Tuesday 26 May, 8 pm. Concert in homage
to Pierre Brossolette, Germaine Tillion, Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz, Jean
Zay.
The evening before the ‘panthéonisation’ (the placing in the
Pantheon) of these four figures of the Résistance, there was a concert in the quadrangle of the Sorbonne. At the front were seats for those most closely associated with the people being honoured. The rest of us stood or sat on the paving stones. The setting sun touched the dome of the Sorbonne, the soldiers stood smartly to attention behind the flag-draped coffins, the singing and the readings lifted your heart. This was a rare and precious opportunity
to reflect on virtue, that word which the dictionary
defines as ‘moral excellence’, whose roots are to be found in the Latin virtus, one meaning of which is ‘courage.
Saturday 6 June 10.30 am, Carrefour
de la Chapelle: I am
on my way to the gare du Nord, to book train tickets. The sun is high in a pure
blue sky and the temperature is rising fast.
There are
police everywhere, at the crossroads of la Chapelle, at the metro entrance, in
the little parks beside the boulevards. I remember that this is the week the
Mairie and Police have chosen to clear the tent village under the metro on
the boulevard. The clean-out is evidently well underway.
I am stuck
in a queue at the station for nearly an hour. By the time I am on my way back
there are more police than ever, as well as seven of those dark blue
Gendarmerie vans, one behind the other at the traffic-lights. In piles by the railings, there are also
heaps of possessions: clothes, shoes, unidentified boxes and rolled-up sleeping
bags. I walk up to where the camp was. The tents have gone. The lives of 360
people have been packed up and carted off and where they were has been hosed
down, wiped clean. Order is restored. The area is now encased in a shroud of
white netting, completely impenetrable unless you equip yourself with a pair of
shears and slice your way through.
The police
with their truncheons and their guns aren’t actually doing anything. They don’t
need to. Just by being there they are doing what’s needed: ‘keeping the lid on
what might get explosive’ some might say, or from a different perspective, ‘intimidating
by sheer force of numbers’. I ask one of them what’s happened to the people who
were in the camp.
“Ils ont été
relogés, madame.”
“Où ça? A
Paris ou ailleurs?”
“A Paris, et
ailleurs.”
Same day, 5.35 pm, Esplanade
Nathalie Sarraute.
Bob’s Bake Shop has acquired deck-chairs for its clientele. Most of them are in
use. All the tables at les Petites Gouttes cafe are full. There’s a crowd round
both of the table football games they’ve installed and music pumping out from
indoors. There’s a happy, summer party atmosphere, helped along by more music
from further down the street where one of the local associations is holding an
afternoon fiesta of some kind.
This time I
am on my way to the marché. As in the morning, there are clusters of police
stationed up and down the esplanade, chatting, watching, waiting. I go up to a
policewoman who happens to be standing on her own.
“Bonjour,
Madame,” I say (because courtesy demands that you start with a bonjour),
“Est-ce que vous pouvez me dire pourquoi la police est ici en si grand nombre?”
She barely
looks at me and moves away with her walky-talky going. I wait, assuming (in my
naivety), that she will answer my question once she’s finished her call. But I
am not in England where it would be unthinkable for a policeman asked a polite
question by a member of the public, not to give you at least a semblance of a
civil reply. It doesn’t work like that in France. In France the police are
trained not to answer irritating people like me. So she doesn’t.
I go over to
another group of policemen and I ask my question again, having first said that
I have tried to get an answer from their colleague who has chosen not to reply.
They look at me as if I’m something the dog’s brought in and eventually one of
them says.
“Mais
madame, vous savez très bien pourquoi nous sommes ici. La raison est là, derrière
vous, sur le trottoir Les migrants. Ceux qui étaient à la Chapelle.”
And then I
realise that the crowd he’s pointing to, lying and sitting on the pavement in
the sunshine, or queuing up for sandwiches and drinks, isn’t just more people
like those I’d passed enjoying a quiet Saturday afternoon with friends over a
beer at Bob’s Bake Shop or les Petites Gouttes. These are the homeless being
fed sandwiches by kindly volunteers before the vans arrive to take them off to
the centres de détention, to the airports and other exit points.
Where next?
I saw them in the end, and I spoke to some
of them too. But what I took home with me - along with my shopping bag full of
fresh fish, farm-reared, free-range chicken, cherries, artichokes and a botte
de radis - was their invisibility.
So perhaps
it is, when a cruise ship sails grandly on in the Mediterranean, passing a
rubber dinghy full of Franz Fanon’s Damnés de la terre.
Sunday 7 June, 9.30 pm, rue Marx Dormoy. The street erupts in a
frenzy of tooting cars and flag-waving. The lights change and more cars belt past, their bonnets plastered with the posters of the
pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party, HDP. They're coming in from the suburbs to the north of Paris, Turkish Kurds shouting their triumph, their joy, up and down the street: parliamentary representation for the first time ever (about 80 seats out of 550 is the tentative projection).
Live here in the north of Paris and you feel in your very bones, the porosity of the city, the restless searching for 'something better'.
