Paris bulletin 8 2016

Paris is ending the year dans la grisaille, for which there is no very satisfactory single word in English. The cross on the top of the spire of the église St Bernard up the road from my sitting room window hasn’t properly emerged from the murk all day.  People have been scurrying along the street like figures in a Lowry painting, their minds perhaps on the final purchases they need for their party, the jar of foie gras, the plateau de fruits de mer, another bottle of prosecco. When I went past Monoprix there was a queue yards long waiting at the fishmonger’s stall outside. Prawns (flown in from India) had been reduced from 16 to 12.50 euros a kilo. There were couteaux, bulots, fines de claires, coquilles St Jacques, homards, langoustines and I don’t know what else. Multiply that stall by all the others across Paris alone and you begin to appreciate how thoroughly the seas and the fish farms have been plundered for le saint Sylvestre. 

Picture next, less than a quarter of a mile from that plenitude, a small square, a couple of benches, a single scraggy tree and a heap of coloured bedding, sleeping bags, blankets, backpacks. This is where twenty, maybe more, young men will have huddled together through the night to keep the worst of the cold out of their bones. They are some of the young men and boys who line up each morning, blowing on the tips of their fingers, hugging cold hands under armpits while they wait for their cups of tea or coffee and their chunk of baguette and chocolate spread.

I've joined an association, les Quartiers Solidaires, a group of mostly forty-somethings with children at the local schools, who take it in turns to provide a makeshift breakfast service to the refugees and other homeless people who sleep on our pavements. I’m still learning the routine because I haven’t been doing it for long. I don’t yet even recognize most of those who come. So far I’ve only seen two women and two young girls, one of them with a very small baby. There are barriers of age, sex and most of all language between us. The group changes constantly as well. People get lifted by the police or find another, safer place to pass the night or just move on.

You could say it’s insulting to offer hungry men day-old bread and weak tea; it’s shaming or scandalous that the city doesn’t do more, but in the absence of something better this is definitely better than nothing. The smiles are real on both sides of the table and there is warmth in more than the plastic cups of hot liquid.

There are simple practical steps to follow to do the breakfast. You make sure the chocolate spread is kept somewhere warm overnight so you can spread it more easily once you’re out on the cold street. You boil lots of pans of water, fill the thermoses and the urn, call in at the baker’s along the street to collect yesterday’s unsold baguettes and viennoiseries, load everything onto two trolleys and trundle these round the corner to set up the tables for the makeshift buvette on the place. The queue forms instantly and for the next hour or two you’re busy pouring tea and coffee, cutting bread and making sandwiches. In the occasional lulls you see acts of kindness by passers-by as well as occasional outbursts of hostility. Kindness is a woman handing out a bag full of woollen gloves, another a thick scarf, another a two big packs of paper hankies. Hostility is a middle-aged man screaming down the street, ‘Madame, vous avez créé un ghetto! On devrait les chasser tous! C’est de la merde.’

Down at the Champs Elysées there will have been other long queues outside le Grand Palais but it shut at 6 o’clock this evening and won’t open again until tomorrow when it will stay open right through till 2 am. It’s not the Mexican art exhibition that’s drawing the crowds but ‘the world’s biggest indoor ice rink’.  When we went a few days ago it was still light but by six o’clock the daylight had fled, the lasers came on in the glass roof and the whole place became a magical whirling, spinning universe of light and sound.

There are so many wonderful exhibitions to see at present it’s hard to choose which to mention but two not to miss are the Icons of Modern Art, the Shchukin Collection at the Fondation Louis Vuitton on until 20 February.  Magritte, la Trahison des Images is at the Pompidou and ends on 23 January.

Here’s wishing you many wonderful new experiences in 2017. One of my new year’s resolutions is to turn down the sound - pay less heed to the chatter and the prophets of doom on both sides of the Atlantic.

Paris bulletin 7 2016

I've been in Paris for nearly a week now and the soft light of south-west Scotland, its green fields and wide open moors already feel quite remote. The sun has been shining out of a cloudless sky, although no longer producing the soaring, energy-sapping temperatures that made Paris so unbearable this summer. I was gone before Paris Plages was fully set up and the sand, deckchair and buvettes have long since been dismantled. This weekend has been la Fête des Jardins however, so there have been other entertainments and attractions in all the public gardens.

Our local park, le jardin d’Eole, had a collection of domestic animals in enclosures, a mini city farm I suppose you could say (bearing, it must be admitted, little or no resemblance to the way we really manage the care of the animals whose meat, milk, eggs and skins we consume. I think of my local farm in Scotland where the cows never go outside from one month to the next, or the chickens we eat, allowed at best 10 weeks of life …).

   Sign of the times? New burger bar on the Champs-Elysées. 250,000 ways of eating a burger - just don't ask how the beef was raised, killed and transported, i.e. welcome to consumer choice in the 21st century. 

There were a couple of very large geese cackling about, some sheep in pens and rabbits in hutches and sundry bales of straw to lend an air of authenticity. All that was missing to complete this picture of bucolic harmony was a yokel with a hat on the back of his head and a straw poking out of his mouth. Nice for the kids though, a lot of whom probably thought the geese were just big ducks and couldn’t have told you beforehand how to tell a sheep from a goat.

On the second day I got back I saw for the first time ever a young refugee stripped down to his underpants having a ‘full-body’ wash in the canal that runs along the length of the garden. It hardly merits the word canal being only five feet wide and less than two feet deep and full of bulrushes, reeds and other water-loving plants. However its waters are constantly replenished so it’s not a bad place to get clean if you haven’t access to the public baths. I didn’t know then that the organisers were planning on bringing in animals for the Fête but I was already thinking about the difference in how the wealthy West views its garden spaces and how someone from a low-rainfall, dusty country might view them, or the animals and birds that inhabit them. We have lots of ducks on that little canal. I haven’t heard of any dead ducks being roasted over a camp fire yet but the time may come.

It was a busy weekend for the Mairie de Paris since Sunday was also Paris’s annual car-free day. It looked from my window as if the edict had had more impact this year but it was hard to be sure since the street is generally quieter on a Sunday. I decided to check out one of the pedestrian hot-spots and took the metro to the Champs-Elysées in the afternoon. There I joined the thousands on foot and bike who had sole use of the 10-lane highway for something like 7 hours from 11 am – 6 pm.

                            The Champs-Elysées at 3 pm on Sunday 25 September 2016

The purely pedestrianised part of the road stopped at the rond-point where there was a heavily armed police presence (you were also frisked at the barriers at both ends). Outside the pedestrian limits the only traffic was buses and taxis and those bicycle taxis you see more and more in that part of town. Concorde was a vast expanse of emptiness. It was so safe hundreds of small children were also out on their bikes. It was a joy to see, most of them cycling merrily along - some very little ones wobbling precariously - all the way across the place de la Concorde and up the rue Royale!

                                                     Place de la Concorde, same day

Long shadows on the places, fountains playing, the asters and the begonias still in full bloom; outside my open window I can hear the voices of the women sitting out in the courtyard next door, the rippling notes of a flute, the distant blare of a siren. That’s Paris on a warm September day.

Blue skies and butterflies - the sun also shines in Scotland!

Paris bulletin 6 2016

Le Palais de Tokyo is one half, the west wing, of a huge complex on the avenue du Président Wilson, just down the hill from Trocadéro. Since the whole wing was finally brought into use in 2012 it is now the biggest centre for contemporary art in Europe. Unlike most Paris museums and art galleries it holds no permanent exhibitions of any kind. Its function is to give space to a rolling programme of temporary installations and works. Currently and until September one of the main offerings is a labyrinthine exhibition, Rester vivant, by novelist/poet/photographer Michel Houellebecq.

When it was first built in 1937 the plan was to use what we now know as le Palais de Tokyo as the national museum of modern art. However the mandarins reckoned without the war and the collapse of France. In 1939 most of the paintings had to be packed up and carted off in a southerly direction in an effort to keep them out of Nazi hands and in 1941 the basement of the building was taken over by the Gestapo who needed somewhere to store the hundreds of pianos they’d stolen off Jews who had fled or been arrested. That bit of history is reflected in one of the offers the Palais makes to its visitors: a guided visit round the Lasco Project, the only exhibition which has gone on non-stop since 2012.

Greek street art

You have to do a guided visit because the Lasco artwork you see isn’t in any of the main exhibition spaces. It is hidden away underground, in the corridors and stairways behind the public spaces of the Palais. A staff member has to get you through doors that are otherwise locked. Lasco is street art and in keeping  with the form and its culture it is underground and secret.  You’ll find work by artists such as Philippe Baudeloque, (www.baudeloque.com), JR (jr-art.net), DRAN and others whose names I ought to know but don’t. (Checking all this out after my visit I happened upon www.fatcap.com. I recommend it if you don’t already know it. Street art, in all its guises, is one of the more positive developments of global urbanization – definitely the most in-tune with and reflective of the problems it raises anyhow.)

                                                                     work by DRAN

work by Philippe Baudeloque

Coming back to those pianos, there is a part of the Palais which even the visitors to the Lasco project aren’t allowed into. All you can see is a short video of the secret spaces below you in the true basement of the building, where the wartime stolen pianos were kept: a handful of men working to commemorate that time. Water drips from the low ceiling, the candles they are using for light flicker and dim. 

photos taken from the video of the basement

It’s 10 o’ clock in the evening when I do that visit (visits are that time every day and at midday on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays. The Palais is open from midday till midnight every day except Tuesday). When I come out at ten to eleven I find the street has filled with people. Wherever you can catch a glimpse of the Tour Eiffel there’s a crush of people waiting for the 14 juillet fireworks. I decide to stay and see them too. I wouldn’t have come out specially but now I’m here why not?

I’m sucked into the crowd, scrunched up against a drunk young woman who’s obviously got something stronger than water in the bottle she’s clutching, and an Arab-speaking family, one child already asleep and mum looking like she’d rather be anywhere but here but dad’s got his camera out so they have to stay. The crowd is good-humoured and patient. The Tour Eiffel glitters and sparkles, takes on bleu, blanc, rouge and then goes dark. Fire runs up the sides, falls away, flares out again. Flowers of colour and light blossom overhead. 

fireworks seen from the musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris

The bangs get louder and faster. I watch a little while then squeeze my way through the press and set off back to Etoile and the Champs Elysées. The giant flag billows under the Arc. There’s music, laughter, dancing even. No one knows. Not yet.

Paris bulletin 5 2016

Out and about in Paris last week with my friend, Pamela Shandel, who took the photos.

  

Pamela's cappuccino et petite madeleine

soldiers consult their map (!) in the courtyard of le centre de danse du Marais

in the courtyard at 41 rue du Temple, watching un cours de flamenco

collage of writers at les cahiers de Colette bookshop on the rue Rambuteau

Brioches pralinées at Pralus on rue Rambuteau

laying the pavés outside le Forum des Halles

heading to the play park at Forum des Halles

It’s that time of year again – the season of dark red cherries, apricots, piles of green and gold mangoes outside the Indian shops on the rue du Faubourg St Denis; a time of reckoning too – the bac started a week ago and from now on until the end of the month there’ll be one spectacle de fin d’année after another, parents wielding cameras and phones, quite a few of them hardly watching at all in their urge to record their child’s performance under the lights. I take my place in the queue to find seats for two of my grandchildren’s shows, the first at the Bouffes du Nord, the second at the Théâtre de Ménilmontant, both of them really excellent, a huge tribute to the work done by children and adults.

I can’t tell you who’s still in and who’s already out of the Euro 2016 competition because I’m not interested in football. What I can say is that since the first match kicked off I have seen enough loutish behaviour on the streets of Paris to last me a very long time. The clusters of tee-shirted men displaying that mix of mouthy bravado and panicky fear make me thankful I’m a woman. Lord of the Flies has been in my mind more than once.

I know the footballing louts are ‘a tiny minority’ and they are by no means only English and Russian, but every time they elbow bystanders out of their way, slap someone round the head, bawl their slogans and tribal songs in the metro, wave their flags in rival supporters’ faces, toss their empty beer cans on the pavement, all of which acts I have personally witnessed, they put another layer of scum on the surface of social life. The story that is circulating of a crowd of English supporters forcing a seven year-old boy begging on the street to drink from a can of lager before they gave him money may well be apocryphal but I don’t find it much of a stretch after some of what I’ve seen.

I know this is a Paris bulletin but exceptional circumstances demand exceptional responses. Two events have dominated the UK front pages this past week: the murder of Jo Cox and the referendum. Both resonate strongly for me here in the 18^th arrondissement where yet another camp of refuges has been established round the corner from my flat on the esplanade Nathalie Sarraute. This after the recent clearing of the camp outside the jardin d’Eole where by the time it was cleared there were 1,300 migrants and refuges from various African and Middle Eastern countries, living in conditions of the most appalling squalor and degradation. I am told that the police have now cleared refugee camps in this area 23 times in the past year. 

Right at this minute the rain is pouring down as it has done with monotonous regularity in both May and June. Hard to imagine what it feels like to lie, (most of the tents are too small to allow you to sit up comfortably), listening to the rain beating down on a thin layer of nylon above your head when it’s not trendy urban camping you’re about, with a hot shower waiting and a change of dry clothes in the cupboard (cf. a recent piece about rooftop camping in Brooklyn in one of the broadsheets).

Another of the effects of these repeated clearings is that in our neighbourhood whole stretches of public space have been cordoned off by the authorities. They include parks as well as pavements and this in an area which is already short of open green spaces for relaxation and play.

Fortunately there are other responses. La cohabitation is a fact of life here. I am proud to live in this area - one of the poorest and most overcrowded of the city - where incomers are seen in their singularity however many they are, where the inhabitants don't stint their efforts to help through the quartiers solidaires network and others like it. 

I posted my ‘IN’ vote a while back. You can stay stuck in inaction and a sense of powerlessness or you can do whatever you can, little as it may be, to counter those whose only solution is to pull up the drawbridge, batten down the hatches or head for the hills… I read a post from some British man yesterday which said that choosing which side to vote for in the referendum is ‘a difficult decision’. Really? Who in their right mind would want to be immured in any kind of fortress with the likes of Farrage or Johnson?

mes géraniums qui font face au mauvais temps

Paris bulletin 4 2016

We may be in the End Times after all. The rain seems to suggest so. I see no sign of any ark-building however, although plenty of sodden tents. Round the corner from my flat something like four hundred migrants are camped on the same patch of land they used last year by the jardin d’Eole.

I took my own advice to heart after my last bulletin. I’m cultivating what passes for a garden in a tarmac-covered backyard, in tubs of course, all flowers except for one tub:  radishes. I thinned them out yesterday and they are beginning to swell although I doubt they’ll have much zing about them if the sun doesn’t shine soon.  

Before the skies opened and the rivers began to fill I went over to Truffaut, Paris’s biggest inner city garden centre, and ‘animalerie’. The place was heaving with Parisians intent like me on filling their window boxes and creating des balcons fleuris.

‘On a du solieil au balcon jusqu’à 14 heures. Qu’est-ce que vous me conseillez?’ 

          The Panthéon a fortnight ago - blue skie, hot sun and flowering chestnuts.

Since then the men outside the Luxembourg and the Louvre have swapped their bottles of water at 1 euro for umbrellas at 5 and they’ve been doing excellent business.

To get to Truffaut you can walk alongside the Seine from the Gare d’Austerlitz metro station, or from the quai de la Gare (Gare de Lyon across the other side of the bridge). It’s a part of Paris I come to very rarely since I don’t use the bibilothèque François Mittérand or the Cité de la Mode et du Design, the building you see from the tip of the Ile de la Cité, its green carapace conjuring the image of a slumbering croc at the edge of the Seine. I’ve had some nice al fresco lunches up aloft in the café on wooden deck there. Lots going on, day and night, if you’re over that way.

Stay on the Left Bank (and there’s nothing to entice you to the Right at this point) and  you can do a walk back towards the Institut du Monde Arabe that takes you through the sculpture park, a succession of installations and objects competing with too much fussy vegetation and constrained by the limitations of the corridor-like space.

The Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA), is as usual hosting a range of exhibitions: ‘I AM WITH THEM -  un manifeste photographique pour les réfugiés’,  ‘Les jardins d’Orient’, ‘Des Trésors à porter’ – (see more on these at www.imarabe.org) and holding some excellent one-off performances and debates.

Jack Lang, the current president of the IMA, is that rare animal, a French politician one can still feel uncomplicated admiration for. While Minister of Culture he was responsible for creating the Fête de la Musique (21^st June every year), also for the law that enforces a minimum sale price for books, thereby protecting writers, publishers and independent bookshops. (Lang’s Law is the reason you don’t find stacks of cut-price paperbacks in French supermarkets).

I heard him speak on the radio the other day, a contribution which was in marked contrast to the dominant discourse at present which is all about les casseurs and the on-going social action against la Loi el Khomri, industrial action at ports and refineries threatening to put the nation’s supplies of petrol at risk. Etc, etc. There was Jack Lang talking with such energy and optimism about the development of civil society in the north African states, it was like a breath of fresh air.

Here in the 18^th arrondissement we have our own more modest ICI, l’Institut des Cultures d’Islam (www.institut-cultures-islam) : Abu Sadiya and friends playing on 9 June at 20.00 hours, and a ‘taking stock’ exhibition on Tunisia 5 years after the revolution, to mention only some of what is on offer.

There’s more yet - this year’s Monumenta in the Grand Palais: Huang Yong Ping’s ‘Empire’, Chung Hyun’s Standing Men in the gardens of the Palais Royal, 

Standing Men - Palais Royal

The Albert Marquet retrospective at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris and the Paula Modersohn-Becker in the same building.

And of course, Paul Klee at the Pompidou: l’ironie à l’oeuvre, until September.

I finish typing this list of delights and curiosities and make myself a cup of coffee. The clouds are still massed but the rain has stopped. There’s no rainbow, no dove, just three very damp, bedraggled pigeons on the flat roof opposite, one of them minus a leg.  

A wet, one-legged pigeon – what more apposite symbol could there be of the times we live in?

Paris bulletin 3 2106

‘Surmédiatisation’, I’ve been hearing the word a lot on the radio since I got back. It’s what some people are saying about Nuit Debout, the latest radical protest movement taking shape in Paris and all across France. They mean the amount of coverage the movement is getting is out of all proportion to its size. I hear it as a barely coded way of saying ‘the sooner we turn the oxygen off, the sooner it’ll die’. The Nuit Deboutistes camped out on the Place de la République have also been accused, by the Front National in particular, of ‘tendances faschistes’ and attempting to privatise ‘l’espace public’.

I’ve only heard of one person who has been made to feel unwelcome: the controversial right-wing broadcaster-philosopher Alain Finkielkraut who claims he was ‘driven off’ by a handful of activists. If his aim was to discredit the organisation he certainly had some success. He got several minutes to rant about the incident on France Culture earlier this week - a stunning example of surmédiatisation if ever there was one.

The heat is rising, as they say. I decide to catch the 65 bus and see for myself what’s going on.

It’s two o’clock in the afternoon. The sky is a brilliant blue, the trees are beginning to break into leaf. The school holidays have just begun and the Place is full of skaters, cyclists, people lounging about, children playing at tables with the games and jeux de société supplied by the Mairie. 

And in amongst all that, taking no more space than they ought, using no loud-hailers or platforms are the Nuit Deboutistes. Little huddles of people earnestly debating, planning, theorising and advising.

I join the ‘action’ group where a middle-aged man, evidently a core activist, is explaining how to set up a secure email account, how to join ‘la prochaine action chez Renault’ and how to keep out of the clutches of the police. In response to one of the questions asked he says ‘Nuit Debout est surtout un mouvement fédérateur.’ A few hands are raised and flutter like flags for a moment, a non-verbal ‘hear, hear’. There’s a photocopied sheet that tells you what gestures to use at these debates, the ‘please can I speak’ hand in the air, the hands joined above the head for a call to silence – and so on.

SDF Debout!

I spot the slogan ‘Vive la Commune’ daubed above the entrance to the metro station and I think of le mur des Communards in Père Lachaise where so many were slaughtered at the end. Do people know how savage the fighting was in 1871? Heads must fall in French revolutions. Whose heads is the question. A cheerful-looking rogue accosts me. ‘Moi je suis SDF Debout,’ he says and waves his can of lager in my face. I spot another notice: AG – assemblée générale-  tous les jours à 18.00 heures. I decide to come back the next day.

AG in full swing

Seven o’clock. The sun has dropped behind the buildings. A crowd of several hundred is gathered at the main AG. There’s another, slightly smaller, round a van at the end nearest Magenta, listening to the speeches relayed across. There are stalls selling books and leaflets, stalls offering food and drink, break-out groups, Hôpital Debout, Avocats Debout, Féministes Debout… 

There’s a group - two women and a man - offering free hugs (in English). Lots of beer being drunk from cans, a whiff of hash but no drunkenness, an atmosphere of bienveillance and good humour. The Place is throbbing with life. And then, beyond the statue a percussion band starts up and the air reverberates to the archaic, intoxicating beat of drums. A couple of hours later there’ll be a concert with a full-size orchestra playing Dvorak’s New World Symphony.

 **

If this is the best we can do radical change can’t come soon enough. That’s my reaction, venturing into newly re-opened Forum des Halles. The only thing to say about the architecture is that it’s as ugly as it ought to be considering what it’s built for: shopping, shopping and more shopping. Others have written about the extraordinary undulating, sagging beige roof. I felt positively seasick every time I looked up. It goes without saying what you can buy is the same as what you can buy in all the other main commercial centres in Paris and elsewhere.

I’d urge you to go and see the Anselm Kiefer exhibition at the Pompidou except that it’s over, which is a pity in view of what’s going on at République. Kiefer is truly an artist for our era – the early work monumentally, darkly Germanic, the more recent work equally monumental but cosmic , flower and fern-strewn. ‘Over your cities grass will grow’ is the title of Sophie Fiennes' 2010 film of his work. I like that. It chimes with the feeling I have that grass is growing out of the cracks in the concrete on la Place de la République. Mai 68 had sous les pavés la plage, but we need something more industrious for avril 2016. Time perhaps to read Voltaire again? Cultiver son jardin, élever son bétail? We could do worse.

Paris bulletin 2 2016

Considering Stendhal’s place in the French literary canon you might expect the street named after him to be more prestigious than it actually is: a narrow, residential street 
leading off the rue des Pyrénées in the 20^th arrondissement. Its starting point is an old stone building whose gable end, facing back towards place Gambetta, bears a half-obliterated sign ‘Ville de Paris Dispensaire Jouye-Rouve-Tanies Maladies de Poitrine’. Many years have passed since it dealt with the tubercular and the bronchitic but it still retains a forbidding, prisonlike presence with its high, barred windows and grey doors.

At the far end of the street there are three flights of steep steps that take you down to the entrance to the église St-Germain de Charonne, closed for now but probably reopening later this year once major repair work is finished. It was formerly the parish church of the village of Charonne before the latter was brought within the city boundaries in 1860, but there has been a chapel or holy place on that site from around 450. Apart from its rather wonderful position and and structure which you can appreciate without going inside, St-Germain de Charonne is chiefly notable for its cemetery, it and the église St Pierre de Montmartre being the only two Paris churches still to have their own cemetery attached to the church itself. The villages of Montmartre and Charonne were beyond the city boundaries when Napoléon passed his decree in 1804, banning all burials intra muros.

The best thing about the cemetery is how small it is. There is no sense of the almost industrial disposal of dead bodies you get with the big Paris burial grounds, like Père Lachaise and Montparnasse. I wander round one sunlit afternoon, listening for a moment to the excited outpourings of a volunteer standing over the grave of Robert Brasillach, fervent supporter of Nazi Germany and editor for a while of the fascist newspaper ‘Je suis partout’. Following the liberation of Paris Brasillach was executed by firing squad on the orders of General de Gaulle, despite a huge campaign by key literary figures of the day to have his sentence commuted. His brother-in-law, Maurice Bardèche is buried close by. Unlike Brasillach who was dead by the time he was 35, Bardèche, arch-negationist and Holocaust denier, lived till he was 91, fighting till the end for the rehabilitation of Brasillach’s name. He apparently left five sons behind him, perhaps one of them is keeping the flame burning yet.

Robert Brasillach

Two days earlier I had been in the 17th arrondissement, accompanying my grand-daughter to her concert at the conservatoire there. She had a rehearsal before the concert started so in the gathering dark I decided to take a look at the modern church I could see, more Byzantine than European in style, behind the trees of a nearby park:  l’église de Sainte Odile, as I discovered. A remarkable edifice, as big and cavernous as a cathedral.

There was a mass on in the church. I saw a figure in military uniform holding a French flag. It was 11^th March. I had happened upon the annual celebration/commemoration of Lieutenant-Colonel Jean Bastien-Thiry’s life. Who was this man, what did he do to merit a mass? I had no idea.

The priest had just begun his homily – lots of fine words about his honour, his patriotism, his courage, his belief in the rightness of what he did. Suddenly a young man erupted into the church, one arm raised, shouting. He walked briskly down the centre aisle and right up to the altar. The priest had no choice but to stop and ask him what he was doing. His response was unintelligible but loud. Some men in the congregation were already on their feet. He came back down the aisle, arm still raised, still shouting, and exited the building. The mass resumed.

Like Brasillach before him, Jean Bastien-Thiry was also 35 when he died under a hail of bullets. The date was 11^th March 1963. That killing too was carried out on the orders of the General de Gaulle. Like many of his contemporaries Bastien-Thiry believed de Gaulle had betrayed France in reversing his policy on Algeria. His crime was to have reneged on his promise to keep the country as an integral part of France. Bastien-Thiry and his fellow-conspirators set up an ambush on the road out to the airport at Villacoublay where de Gaulle was due to catch a place to Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises.  Despite a barrage of bullets, several of which hit the general’s car, De Gaulle and his wife escaped without a scratch. Out of more than twenty plotters Bastien-Thiry was the only one to be executed.

Jean Bastien-Thiry

I’m left wondering at the coincidence of coming face to face, twice in as many days, with the lives and deaths of two of France’s more controversial figures, the one wielding a pen, the other a machine gun.

There is a very recent grave in the cemetery of St-German de Charonne. The flowers piled high, the candles in pots and the scribbled messages mark the passing of another life, another summary execution. The excitable volunteer leads his visitors across to where I’m standing. No one speaks. After a moment the woman kneels down and straightens up a bent flower. She takes out a handkerchief and wipes her eyes:

Claire Maitrot-Tapprest, 23 ans, étudiante en philosophie à l’université de Reims, passionnée du rock indépendant, fauchée au Bataclan par des balles terroristes.

Paris bulletin 1 2016

I was in Scotland until the end of January where it rained a great deal. Now I'm back in Paris where it's doing much the same, day after sopping day. It’s not just the pigeons that are grey and bedraggled. However I wasn't going to be beaten by le temps pourri. In quick succession I booked tickets for my art classes, for a concert at the Philharmonie de Paris and for the new production of Bernard-Marie Koltès’s play ‘Dans la Solitude des Champs de Coton’ which is on at the Bouffes du Nord at present. At the end of that first week I also went to the exhibition ‘Moïse – figures d’un prophète’ at the MAHJ (Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme) on the rue du Temple.

Security in public buildings remains high in Paris. Some days when I go to the Louvre they make you take your coat off, some days they don’t. It’s just one of the ways we are supposed to feel we are active participants in the fight against terrorism. Checks like these are among the less sinister features of the present and continuing ‘état d’urgence’ which, in the light of the most recent vote in the Assemblée Nationale looks as though it’s here to stay. Nothwithstanding the widespread disagreement in virtually all sections of the population, apart from the far right, about enshrining these fundamental changes in the constitution of la cinquième république.

For some categories of the population the impact of the measures is much more far-reaching than the inconvenience of having to remove your coat and flash the contents of your handbag at a bored security guard. I’m talking about house arrests, house searches and the curtailment of free movement which results from both of those. So far only a tiny proportion of the population has been targeted by such measures but they are not distinct from the more routine searches we are all subjected to. The état d’urgence has introduced a conditioning process – more accurately a process of indoctrination – of the general population. We are to become desensitised to the posses of heavily armed soldiers parading through the streets, to having our right to gather in public places controlled and/or prohibited, our choice of friends monitored. 

The longer it goes on the more normal it will become so that in the end it won’t matter whether the powers the government has seized make us more or less secure than we would otherwise be. It will just be ‘how it is’. Violence masquerading as protection: that's why most of those stuck in the mud of the Calais camps don't want to live here. 

There is nothing either tokenistic or cursory about the vetting you undergo to get into the MAHJ. You cross the cobbled courtyard of the Hôtel de Saint-Aignan that houses the museum and state your business to the official in his booth of reinforced glass before even getting as far as the electronic checks. Once you’re through those the Moses exhibition doesn’t disappoint, either in the art on display or the accompanying texts and explanations. It led me to download a copy of the King James’s Bible onto my Kindle so that I could read it without the magnifying glass I need for my ancient print copy. I’d quite forgotten what a great book Exodus is, full of the most amazing stories. 

Before you get into the exhibition itself you come face to face with a life-size Moses (actually Charlton Heston), projected onto the wall at the back of the main staircase. There he is with his staff, making the Red Sea open so that the Israelites can trundle through to safety – a ten minute excerpt from The Ten Commandments, Cecile B DeMille’s last and most expensive film, all bronzed bodies and churning waters. 

                                              Charlton Heston in biblical mode

The rest is rather more reflective. The exhibition closes on 21^st February, so not much time left to see it.

Like the small neighbourhood mosques few synagogues advertise their presence in Paris, although ironically they’ve become more visible since 13^th November precisely because of the soldiers that stand guard at their doors. The city’s main synagogue, the largest in France, is on rue de la Victoire, a very ordinary commercial street in the centre of Paris. 

upholstery shop opposite the synagogue

The synagogue towers over it, impressive both in its dimensions and its ornamentation. Sadly, if you are not Jewish the outside is all you are able to see. Both entrances are surrounded by steel crush barriers, both are guarded by armed police. I did manage to get through the first two doors only to be quizzed, and my request to be allowed entry rejected, by a shadowy figure sitting behind darkened glass in a kind of guardhouse.

A different expedition next – out into the Ile de France for lunch with a friend. I catch a transilien train and we cross the looping Seine not once but twice. The high-rise buildings and tagged walls gradually give way to les pavillons de banlieue, packed in tight bundles one against the other. By the time we reach my station there are actual fields full of actual sprouting crops and Paris is like a mirage on the skyline.

The streets are quiet. It’s good to get some distance.