It was Les Halles, it was the “belly” of Paris. The belly to eat, the belly to kiss, the belly to give birth.
That belly was ripped off in the 1960s. The total. An unprecedented crime against the life of a city. A hole remained. Huge, gaping, for years. And it was a huge mall. Ugly to cry. Until spoiling the grace of Saint-Eustache. In the stones of the church, at breast height, nails had been driven to hang the small tarpaulins of the fruit and vegetable vendors. Even these modest traces have been erased. To make clean, smooth, deodorized. But this time, after the belly, it is the heart which is torn, it is the heart of Paris which is bled and emptied of its blood, the heart of popular Paris, ours. From the Samaritaine to the Louvre post office, billionaires have raided everything, looted everything. Bernard Arnault, Francois Pinault, the most uneducated birds of prey have emptied everything, everything sanitized. There is more than the luxury of duty free for tourists, fashion and morgue. And speculation on indigent copies of Duchamp, Klein or Warhol.
Death, the heart of Paris of Zola, Manet, Doisneau, Breton and my grandmother, a maid in her tiny maid’s room at 24 rue du Pont-Neuf. Cursed be the accomplices, the public powers, the politicians, the architects, and all those who collaborated in this triumph of bourgeois imbecility. They realized and accomplished Baron Haussmann’s project: Paris without the people. This social racism has a long history. In 1857, in a letter to Napoleon III, Haussmann said what Paris would be like:
“There is no need for Paris, capital of France, metropolis of the civilized world, the favorite destination of all leisure travelers, to contain factories and workshops. That Paris cannot be just a city of luxury, I grant. It must be a center of intellectual and artistic activity, the center of the financial and commercial movement of the country as well as the seat of its government; this is sufficient for its greatness and prosperity. In this vein, it is therefore necessary not only to continue but also to hasten the accomplishment of the major road works designed by His Majesty, to bring down the high chimneys, to upset the anthills where envious misery is agitated, and instead of exhausting oneself in solving the problem which seems more and more insoluble of cheap Parisian life, accepting in a fair measure the high cost of rents and food which is inevitable in any large center of the population, as a useful aid in defending Paris against the growing invasion of workers in the province. [1] »
Replace the invasion of workers from the provinces with immigrants from further afield. To push back the workshops, that is to say these craftsmen and these workers who will be twenty years later the people of the Municipality, and above all … “Overturn the anthills where envious misery is agitated”. With their billions, Bernard Arnault and François Pinault accomplished the social apartheid project of the Second Empire. But at least during the next demonstrations, we’ll know where to go!
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