Paris bulletin 2 2015

Tuesday 15 March: I am sitting on someone's gravestone in the heart of the Père Lachaise cemetery. The sun is beating down through a thin film of Paris pollution. It is very warm. There is no one else about, only the chirrup of birds getting on with life among the dead and decaying, the distant roar of a plane, the even duller hum of the city.

Somewhere not so far below me there must be coffins or the remnants of coffins, mouldering away to dust. Why I wonder would anyone want to be buried inside one of these vaults, under one of these weighty sépultures? Is it a comfort to know that even dead, you will still have a roof over your head? I scrape off the moss on the lettering and see I've been sitting on la Famille Plessil.

Elsewhere, but still intra muros, a different kind of gathering-in is in place. Where once there were mattresses, pushed out of sight during the day under the métro aérien on the boulevard de la Chapelle, now there is a village of tents. I am out with my camera in my bag one morning. I cross the road to speak to one of the ‘residents’.

 

“Vous parlez français?” he shakes his head. “anglais?” he shakes his head again and points to the camera. “No photos,” he says. I have already taken a couple of pictures from the other side of the road but I put the camera away and ask him who is providing the tents. “No, no,” he repeats, politely but firmly. A woman shouts across to me, pointing to herself. “Sri Lanka,” I hear her say. She is nursing a tiny baby.

No quiet alleyways here, no lasting testaments to long lives and prosperity. The traffic flows in fits and starts on either side of the encampment, the  metro rumbles overhead.

Friday 20 March. What we’ve learned to call a ‘spike in pollution’ (un pic en français) has thrown a grey film over us since the middle of the week. Anne Hidalgo, maire de Paris, has asked the government to instruct the police to enforce ‘la circulation alternée’ and to let people travel for nothing on public transport for the duration of this particular episode. She doesn’t have the power to make this happen herself. So far central government, in the person of the Minister, Ségolène Royale, has refused her demands. Despite the fact that Hidalgo is responsible for overseeing the living conditions of the citizens of Paris, there is nothing she can do except put in place an hour of free autolibre, a day of free vélibre and free parking for residents. Just one more example of the deadening effect of France’s over-centralised, unresponsive state.

Saturday 21 March: Radio France is on strike for the third day. Yesterday 800 Radio France employees confronted their PDG, Mathieu Gallet, in the main hall of the newly renovated Radio France building. By all accounts it was a tense and disputatious meeting. Gallet threatened to walk out several times.

The salon du Livre is on at the Porte de Versailles. The Orsay reports huge numbers attending the Bonnard exhibition, the same goes for the recently re-opened musée Picasso, the David Bowie at the Philharmonie and les Bas-Fonds du Baroque at the Petit Palais. Spring is coming and Paris, Ville Lumière, Ville de la Révolution, is doing what it’s done for centuries – taking on (taking down?) the powerful while simultaneously flaunting its beauty, its wealth, its creativity and culture.  

Why then does it feel this time so precarious, so aléatoire? As if the polluting haze is not only physical but civilisational? When I’m out in the late afternoon the sun is ‘a wound, a boiling tropical eye’, as Hilary Mantel puts it in her novel, ‘A Place of Greater Safety’, that novel which charts the beginning of the French Revolution but reads like a commentary on our current times. We are on the brink of the departmental elections. The spectre of Front National intolerance and crypto-fascism stalks the land.