamping and bellowing after the antics of the French football team, ‘bringing shame and dishonour on the nation’ as Jean-Francois Copé, leader of the UMP said this morning. There are those who would like to link the foot-stamping and ‘injures’ to the comments of public figures like Brice Hortefeux (racist) and Sarkozy (vulgar – c.f.  his memorable ‘casse-toi pauvre con’ at the Salon de l’agriculture in 2009 – loosely translated ‘piss off you stupid bastard’). And there are others – plenty more – who want to find the worm in the apple in the cités, the sprawling suburban housing estates where ‘all the trouble comes from’.

The Goutte d’Or, the strongly Muslim area right up the street from my flat was targeted recently by extreme right-wing groups intent on stirring up hatred (it is there that the worshippers described in the last bulletin gather outdoors to pray on a Friday).

Using the seventieth anniversary of de Gaulle’s appel de Londres as an excuse they began advertising a ‘community apéro’ (apéro short for apéritif, so implying, even if they hadn’t spelled it, out that alcohol would be on offer). The grand apéro was to serve saucisson and pinard, the latter also chosen on the dubious pretext that this was the wine that gave the Goutte d’Or its name (the drop of gold).

Pork sausages and alcohol in an area where the majority of the residents are Muslim? Nothing very subtle about that, which was exactly the point. The event was banned in the 18^th but found an alternative venue near la place Charles de Gaulle in the 8^th arrondissement where apparently two of the big names in French fascism had a set-to and ended rolling about in the dust.

And one last thing – I’ve been to l’église St Julien le Pauvre in the 5^th arrondissement. One of the city’s oldest churches it was made a place of worship for Melkite (Arab and Middle eastern) Greek Catholics in the mid-nineteenth century. It was also the church a group of Dadaists chose to hold a ‘Dada Excursion’ in.

Les points chauds –anciens et modernes - de Paris!