Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (52 page)

As he explained in his manifesto-autobiography, he had had to be tough to survive. In the beginning, he was on his own: ‘I had no network, no personal fortune, and I was not a civil servant.’ He was a lawyer in the wealthy suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. He was also the son of an immigrant, and he had an unusual, foreign-sounding name: Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa. It might have been Jewish or perhaps Romany, but in any case not French. ‘With such a name, many people would have deemed it wise to melt away into anonymity rather than seek the limelight.’

‘Sarko’–as he was known to enemies and allies alike–loved his job as Minister of the Interior: ‘Day and night, drama and passion rise up at the office door: hostage crises, terrorist threats, forest fires, demonstrations, raves, bird flu, floods, disappearances–the responsibility is overwhelming.’ He saw himself at Sangatte, in the hangar where illegal immigrants were penned: ‘Three thousand pairs of eyes imploring me and threatening. None of them spoke a single word of French. They expected everything of me, but I had so little to give.’ He increased the fingerprint database from 400,000 to 2.3 million, and allowed foreign prostitutes who betrayed their pimps to remain in the country.

Out of devotion to his job, he had neglected his wife: there were sacrifices that had to be made. The country was falling apart. Rural France was being colonized by the British, and French businessmen were emigrating to London. His own daughter had gone there to work for a bank. Middle-class people saw their investments losing value, while unionized workers thought they had a God-given right to a minimum wage.

He remembered how, as a fifteen-year-old boy, he had laid a flower under the Arc de Triomphe on the day of General de Gaulle’s funeral. No one cared about the nation any more. French football supporters booed the ‘Marseillaise’. Cowards who had been shot in the First World War were rehabilitated. Napoleon Bonaparte was likened to Adolf Hitler, and colonization was seen as a criminal enterprise.

As a professional politician, he did whatever he could to earn the respect of the police. He allowed them to carry flash-balls and, since ‘the biggest problem is housing’, he gave them better barracks and police stations. When a police officer married or had a child, the officer received a personalized bouquet from the minister. The minister’s own Labrador, Indy, had been sent for training with the counter-terrorist RAID unit of the national police. Policemen would no longer have to work with their hands tied behind their backs: the old ‘defensive strategy’ would be replaced with an ‘offensive philosophy’ that would ‘bring firepower to zones of lawlessness’.

His speeches were played to members of the public assembled by a public-relations firm. The members of the public held joysticks connected to a computer, and twitched the sticks in response to what they heard: left for negative, right for positive. The word ‘
racaille
’ had produced a significant jerk to the right.

The woman on the balcony at Argenteuil on the evening of 26 October had unwittingly uttered a vote-winning word. Journalists would always find some elderly white woman with shopping bags or a well-dressed social worker to say that things were not so bad in the
banlieue
, that young people had nothing to do and were poorly treated. But no politician could ignore the fears of ordinary people when they saw the beautiful city of Paris besieged by the
racaille
.

4. City of Light

A
T TWELVE MINUTES
past six on 27 October 2005, the lights went out in Clichy-sous-Bois. There were howls of dismay in a hundred thousand households. Then the emergency backup supply kicked in, and the lights came back on. This was the sort of service people had come to expect in the rundown
banlieue
.

A teenage boy came shambling into town, looking like some kind of alien. He was heading for La Vallée des Anges and Le Chêne Pointu. His face was a nasty shade of yellow, and his clothes were smouldering as though he was about to burst into flames. He slumped along, eyes glazed, muttering something incomprehensible.

He reached the shopping centre at 6.35. The first person he saw was Bouna’s older brother, Siyakha Traoré. Muhittin could barely speak, as though his tongue was too big for his mouth. Siyakha made out just two words, which he repeated over and over again:
Bouna
…
accident
…

He had clambered over the wall in a dream. The policemen were nowhere to be seen. He had noticed that his clothes were burning, which seemed incredible. His friends had disappeared in a flash of light. For a moment, the air had been on fire. The next thing he knew, his jacket was being pulled up over his head by Siyakha’s friend.

The friend phoned for an ambulance while Muhittin led Siyakha through the park. He was saying, ‘They chased us…’

They reached a place near a mound of trees that Siyakha, in all the years he had lived in Clichy-sous-Bois, had never noticed. He could feel the heat coming off the concrete walls, and there was a smell that reminded him of a sick room. He asked, ‘Where are they?’ Muhittin covered his face with one arm and pointed with the other: ‘In there.’

Later that night, Muhittin lay on the operating table and then in a sterile room at the Hôpital Saint-Antoine, watched by his father, an unemployed brick mason, who spoke to him through the Hygiaphone. The news was spreading through the
banlieue
, first by word of mouth, then by television and radio, and then, more slowly, like incessant, heavy rain, through the blogosphere.

The sequence of events became muddled almost immediately. The crucial pieces of information were carried along by an overwhelming narrative that had the unmistakeable appearance of truth. No matter how often the facts were cut and pasted, edited and translated into the evolving language of the
banlieue
, they always came out the same. The police had caused the death of two boys in Clichy-sous-Bois. The Minister of the Interior had called them ‘scum’. Another boy was fighting for his life. The victims were a Black, an Arab and a Kurd. They were boys from the
banlieue
, no different from anyone else. One of them was only fifteen years old.

On the following night, twenty-three cars were set alight in Clichy-sous-Bois, and there were pitched battles with the police. Cars were always burning somewhere in the suburbs, but now the fires were like hilltop beacons signifying an invasion or a festival.

From his hospital bed, where he had to lie very still because of all the skin grafts, Muhittin could watch a television that was bracketed to the wall. Sometimes, he was in tears; at other times, he trembled with rage. Politicians were feeding the flames with their lies. On his second day in hospital, he was questioned by the police, who brought a computer and a printer and spoke to him without using the Hygiaphone. ‘Look what you’ve done now,’ they said. ‘Thirteen cars were set on fire yesterday.’ They told him to sign the statement, and since he was unable to write with his burned hands, they made him sign with a cross.

The signed statement was leaked to the press. Muhittin Altun was said to have confessed that the police had not been chasing them, and that they had been fully aware of the danger of entering an EDF site. Furthermore, the Prime Minister and the Minister of the Interior announced that according to information received from the police, the boys who died had been in the act of committing a burglary.

On 30 October, a tear-gas grenade launched by the police exploded outside the Bilal mosque at Clichy-sous-Bois and the fumes wafted into the building. The mosque was full because it was near the end of Ramadan. The congregation tumbled into the street to see policemen pointing their guns and shouting. Then the situation ‘stabilized’: that night, only twenty cars were set on fire. But the violence was spreading, at first in a tight arc around the northern suburbs, then fanning out to the west and the south.

In the days when Northmen had sailed down the Seine to plunder Paris, chroniclers had exaggerated the calamity to match the magnitude of the offence. In 2005, television news performed a similar function. A map of France, less accurate than the charts of medieval geometers, appeared on CNN, showing Lille on the coast and Toulouse in the Alps. Commentators analysed the situation and warned of a cataclysm of international dimensions: the burning of the Paris
banlieue
was connected with racial tension, terrorism, fundamentalist Islam, the practice of polygamy and the wearing of the veil. Paris was no longer the enchanted enclave of biscuit-tin memorials preserved by architects and politicians for the benefit of the admiring world. It was something vast and shapeless, ugly, unruly and uncharted. Its population of intellectuals, café waiters and
femmes fatales
had vanished. A new population of Parisians appeared in the international media, their hooded faces flaring out of the apocalyptic gloom when police cars passed with flashing lights or another petrol bomb exploded.

At the beginning of November, the capital was ringed with fire. From Clichy-sous-Bois, the inferno seemed to be heading for the centre of Paris along the Canal de l’Ourcq, through Bondy, Bobigny, Pantin and La Villette. On 6 November, civil disorder had spread to twelve other cities from Brittany to the Mediterranean.

The Minister of the Interior talked of ‘extreme violence such as is rarely seen in France’, but the people at the centre of the eruption knew that they were witnessing something that was practically a speciality of Paris. The police intelligence service was preparing a confidential report: the troubles had nothing to do with religion, race or country of origin. No terrorists or gangs were involved. The violence was entirely spontaneous. This was not juvenile delinquency, it was an ‘urban insurrection’ and a ‘popular revolt’.

The revolutionary spirit of the
faubourgs
was still alive, and old Parisian traditions were being upheld by the
racaille
. On 8 November, paying tribute to the City of Light, hundreds of towns and cities were in flames, from Perpignan to Strasbourg, and a state of national emergency was declared.

Those unsightly quarters of Paris called the
banlieue
were proving themselves worthy of the capital. One day, perhaps, like other popular revolts, the riots would be seen as the birth pangs of a new metropolis. Paris had been expanding since the Middle Ages, pouring over the plains and flooding the valleys of the river system, as though it would eventually fill the entire Paris Basin. Each eruption had threatened to destroy the city, but each time, a new Paris had risen from the ashes. In the glowering hills that could be seen from Montmartre and the Eiffel Tower, a world was taking shape, and the millions of people who had known and loved Paris would have to return to discover the city again. Meanwhile, tour companies and hotels were reporting mass cancellations. From their concrete canyons and eyries, the inhabitants of the
banlieue
were sending out their electronic messages, which were translated by the world’s press from a
banlieusard
patois composed of French, Arabic, Romany, Swahili and American English.

Their Paris was a rap litany of place names that only the most exhaustive guide book would have recognized as the City of Light: Clichy-sous-Bois, La Courneuve, Aubervilliers, Bondy…This was the city that had grown from an island in the Seine until it stretched to the horizon in all directions. The
racaille
were marking their tribal territories in that great grey mass of buildings between the wooded massif of Meudon and the plains of the Beauce and the Brie. They, too, were children of Paris, and, like true natives of the city, they expressed their pride in angry words that sounded like a curse. And since, by some miracle, the world was reading their messages, they wrote of the perilous adventures and the unforgettable education that awaited anyone who dared to visit the wilds of the undiscovered city: ‘If you come to Bondy, you won’t get out alive!…’

W
E REACHED
B
ONDY
on our touring bikes just as the sun was turning the Canal de l’Ourcq into a ribbon of grey steel. That morning, we had set off from the Col du Donon, which lies nine hundred and eighty feet below the highest peak of the Vosges mountains in north-eastern France. For centuries, the col was used by Celtic tribes and Roman legions passing between Germany and Gaul. Its importance as a crossing-point is marked by the remains of a temple to Mercury and, on the southern ascent, by a memorial to the
passeurs
who helped French prisoners to escape from the Nazis. From there, we had spiralled down through the pine forests, over the Grendelbruch Pass, to the valley of the Rhine and the city of Strasbourg, then crossed the plains of northern France. By the time we reached Paris, we had covered five hundred and eighty-one kilometres at an average speed of 92 kph, according to my GPS unit, which, in the excitement of reaching Strasbourg railway station on time, I had forgotten to turn off.

A canalside bike path starts near the Gare de l’Est. It crosses the toy-town science park of La Villette, and passes under the baleful eyes of the neo-Gothic flour mills, the Grands Moulins de Pantin, which, until 2003, sucked in all the wheat of the Brie and the Beauce to feed the
boulangeries
of Paris. After Pantin, the
piste cyclable
wanders through a maze of half-demolished buildings, past the hulks of abandoned factories inexplicably ‘under video surveillance’, every window smashed and every surface covered by graffiti-artists as resourceful and determined as property developers. Then, rejoining the canal, it straightens out, and the speed picks up enough to change into the big chain-ring. Suddenly, approaching Bondy and the bridges that carry the Périphérique de l’Île-de-France, which marks the heliopause of the Paris system, we were pedalling alongside the Métro. A train was slowing down before veering into the Bobigny–Pablo Picasso station, and we could see the faces of passengers staring out at the open air.

At that time of evening, the north-eastern
banlieue
looked like a promotional film for home-buyers and investors. A Black African was walking along the tidy embankment with a friend who appeared to be Kurdish; a little girl was gleefully escaping from her parents on a tricycle. There was a startling absence of broken glass on the towpath; the only danger was a fast dog chasing the figures-of-eight of a fresh smell. After Bondy, where the canal swings north-east, in the cavernous gloom of yet another road bridge, three teenage boys were standing, looking tough and nervy, deep in some shared concern but obviously open to distractions. When they saw us coming, they moved to one side, and, with a shout of recognition, cheerfully saluted Margaret because she was wearing the red cap of a French cycling team, Brioches la Boulangère.

We left the canal at a pedestrian bridge and rode for two kilometres through the streets of Aulnay-sous-Bois. The Hôtel du Parc was a five-storey concrete dormitory with a view of a car park. The Senegalese man at the reception desk sent us down to the cellar to store our bikes; then he asked us where we had come from ‘like that’.

Every cyclist enjoys the chance to shrug off an epic expedition and to extol the miraculous efficiency of the bicycle, and so I told him, ‘This morning, we were on top of the Vosges mountains; we cycled down to Strasbourg and took the TGV to the Gare de l’Est.’

The man looked slightly puzzled, his question evidently unanswered. ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘I mean, how did you get here from the Gare de l’Est?’ ‘We cycled out along the canal.’ His eyebrows shot up, and he almost shouted, ‘You came all the way here from the Gare de l’Est–on your bikes?!’–‘Yes…’–‘
Oh lálá! C’est fort, ça!
’ (‘Blimey! That beats everything!’) Shaking his head, he handed us our room key, and said again, ‘
Ah! C’est fort, ça!
’

It was not the fact of having cycled seventeen kilometres that amazed him but the thought of actually traversing that solidified ocean of shunting yards, building sites, cemeteries, schools, hospitals, stadiums, advertising space and infrastructure that joins Paris to the
banlieue
. For some reason–personal challenge, GPS malfunction or an inappropriate foreign way of doing things?–we had spurned the merciful oblivion of the transport network to pursue our unimaginable course through the great abstraction.

Next morning, with the rain bucketing down, the expedition may well have appeared to verge on the eccentric. We cycled across the canal and the unfenced railway tracks to Clichy-sous-Bois. After exploring the area around the EDF site where the two boys had died, we headed back towards Paris. During one of the heavier downpours, we stopped under a bridge where a dead smiley face in blue paint announced the supremacy of ‘The Canal Brotherhood’ and the boys of ‘North Bondy’, all of whom had sensibly remained indoors. We left the canal near the Périphérique de l’Île-de-France and splashed along the main street of Drancy to the hideous apartment blocks of La Muette. It was here that Jews from the Vel’ d’Hiv had been incarcerated in 1942. The buildings had been completed after the war as though nothing had happened. The U-shaped block around the central courtyard survived the demolition of the towers in the 1970s and is now used as ‘social housing’. Most of the five hundred people who live there are waiting to be moved to less squalid accommodation. Some of them were standing under the concrete awnings as though they were ready to leave at any moment.

On a photograph taken that morning in Drancy, a complex expression on Margaret’s usually sunny face suggests that this would never be counted among our favourite springtime trips to Paris. Fortunately, the visit to the
banlieue
was just a prelude: we were returning to Paris on a mission. Three months before, a chance discovery in a Paris bookshop had turned up a tantalizing trace of something that had been lost for many centuries. It had been one of the most important sites in Paris, and was in some ways the foundation of all the city’s future glories.

The rain eased off as we reached the edge of the eighteenth
arrondissement
. Patches of eggshell-blue sky appeared above the Sacré-Cœur. It seemed as though the conjunction of personal adventure and historical discovery would occur. Foolishly, I uttered the ritual phrase, ‘Paris will never look the same again.’ Almost immediately, as though the demon twin of Saint Christopher who accompanies every traveller had been listening, we were lost. The eighteenth
arrondissement
, where I had lived as a teenager, did not look the same, and the elementary GPS unit showed only a dithering line of dots on a blank background. The streets that were crammed in between the railway lines in the 1930s surreptitiously change direction whilst appearing to run straight. On what turned out to be the tiny, disproportionately confusing Place Hébert, I unfolded the flapping map of Paris, and, after a few more ritual phrases, we set off again in the direction of the Porte de la Chapelle.

C
OMING FROM
G
RENOBLE
, where the Alps rise up ‘at the end of every street’, Stendhal was ‘disgusted’ by his first sight of Paris in 1799: ‘The environs struck me as horribly ugly–there were no mountains!’ The capital of France was a geographical anti-climax, a city built on sand and puddles. One of its grandest
quartier
s was called ‘the Marsh’ (le Marais); its original name, Lutetia, was thought to be derived from a Gaulish word for ‘mud’ or ‘swamp’. Every thirty years or so, the Seine, suffering from senile amnesia, flooded half of Swampville in an attempt to get back to its old bed, which lies a kilometre and a half to the north of the Île de la Cité, along the line of the Grands Boulevards. The knobbly mounds of gypsum that rimmed the city were like a botched imitation of the Seven Hills of Rome. During the nineteenth century, some of them were even rounded off and flattened, as though town planners had taken Isaiah’s prophecy to heart: ‘Every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight’.

In 1899, the popular geographer Onésime Reclus found some ironic consolation in the fact that the Paris meridian exactly bisects the peak of Mount Bugarach, six hundred and sixty-four kilometres to the south. He declared Mount Bugarach to be a Parisian Pyrenee, ‘the Metropolitan Pic du Midi’: Paris had a mountain after all…But a mountain that was invisible even from the Eiffel Tower on a clear day was a part of the Parisian landscape only in the most abstract sense. Pending future upheavals of the Paris Basin, the capital would have to be content with its grandly named little lumps: Montmartre, Montparnasse, Montrouge, Montsouris and the Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève.

It was in January 2008, while browsing in a Latin Quarter bookshop, that I discovered what appeared to be a mountain in one of the most densely populated parts of Paris. It was such an unlikely discovery that I wanted to leave the shop at once, with the precious information stored away and preserved, at least for a few days, from the inevitable disappointment. Like every visitor to Paris, I had made ‘discoveries’ that were known already to millions of people–the mysterious little attic room on the south face of Notre-Dame overlooking the Seine, or the crenellated brick tower that hides in a shrubbery near the western foot of the Eiffel Tower (a chimney left over from the old hydraulic lifts). Then there were the discoveries that were purely archival–things that had vanished so completely that the imagination had no purchase on the present: the unmarked location of the guillotine that beheaded Marie-Antoinette, or the little-known Isle Merdeuse (‘Shitty Island’) that used to lie in the Seine in front of what is now the seat of the French parliament. And finally, there were all the discoveries that weren’t discoveries at all, because, despite plausible real equivalents, they existed only in a writer’s imagination: the seedy boarding house ‘in that vale of flaking plaster and streams of black mud’ behind the Panthéon where Balzac’s
Le Père Goriot
begins, or the curiosity shop on the Quai Voltaire where Raphaël de Valentin in
La Peau de chagrin
acquires the magical ass’s skin that makes his every wish come true.

This time, I felt sure that something real lay behind the excitement, and that, for once, instead of simply hoarding the memory of its treasures, I would be giving something back to Paris. The clue was an engraving made in 1685 by an anonymous artist. It shows the village of La Chapelle (now part of the eighteenth
arrondissement
) strung out along a ridge, its little houses silhouetted against a white sky under billowing, rococo clouds. A hedge-lined road climbs up through neatly furrowed fields to a small church tower that stands at the highest point: it was there that the road from Paris crossed the main street through the village before dropping down on the other side.

To anyone who has walked or cycled through France with a vision of the map’s lines and symbols superimposed on the landscape, the engraving is instantly recognizable as the picture of a col. Cols or mountain passes are a kind of international velocipedal currency: the difficulty of a ride–or a stage of the Tour de France–is measured by the number of cols it crosses, and even if the cols are only a few hundred metres above sea level, a rider who has crossed them is entitled to feel that mountains have been conquered. Often, they are marked by a chapel, a cross or a standing stone, and, if officially recognized as cols, by a special road sign. A col–also known as a
pas
(or a
porte
if it straddles a frontier)–is a gateway to another world. At cols, as at river confluences and tribal boundaries, human history and physical geography are in closest conjunction.

Ever since hearing of a cyclists’ organization called the Club des Cent Cols, I had been keeping a list of the cols we had crossed on our travels, accidentally or on purpose. The Donon was number 215 on the list, and the Grendelbruch Pass number 216. A cyclist who has crossed at least a hundred different cols, ‘for personal pleasure’ rather than in a spirit of competition, can submit a complete list, and, provided that all the cols appear in the club’s catalogue, the new member receives a colourful diploma stating that the holder has, ‘on a cycle propelled by muscular force alone, climbed at least 100 cols, including 5 over 2000 metres’.

As Stendhal might have guessed, Paris lies in the middle of a col desert. While the mountainous borderlands and the Massif Central have thousands of cols, there are barely ten between the Vosges mountains and the hills of Normandy, and only one within a day’s ride of Notre-Dame. This seems particularly sad since the introduction of the ‘Vélib’ self-service scheme in 2007. Every day, on lumpy grey bikes that might have materialized from a children’s cartoon, thousands of Parisians rediscover their city’s topography: the Avenue des Champs-É lysées is once again a hill, and ‘Montagne Sainte-Geneviève’ is no longer a misnomer. Yet there is no official recognition of the exploits of
vélibistes
, and nothing that allows pedalling Parisians to celebrate the eminence of their city.

The hypothetical pass at La Chapelle seemed to promise reparation. If the summit of the road that climbs up from the Seine to cross the northern ridge was a col, then the hills on either side of it–Montmartre and the Buttes-Chaumont–could legitimately be counted as mountains…

I
N
J
ANUARY
, a preliminary investigation on foot produced some encouraging evidence. At the church of Saint-Denys-de-la-Chapelle, opposite the Hollywood Video shop and the Sex in the City club, the road slopes down on either side. The old Roman road from the south and the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis converged at what is now the Marx Dormoy Métro station. In the other direction, the road descends gently to the plain of Saint-Denis where the gigantic medieval fair of Lendit was held. Some historians believe that this convenient plateau above the marshes of Lutetia was the sacred ‘centre of Gaul’ where, according to Caesar, Druids came from as far away as the Mediterranean and Britannia to elect their supreme pontiff.