Paris bulletin 11 2009

Parisians can be unpredictable in how they react to the renaming of their streets and squares, to mark the passing of this or that public figure. L’Etoile at the top of the Champs Elysees  was turned into la Place Charles de Gaulle some years after his death but you still commonly hear it referred to as l’Etoile. Likewise, you hear the name Roissy used for the airport rather than l’Aéroport Charles de Gaulle and le Centre Beaubourg instead of le Centre Georges Pompidou.

 

Whatever you might think about Roissy and Beaubourg, la Place Charles de Gaulle seems to fit better with the general flavour of the surroundings than does the name l‘Etoile. Stand underneath l’Arc de Triomphe and whichever way you turn it’s battles and generals on every side. All but one of the wide avenues feeding the chaos round the rond-point is named after either a significant French victory under Napoléon (who else?) – Iéna, Wagram, Friedland - or after a military man of note, Hoche, Foch, Mac Mahon. It’s left to poor old Victor Hugo to fly the flag for les belles lettres et la culture.

Right beside you there’s the tomb of the unknown soldier and over the hill from the Champs Elysées is l’Avenue de la Grande Armée streaking off towards la Défense. You could almost fancy you hear the distant thud of canons and whinnying of horses.

This weekend saw a new street sign go up for a very different kind of warrior: Léo Ferré, anarchist, poet and singer-songwriter, up there alongside Brassens, Brel and the rest of those marvellous songsters and poets of the 60s and 70s. He’s had a square in the 12^th arrondissement named after him. Delanoë, mayor of Paris, hosted the inauguration ceremony – this is what he said in his press release:

  Avec cette inauguration, Paris célèbre ainsi un de ses enfants, qui avait pour mot d'ordre l'insoumission et qui a fait de la révolte, avec un mélange d'ironie et de grâce, un art de vivre", (roughly translated as ‘In naming this square after Léo Ferré Paris honours one of its own sons (not entirely true – Ferré was born in Monaco). He was a man who believed fervently in insurrection and who brought irony and grace to his role as a rebel.)

I remember Léo Ferré, whose songs I played endlessly when I was a teenager, with a great deal more affection than I remember de Gaulle so I’m very pleased he’s got a little square named after him. But it is a little square and it’s not exactly on any part of the tourist trail.

All the talk just now is of a ‘changement de cap radical’ (a radical change in direction) – greening the city, greening industry, consuming less and sharing more. So maybe, in keeping with the mood of the moment, Delanoë should also take a fresh look at the cohort at the top of the main street. What kind of a statement would it make about France’s ‘direction of travel’  if instead of carrying the names of generals and battles the avenues round Place Charles de Gaulle were called Avenues Jean Racine, François Villon, Montesquieu, Diderot, Georges Sand, Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre…? Of course la Place Charles de Gaulle would have to change too but I expect Delanoë could find him a space on another wall, maybe in a nice quiet square somewhere in the 12^th arrondissement?

It’s the mid-term holiday in Paris, right through to next Wednesday. The schools are shut and even the regular presenters on morning radio seem to have taken themselves off to the country. But the news keeps coming whoever gets to tell it. We’ve had the Jean Sarkozy-EPAD story in tiresome detail. That came to a conclusion of a sort on Friday when he was elected ‘administrateur’ after he let it be known he would not after all ‘brigue’ (go after) the presidency itself. Now that’s out of the way, we’re back on the question of suicide at work. This particular hare was set running when it emerged that there have been 24 work-related suicides in the past 2 years at France Télécom. Twenty-four in two years is a lot less than the numbers of men who kill themselves each year in French prisons, but so far I haven’t heard anyone make that comparison. Prisoners topping themselves in large numbers isn’t quite such a headline-grabbing item anyway, compared to the news that several gainfully-employed French men and women have done just that as a result of the pressures and bullying they were subjected to. It’s been a PR disaster for the company and got it into hot water with the government. The strongly nationalist faction inside the ruling UMP isn’t best pleased when a company which bears the word ‘France’ in its title is no. 1 item in the news for its bullying of its own employees.

But that’s why we won’t see a change in the names circling la Place Charles de Gaulle any time soon. That’s France, an aggressive, hierarchical country which, fortunately for its citizens, also produces generation after generation of sons and daughters who give their lives to creativity, rebellion and dissent in the name of human dignity.