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    Paris in Turmoil: A City between Past and Future
    Paris in Turmoil: A City between Past and Future
    Paris in Turmoil: A City between Past and Future
    Ebook130 pages1 hour

    Paris in Turmoil: A City between Past and Future

    By Eric Hazan

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    About this ebook

    Since the disastrous Pompidou years, working-class Paris has been steadily nibbled away, either by destruction or more insidiously by a kind of internal colonization. Take for example a small outlying district populated by Arabs, blacks and poor whites twenty years ago, the L'Olive neighbourhood north of La Chapelle The area is noted as pleasant, people frequent it and explore it, and as the rents are low some settle there. Others follow, first friends and then anyone else. Rents go up, buildings are renovated, bars open, then an organic food shop, a vegan restaurant...The earlier indigenous inhabitants are driven out by the rising rents and settle further away, in Saint-Denis if they are lucky, or else in Garges-l s-Gonesse, Goussainville or God knows where.

    But new neighbourhoods are emerging, for example the Chinese quarter of Bas Belleville, which has grown since the 1970s to the point that in some streets, such as Rue Civiale or Rue Rampal, the restaurants and shops are all Chinese, with many Chinese sex workers on Boulevard de la Villette. These Chinese almost all come from Wenzhou, a large province south of Shanghai, whose inhabitants are reputedly known for their commercial skills.

    Paris is constantly changing as a living organism, both for better and for worse. This book is an incitement to open our eyes and lend an ear to the tumult of this incomparable capital, from the P riph rique to Place Vend me, its markets of Aligre and Belleville, its caf s and tabacs, its history from Balzac to Sartre. In some thirty succinct vignettes, from bookshops to beggars, Art Nouveau to street sounds, Parisian writers to urban warts, Jacobins to Surrealism, Hazan offers a host of invaluable aper us, illuminated by a matchless knowledge of his native city.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherVerso UK
    Release dateNov 15, 2022
    ISBN9781839764707
    Paris in Turmoil: A City between Past and Future
    Author

    Eric Hazan

    Eric Hazan is the founder of the publisher La Fabrique and the author of several books, including Notes on the Occupation and the highly acclaimed The Invention of Paris. He has lived in Paris, France, all his life.

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      Book preview

      Paris in Turmoil - Eric Hazan

      Neighbourhoods

      On paper, Paris is divided into eighty quartiers, four per arrondissement, but this division is purely administrative, lacking any palpable reality. No one will tell you that they live in Gros-Caillou or Sainte-Marguerite. What they consider ‘their neighbourhood’ is an emotional territory whose boundaries may be historically and geographically clear without everyone giving it the same name. Thus, some people will say they live in the Marais, while their near neighbours will say they live on Rue Saint-Antoine or ‘not far from Bastille’.

      Some neighbourhoods have changed so much that they no longer justify their traditional names. The Latin Quarter, where tourists outnumber students, centred on a Sorbonne where you have to show your identity card to get in, and deprived of almost all its large bookshops, no longer has much Latin about it. In the Jewish quarter of Rue des Rosiers, there are only two or three shops where you can still find gefilte fish or pastrami, as the old Ashkenazi population have died and their children gone to live elsewhere. The Goldenberg charcuterie, once a neighbourhood flagship, has given way to a Japanese fashion shop. Some neighbourhoods have even disappeared completely: in the former Armenian neighbourhood, around Rue Lamartine and Rue de Trévise, all that remains are a few shop signs with an Armenian sound.

      Many once large communities never had their own neighbourhoods. The White Russians, very numerous in Paris from the 1920s to the 1950s, also had a newspaper whose theatre critic was the owner of a Russian restaurant on Rue Bréa, ‘Chez Dominique’. White Russians were often taxi drivers – beret pulled down to the ears, grey overcoat, dead Gitane, and a very particular way of mistreating their old black and red G7 taxi. This community evaporated without having had a definite location in the city, and is all but forgotten – a pity.

      But other neighbourhoods are emerging. New Jewish districts have developed, one at the bottom of Rue Manin near Porte Chaumont, the other, posher, in the seventeenth arrondissement around Avenue de Wagram, Rue Rennequin and Rue Jouffroy-d’Abbans. Older already is the ‘Indian’ district, in fact Sri Lankan and mainly Tamil, whose shops for saris and Tamil-language films are on Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis between the Gare du Nord and Place de la Chapelle. The Kurds (so-called Turks) have for years had their neighbourhood in the tenth arrondissement, on Rue d’Enghien, Rue de l’Echiquier and at the bottom of Rue Saint-Denis. Even older (though less old than the large complex in the thirteenth arrondissement) is the Chinese quarter of Bas Belleville, which has grown since the 1970s to the point that, in some streets, such as Rue Civiale or Rue Rampal, the restaurants and shops are all Chinese, with many Chinese sex workers on Boulevard de la Villette. These ‘Chinese’ almost all come from Wenzhou, a large province south of Shanghai, whose inhabitants are reputedly known for their commercial skills.

      ‘Paris is no longer what it used to be’ – yes, and fortunately it changes and constantly evolves like a living organism, some parts atrophying while others proliferate.

      Tabacs and Droguistes

      The poor smoke more than the rich. Sociological studies show this, but we scarcely need them: just compare the density of tobacconists between fashionable Paris and working-class neighbourhoods. Between the Palais-Bourbon and the Institut du Monde Arabe there are only three tobacconists on the elegant Boulevard Saint-Germain, including the Cave des Cigares at the Odéon crossroads, which is not really a bureau de tabac. Three is the number of tobacconists on Rue de Belle ville, between Métro station Belleville and the next one, Pyrénées, a five-minute walk away. Like obesity, smoking is a marker of class. In fact, it is rare for bureaux de tabac, often also hosting the PMU, Loto and Française des Jeux,* to be chic establishments – like the Civette, opposite the Comédie Française, where state councillors probably go to buy their Havana cigars.

      The names of Parisian tobacconists sometimes refer to their location – Tabac du Roule, de la Muette, des Gobelins – but often take the name of brands of cigar or cigarette that have long since disappeared, dating back to the time when dark tobacco emerged by the ton from the SEITA factories and was smoked in all the cafés. Week-end, Balto, Reinitas, Celtic, Boyard: so many memories from the years of the Renault Dauphine, Jean-Luc Godard’s Petit Soldat and Romain Gary’s Prix Goncourt for Les Racines du ciel. As for the name ‘Le Jean-Bart’, this refers to the legend of the famous corsair threatening his English jailers to set fire to a powder keg with the lit cigar he was holding in his hand.

      In those years, Parisian tobacconists were often run by natives of Auvergne, or more precisely of the Rouergue – not very friendly, on the whole, with big wolfhounds and surly wives. Almost nothing remains of this population, the rare ‘Au Bougnat’* signs being rather souvenirs of wood and coal merchants, who have also almost disappeared. There is indeed a tabac called Le Rouergue on Rue du Faubourg-du-Temple, but the owner is Chinese and does not know why his establishment bears this name. All smokers and lottery-ticket scratchers are aware how, for several years now, Paris tabacs have been massively taken over by Chinese. They are often young, and far more pleasant and efficient than the old ones from Villeneuve-sur-Lot. When asked about the reasons for this Asian domination of such a Parisian business, their answers are unclear: a system of tontines to raise the necessary money (a well-placed tabac can cost up to a million euros) or the ability to work harder than others.

      More curious is that Paris droguistes, those hardware stores where you can find mothballs, plungers, mousetraps and so many other useful objects, often have an Indian from Madagascar as their owner. In a beautiful establishment on Rue Choiseul, near the Opéra Comique, one of these explained this penchant to me: ‘In India, we belong to a caste whose speciality is precisely these shops where everything is sold. Many of us settled in Madagascar in the French time, and our families had shops like this one. And when we had to leave, the choice naturally fell on France. Today, when a droguiste comes up for sale, we try to get one of our people to take it.’ Provided they continue, and manage to resist the chains of Leclerc, Auchan and the like, we shall still have these shops where, as with certain old garages or second-hand wind instrument dealers, an ordered accumulation defies standardization and rivals in its fantasy the contemporary art forms known as installations.

      Kiosks and Carts

      The newsagent by the Belleville Métro station explains to me how, at around four in the morning, his suppliers drop their packets into a box at the back of his kiosk which they have a key to. So he never sees them – except the one from Le Monde, who comes by at about half past twelve.

      Until the 1960s, the press district was concentrated between Rue Réaumur, Rue Montmartre and Boulevard Poissonnière: L’Aurore on Rue Montmartre, L’Humanité on Boulevard Poissonnière, Le Parisien libéré and France-Soir on Rue Réaumur, Le Monde almost in exile at the end of the small Rue des Italiens. As soon as the newspapers came off the presses, swarms of cyclists set off to distribute them to the kiosks on bikes with smaller front wheels to accommodate an enormous metal rack. (In the days when meat was delivered to homes, the butcher’s boys had similar bicycles, but they were red.) The cyclists were not the only ones to distribute newspapers, there were also street sellers who sold them retail in the busiest places – Métro stations, cinema queues, railway stations, department stores, the Champs-Elysées (Jean Seberg selling the Herald Tribune in Godard’s

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